Perry Mason 153: Trust the Process?

Note: People often want others to like what they like because it validates their own choices, fosters a sense of belonging, and allows them to share the enjoyment of experiences. While these impulses are deeply rooted in human nature, the motivations behind them vary from person to person. For my part, I would hate to see Erle Stanley Gardner's work fade into obscurity the way Mignon Eberhart's novels largely have. At the same time, I recognize that this is a natural process: yesterday's popular authors are often forgotten as tastes change and new generations of readers find different stories that speak to them. That said, my sense of identity is not tied to my reading preferences. If someone mocks or dismisses the books I enjoy, I do not take it as a personal affront. Readers are free to like what they like, and just as importantly, they are under no obligation to defend their tastes to anyone else.

Trust the Process? Tell That to TikTok: Perry Mason Meets Today’s Inveterate Institutional Skepticism

A modern reader can walk into a Perry Mason novel carrying a certain amount of suspicion. The police may be mistaken. The prosecutor may be overconfident. The legal system may be tilted in ways that produce bad outcomes. In many contemporary stories, that's the starting point.

Then along comes Perry Mason.

Mason inhabits a world where the central problem is not that truth is inaccessible, but that the authorities keep getting it wrong. Witnesses lie or are just mistaken and think they are telling truth. Police jump to conclusions. Circumstantial evidence points in the wrong direction. The authorities become convinced of a theory and stop looking. Mason's job is to keep looking.

That distinction matters. Gardner's novels run on faith in process. Not blind faith, and certainly not faith in authority, but faith that careful investigation, logical reasoning, and relentless questioning can eventually force reality to reveal itself. Mason will occasionally bend a rule, but usually in the spirit of a mechanic tweaking an engine. He isn't trying to blow up the machine. He wants to make it work properly.

This helps explain why Mason remains such an appealing character. He's a virtuoso. He notices what everyone else misses. He asks the question nobody thought to ask. He walks into situations that appear hopelessly tangled and patiently begins pulling on the right threads. A large part of the pleasure of reading Gardner comes from watching expertise in action.

What Gardner is selling, however, is not cynicism. Mason spends an extraordinary amount of time exposing police mistakes, prosecutorial overreach, and official complacency. Yet the novels never suggest that justice is impossible or that the system is irredeemably corrupt. Their criticism is corrective rather than destructive.

The structure of the stories makes this clear. A case begins with appearances pointing firmly in one direction. The wrong suspect is arrested. The evidence seems overwhelming. The authorities congratulate themselves on a quick solution. Then Mason starts asking questions. More facts emerge. Assumptions fall apart. The picture changes.

The remedy is almost always the same: more investigation, more scrutiny, and better reasoning.

That is why the courtroom in a Gardner novel is not a sham or a theatrical backdrop. It is the place where error is tested. The drama comes from watching a flawed process gradually become a more accurate one.

A skeptical reader might reasonably object that Mason's victories are individual rather than systemic. He clears one innocent client at a time; he does not reform society. Fair enough. But that limitation is precisely what keeps the books from becoming cynical. They do not argue that the law is a fraud. They argue that the law is a human tool - imperfect, sometimes misused, occasionally mishandled, but still capable of producing justice when placed in competent hands.

Gardner's underlying optimism can feel almost old-fashioned today. Not because he believed institutions were perfect, but because he believed mistakes could be corrected through intelligence, persistence, and honest inquiry. In the universe of Perry Mason, truth is stubborn. It may be buried under bluffing, incompetence, and bad assumptions, but it is still there. And if Mason keeps pulling on the thread long enough, eventually the whole knot comes undone.

The enduring appeal of Perry Mason lies in that optimism. Gardner's novels insist that mistakes, biases, and institutional failures are real, but they also insist that truth remains discoverable and that determined individuals can compel authorities to recognize it. The books are not warnings about collapse; they are arguments for the power of reason, preparation, and persistence to make imperfect institutions work better.

