Perry Mason 167: Pass the Gravy

Note: I like the Cool & Lam series and this 1959 outing is one of Gardner’s sturdier contraptions, the kind that looks at first like two unrelated annoyances and then reveals itself to be one of those infernal little boxes where every side folds into the next. 

Pass the Gravy – Erle Stanley Gardner writing as A. A. Fair

Pass the Gravy (and you can already hear Bertha Cool snort at the title) is Gardner nudging a mess of details until they cry uncle and confess.

We begin, as usual, with PI Donald Lam being handed two problems that he is explicitly directed by partner Bertha not to combine. First: a fifteen‑year‑old girl with more anxiety than cash wants her Uncle Amos retrieved from his latest alcoholic orbit - except this time the orbit has widened past what the family can endure. Second: a far more remunerative proposition, courtesy of a sleek wife whose missing salesman husband has vanished into exactly the sort of fog Gardner enjoys. Bertha Cool, patron saint of billable hours, votes decisively for glamour over pathos. Lam, professionally a risk-taker all the way, declines to choose.

The miracle (or the trick, depending on your tolerance) is a pair of postcards from the same nowhere gas station, which Lam seizes on like a man on a mission. Off he goes, ricocheting through Sierras, Reno, and a parade of low‑rent America - hitchhikers, ex-cons, predators - each one offering a clue that mostly serves to make the previous clue look stupid. Gardner keeps the tone breezy, but the method is almost scientific: accumulate detail, distrust it, repeat.

Meanwhile Bertha looms - half partner, half thrower of Lam under busses - coiled like that famous spool of barbed wire, measuring morality in invoices. Lam, no one’s idea of a saint, nevertheless insists on helping the broke kid, as if he’s dimly aware that a detective who ignores the poor stops being a detective and turns into furniture. Secretary Elsie Brand thinks dark thoughts, looking askance at Lam's desire to assist a teenage girl - it was an age when literally millions of sixteen-year-old girls got married every year.

It is here that Lam can be read in light of Seneca’s observation that “the wise man is fortified against all inroads.” Lam is no Stoic adept - he is too ironic, too improvisational, too entangled in contingency - but he approximates Stoic flexibility and resilience in practice. He does not retreat before uncertainty, financial pressure, or physical danger; nor does he allow Bertha’s mercenary calculus to wholly dictate his course. Poverty (his own professional precarity), sorrow (the girl’s desperation), disgrace (his disbarred past), and pain, disability, and disfigurement (the ever-present threat of bodily harm to his small frame) all press upon him. Yet Lam persists, not with serene detachment, but with a dogged alertness and dedication that mirror Seneca’s ideal in a compromised, modern form.

In the end, the puzzle snaps shut neatly, Gardner having tidied the room with efficiency. But the aftertaste is better than that: beneath the wisecracks and coincidences, a faint, unfashionable idea - that decency may be impractical, but is nonetheless binding. Lam doesn’t win because he’s invulnerable. He wins because he refuses to take the sensible exit and he does not like seeing vulnerable people abused.

The Nones of Crime: Mystery House

Note: As for the connection with the classic TV series Perry Mason, Sheila Bromley was both a goody and a baddy in five episodes. Her most outstanding performance was in TCOT Nervous Neighbor in which she had amnesia, one of the very few credible instances I’ve seen of that “convenient for the script” condition. 

Mystery House
1938 / 56 minutes
Tagline: “A piece of wire...a toupee...a rifled safe..3 CLUES! 3 MURDERS! 3 TIMES The Thrills of Any Other Mystery Hit!”
[internet archive]

This Warner Brothers B-movie begins at an autopsy hearing where Gwen (Anne Nagel) insists her father was murdered - after all, he’d accused his business partners of shady dealings. But the evidence points to suicide: a locked room, a gun, and no sign of foul play. 

Gwen, unconvinced, vows to hire a private detective. Enter Sara (Ann Sheridan), nurse