Perry Mason 152: TCOT Vagabond Virgin

Note: How could anyone not finish a novel whose first chapter poses this immortal question: “Can you put a virgin in jail as a vagrant?” That’s not just a hook - it’s a literary speed bump that makes you slam the brakes and say, “Wait…what?” You know you’re in for a ride when Chapter One sounds like a cross between a law textbook and a bad pickup line.

The Case of the Vagabond Virgin - Erle Stanley Gardner

John Racer Addison had everything: wealth, power, and a name that blew open doors in the world of big retail. But success breeds enemies, and Addison was about to learn that the price of privilege could be murder.

It began innocently enough. Returning from a business trip, Addison gave a ride to Veronica Dale - a girl with platinum hair, wide blue eyes, and a story that tugged at his conscience. She had traveled far, had no money, and looked heartbreakingly vulnerable. Addison arranged a hotel room for her, alone, and slipped her some cash. It was an act of kindness. Or so he thought.

Hours later, Veronica was arrested for vagrancy - the arresting officer figured she would be safer in jail than the mean streets of L.A. Addison panicked. A scandal could destroy him. He called Perry Mason - the man who could turn disaster into triumph. Mason sprung the girl, and soon Veronica was working in Addison’s department store (remember those?), selling hosiery and flashing that innocent smile. 

Then came Eric Hansell. Red-haired, smooth-talking, and rotten to the core. He threatened Addison with a headline that could ruin him: “Department Store Tycoon Sets Up Blonde in Love Nest.” Addison saw his empire crumbling. He turned to Mason, and together they plotted to outwit the blackmailer.

But before the plan could unfold, Addison’s partner - Edgar Z. Ferrell - was found dead. Murdered. And Addison was the prime suspect.

The courtroom became a battlefield. Hamilton Burger, pompous and preening, thought he had Mason cornered. He didn’t. Mason played his cards with icy precision, dismantling the prosecution piece by piece. The climax was pure Gardner - a twist so audacious it left the jury gasping and Burger fuming.

This 1948 novel isn’t just a whodunit. It’s a study in greed, lust, and the fragile veneer of respectability. Addison, impulsive and irritable, is vivid in his desperation. Veronica, the girl who could topple empires with a smile, is a reminder that beauty has unintended consequences in this wacky world. Even Sergeant Holcomb, arrogant and ominous, adds a note of menace to the mix.

Gardner doesn’t waste time on psychology - his characters live in the moment, driven by fear, anger and desire. But in this story, they leap off the page - unusual for Gardner characters to be so life-like. Yes, the ending may feel rushed, but the journey is pure thrill - a glittering cocktail of sex, money, and murder.

Matinee Musings: Among the Missing

Note: In City Limits (1934) two homeless guys teach a tycoon to enjoy life. In Hitchhike Lady (1935) two women meet on the road and form a heart-warming bond. Midnight Mary (1933) is a fast, economical crime melodrama with a tough shell but a tender center – the heroine’s longing for a better life and real connection gives the film its emotional weight. This is another little movie of the time, forgotten, with a big soul.

Among the Missing
1934 / 1:06
Tagline: “His life was a crooked path until he crossed the path of romance!”
[youtube]

This wonderful little tale is the kind of modest studio picture that slips past you if you’re looking only for Pre-Code naughtiness. But it rewards attention with an intelligence determined not to be limited by technical hassles. At a time when early sound films were still hugging the safety of their padded, echo-proof interiors, Columbia’s programmers were not expected to take risks.

Yet here is a film that ventures out into Los Angeles at night - into its streets, its shadows, its semi-smoggy air - and comes back with something like authenticity. The city is an authentic space. The dim pools of streetlight, the casual movement of passersby, the clutter of exterior life all lend the film a kind of immediacy that studio-bound contemporaries rarely achieve. There is less theatrical posing, more observation; less contrivance, more texture. The result is a tone that feels unexpectedly modern - grittier, yes, but also more genuine.

But also humane. That humanity is most striking in the film’s curious marriage of hardboiled criminality and domestic melodrama. Jewel thieves, in the 1930s imagination, belong to a Raffles world of speed, elan, and hard edges. Yet Among the Missing deposits them in a space that insists on pots on the stove, on swept floors, on bowls of home-made doughnuts. The antique store is not merely a front for fencing stolen jewelry; it becomes, under the influence of an old lady on the run from exploitation, a home. The transformation is effected by Aunt Martha (Henrietta Crosman), and here the film’s real originality asserts itself. Not a victim, she is, rather, a moral force - quiet, observant, busy and full of practical wisdom.

Driven from her nephew’s household by petty ingratitude, Martha wanders around Los Angeles and, by narrative coincidence that doesn’t feel forced, into the orbit of two thieves running an antique shop as a front. If the setup sounds like boilerplate, the execution is anything but. The crooks – Tommy (Richard Cromwell), all callow entitlement and impulsive resentment; the English cutter of jewels (Ivan Simpson), perpetually dissatisfied; and the older Gordon (Arthur Hohl), wily and watchful - are sharply drawn types. They expect to use Martha as camouflage, a harmless old housekeeper to deflect suspicion. Instead, they find themselves subject to her steady gaze.

Martha cooks. She cleans. She makes pancakes. These gestures, simple and unadorned, begin to erode Tommy’s carefully cultivated hardness. She recognizes more than he intends to reveal, and he senses it. Tommy bristles under her scrutiny, interpreting her concern as interference, her double-edged remarks about living in a “big house” as baleful prediction.

Yet it is precisely in these exchanges - half domestic nagging, half moral instruction - that the film finds its tension. Martha does not sermonize; she assumes Tommy has a conscience somewhere and speaks to it. She turns the police away when necessary, protecting Tommy even as she reminds him Judy (Billie Seward) is too nice a girl to be allied with a thief who is prison bound, creating a space in which gratitude, guilt, and the possibility of change can coexist.

The hideout, then, becomes something more than a backdrop for crime. It is a moral arena, like anyplace can be should a movie-goer want to frame it that way.* Martha’s belief in Tommy - her insistence that he can imagine a life beyond grand theft and incarceration - introduces an emotional counterpoint that reminds us everybody counts and everything they do counts too. The film never lets Tommy entirely off the hook; he remains petulant, self-justifying, and only intermittently responsive until he sees the cold hard facts about his partners in crime.

In lesser hands, this blend of grit and gentility might dissolve into syrup. Here, it’s persuasive. The Los Angeles nights give the film its edge; Aunt Martha gives it its conscience. Between them, Among the Missing becomes something unexpectedly resonant: a small film with a big heart, in keeping with Oscar Wilde’s radical notion that “Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.”

* I thus give away my entire philosophy of movie reviewing in a phrase.

The Nones of Robert Florey: Registered Nurse

Note: A moralist like me must object that this movie blurs standards of sexual propriety and professional ethics. Its plot involves prostitution, venereal disease, and undercover deception, portraying a nurse entangled with criminals. Such themes, handled sensationally for melodrama, could be seen as undermining respectability, chastity, and trust in medical professionals generally. But .. Bebe Daniels! She’s so likable she could over-charge me for a second melodrama sandwich and I’d thank her for the privilege. Bebe Daniels! Bebe Daniels!

Registered Nurse
1934 / 1:03
Tagline: “A blazing closeup of nurses in love - and the men who take their kisses!”
[internet archive]

This Pre-Code melodrama is set in a hospital with a focus on the nursing staff. The head nurse and the Mama of a brothel compare notes on recruitment and retention of “good girls” for staff. The Mama complains “Ya know, your best girls are always leaving ya, setting up in business for themselves. Sometimes right across the street.”

“It's one of those businesses that just runs itself,” the Mama says. “You know, it just rolls on and on and on.” Contrast the placid uneventfulness of a sporting house with the hospital’s churning soap opera. In a moment of indiscretion, the Mama lets on that she recognizes an intern as a patron of her “establishment,” to a nurse’s suspicious surprise. 

Not just sex, but death too. A little boy dies before he can bring his dog to visit his favorite nurse. A mother dies, survived by four small children. A young hoodlum shoots dead a policeman who was going to marry one of the nurses as soon as they had enough money.

Using this fatal shooting in support of his argument not to postpone anything in this cycle of suffering and rebirth, Dr. Lyle Talbot seduces Nurse Bebe Daniels with the tried and true line “Life is short and uncertain.” Poor Bebe is in a bad way because New York family law prohibits her from divorcing an incurably insane spouse.

“Whoever figures out these things,” observes the head nurse, “makes a hash of it,” which seems to me to be a swipe at both New York politicians and the author of all things. But cynicism and nihilism, we movie-goers know well, come with the territory in a Pre-Code picture.

The movie does not try to look like a documentary but succeeds in appearing “slice of life,” a look and feel that Warner Brothers went for in the early Thirties. Violent drunks in the emergency room. Gangsters and madams beating each other up. In the cafeteria, doctors make non-medical staff turn green with descriptions of “dirty” operations of infected organs. Nurses constantly smoking in no-smoking areas is a running joke. Nurse Bebe smacks out of control patients to enculturate American values. “Hey! Dames don’t slap me where I come from!” immigrant crook Sidney Toler gripes in an unidentifiable accent. And Bebe answers, “If you don’t behave yourself, I’ll slap you so hard you’ll forget where you came from.”

Granting the picture looks gritty enough, we still have questions about its tenuous relationship with what we laughingly refer to as reality. Did nurses really wear shoes with high heels at work? Why does gangster Sidney Toler stay in the hospital when he has only a broken leg? Was beacon of civilization New York really a state that disallowed mental incompetence or insanity as grounds for divorce?* Given that the first lobotomy in the USA was not performed until 1936, what surgery was going to cure certain psychoses in 1934? Did medical staff really don their formal wear for a party for a couple getting married? Did doctors really talk about “how far” they’ve gotten (“Have you got to first base?” “I’m still on the bench with her.”)? Was there really a cocktail called the bosom caresser “because it warms you all the way down?”

Bebe Daniels of the gorgeous voice has forlorn facial expressions that’re fetching. She has the ability to be still and yet give off energy that grabs the attention – maybe she transferred that knack from dance or the silents. Kind, clever, unstoppable - sigh. 

Sidney Toler is a gangster that the madam (Irene Franklin) calls a “big begonia.” He’s more sinister than flowering and the movie-goer can assume for him violence is the first resort. Directed by a film noir pioneer, Robert Florey, the movie is often visually striking, with odd camera angles, intense close-ups, night scenes and great use of light.

As an example of another Pre-Code element about this movie, a suicide is treated as the ghost in the machine that makes everything turn out hunky-dory. The most Pre-Code thing is that all the characters are OK with suicide tying everything up with a nice little bouquet. So the amoral atmosphere is not exactly for the kiddish at heart.

* In fact, yes, adultery was the only grounds allowed for a very long time in not only the great state of New York.

Perry Mason 151: Gorilla at Large

Note: In a newspaper interview Raymond Burr described his school years as “not particularly happy ones.” “When you’re a little fat boy in a public school, or any kind of school, he said, “you’re just persecuted something awful.” He learned to control himself probably because he realized he’d be fighting all the time if he didn’t. He developed preternatural powers of concentration, which in his acting life made him study scenes to the point where he seemed comatose: “He’s not looking at you, you’re just there,” said fellow actor Barbara Hale. “I was just a fat heavy,” Burr told journalist James Bawden in 1993. “I split the heavy parts with Bill Conrad. We were both in our twenties playing much older men. I never got the girl but I once got the gorilla in a 3-D picture called Gorilla at Large.”

Gorilla at Large
1954 / 1:23
Tagline: “The hate-beast who lives to kill is loose!”
[internet archive]     

Raymond Burr gets top billing as Cyrus Miller, the proprietor of the delightfully named Garden of Evil amusement park, and he attacks the role with considerably more gusto than the script probably deserves. Burr was one of those actors who never seemed capable of giving less than a professional performance, and here he lends Miller a mixture of authority, resentment, and wounded pride that keeps the character interesting even when the plot threatens to wander off and trash all its commitments.

There are moments when one suspects Brother Ray took the assignment partly to cash a check and partly to remind Hollywood that he could do more than glower ominously from the sidelines. If so, the gamble pays off. He finds several shades to play: the calculating showman, the suspicious husband, and ultimately a man whose certainty gives way to disappointment and despair. Burr was always better than many of the projects he appeared in, and this is one of those occasions.

He is helped enormously by the supporting cast. Anne Bancroft, as the trapeze artist Mlle. Laverne, radiates danger in a remarkably compact package. She has the kind of presence that can make a room full of men forget their better judgment. Lee J. Cobb, meanwhile, stomps through the picture as a detective who delivers dialogue with such conviction that even the most improbable lines sound like pearls of wisdom. When he growls, “We’ve got two gorillas around here and one of them is a murderer,” resistance is futile.

Burr's performance works because he never tips his hand too early. Miller begins as a chilly, manipulative operator, but Burr gradually reveals the insecurity beneath the bravado. His jealousy and hurt feel genuine. Particularly effective is the sequence in the police office where he struggles with the window; it is a small moment, but Burr's frustration and helplessness tell us more about the man than pages of dialogue could.

Nor can the film be dismissed merely as bargain-bin entertainment. The Technicolor is magnificent. The circus setting positively explodes with gaudy reds, blues, and yellows. Cameron Mitchell sports hair of such an enthusiastic copper-red hue that it deserves its own screen credit. Having slimmed down considerably, Burr cuts an impressively sharp figure in a succession of well-tailored blue suits.

And then there is Bancroft. Born Anna Maria Luisa Italiano, she possesses a smoldering presence that the camera clearly adores. When she sizes up Cameron Mitchell, her expression suggests she has just discovered another willing volunteer for a lifetime membership in the sucker club. John Tannen contributes a memorably slippery turn as a publicity man whose instincts for blackmail are almost as finely developed as his instincts for self-preservation.

Taken together, the performances, the color photography, and Burr's unexpectedly layered work elevate the picture above its lurid premise. One arrives expecting a curiosity. One leaves remembering Raymond Burr.

As for the Perry Mason connection, ape-keeper Peter Whitney played an ill-tempered farmer in TCOT Pathetic Patient, an irascible gangster in TCOT Stand-In Sister and a venerable sea captain in TCOT Wrongful Writ. He was one of those big guys that sadly don't last too long: he died of a heart attack in 1972 at the young age of 55. 

Pre-Mason Raymond Burr
Please Murder Me (1956) [internet archive] [my review]
I Love Trouble (1948) [internet archive] [my review]
Sleep My Love (1948) [internet archive] [my review]
Ruthless (1948) [internet archive] [my review]
Pitfall (1948) [internet archive] [my review]
Walk a Crooked Mile (1948) [internet archive] [my review]
Raw Deal (1948) [internet archive] [my review]
Station West (1948) [my review]
Red Light (1949) [internet archive] [my review]
Abandoned (1949) [internet archive] [my review]
Borderline (1950) [internet archive] [my review]
Unmasked (1950) [internet archive] [my review]
The Whip Hand (1951) [internet archive] [my review]
Bride of the Gorilla (1951) [internet archive] [my review]
M (1951) [internet archive] [my review]
His Kind of Woman (1951) [internet archive] [my review]                 
FBI Girl (Nov 1951) [internet archive] [my review]
Mara Maru (April 1952) [internet archive] [my review]
Horizons West (1952) [internet archive] [my review]
Blue Gardenia (1953) [internet archive] [my review]
Gorilla at Large (1954) [internet archive] [my review]

The Kalends of Robert Florey: A Study in Scarlet

Note: As a young French boy, Robert Florey became obsessed with Hollywood movies in the silent era. He came to the US and became the King of B-Movies at Paramount, proud that he should bring craft to a studio system that churned out movies like sausage.

A Study in Scarlet
1933 / 1:11
Tagline: “SHERLOCK HOLMES Playing his Part in the Drama of Life-love and Dangerous Living!”
[internet archive]

The movie opens with a Robert Florey-type touch: we see a guy who’s been strangled through the broken glass of a railway carriage window. The death of Robert Murphy is ruled a suicide, though how exactly one strangles one’s self is left obscure. Sherlock Holmes is consulted by the widow Murphy, who is miffed at being left penniless by her husband’s executor.

Murphy was a member of a secret society. The Scarlet Ring is headed by lawyer Thaddeus Merrydew. The terms of membership in the society are that the assets of any of its deceased members will be divided among the remaining members (widows are left in the cold).

Who in their right mind, the movie-goer wonders again, would belong to such a society given that it is unsurprising when members start exiting this vale of tears before their time, helped along by gunshots? When Captain Pyke is shot, Sherlock Holmes focuses on his mysterious Chinese widow (Anna May Wong) as well as the nasty Merrydew. Other members are put in a dying way: Malcom Dearing first, then Mr. Baker. There is also an attempt on the life of young Eileen Forrester, who became a reluctant society member upon the death of her father. She engaged to a guy so dumb that she gets kidnapped when he is tricked.

Reginald Owen is a 20th century Sherlock Holmes. He has the manner of a successful business executive, which does not comport with my image of a believable Holmes. I mean, Holmes ought to have a slight whiff of eccentricity and instability whereas Owen always has his feet on the ground. Dr. Watson takes a minimal part and he's stuck in the Victorian era. The English actors have that offhand manner of being offensive that makes American rudeness seem merely out of ignorance. I mean, the English can act like cold bloody monsters with no effort at all (in movies; in real life, they’re always ever so nice).

Gleefully wicked, Anna May Wong is smiling that inimitable “I’m gonna chop you up into little pieces” smile.  She’s well-dressed too, as usual. She could wear a poncho and look poised and elegant. She’s in the movie for 10 minutes, tops, and she’s her compelling self for every second.

The plot is nothing like the original novel. In another Robert Florey touch, the subjective camera is used when Marrydew is consulting a hit man. The secret passage is pretty cool as is the fog here and there. But the utter lack of music – didn’t the silence ring in 1935 like it rings in 2026? - seems strange.

European Reading Challenge #6

I read this for the European Reading Challenge 2026.

Death and the Dutch Uncle – Patricia Moyes

Released in 1968, this is the eighth mystery starring Henry and Emmy Tibbett. Having recently been promoted from Inspector to Superintendent, Henry is getting used to his new duties and his office in New Scotland Yard bit by bit.

A petty hood who worked in hotel kitchens between temping on individual heists gets himself shot dead in the restroom of a private bar. Henry is assigned to the investigation.

It happens, however, that Henry and Emmy host a dinner with the brother of the victim in Death on the Agenda. Gordon Trapp is suspicious over the sudden deaths of two judges on an international board which adjudicates border disputes between countries. He tells Henry the two judges were to vote on a case between two newly independent African countries. I’m giving nothing away because the veteran reader of mysteries already knows the two sudden deaths turn out to be murders.

Because Henry and Emmy find themselves immersed in an international conflict, this feels more to me like an out-and-out thriller than a detective story. Though stable middle-class people, the Tibbets didn’t mind getting into breathless action. So this thriller reminded me of Margery Allingham in Traitor’s Purse or Nicholas Blake in Smiler with a Knife or Victor Canning in The Python Project.

Moyes was a traveler so sometimes her mysteries are set in England touristy areas or foreign climes. For instance, Down Among the Dead Men had the backdrop of sailing on England’s East Coast and  Dead Men Don’t Ski was set in the Italian Alps. This one is set in rural Holland with scenery and houses rendered vividly. Moyes’ second husband was a linguist, so the character of the interpreter Gordan Trapp is persuasive. 

There's a diverse variety of people and places in Moyes’ books that makes them different from many mysteries. She still retains the deft characterization, plot twists, exciting climaxes and surprising reveals that we like in traditional police procedurals, before whodunnits got socially conscious, regional, lengthy and dark in the Seventies.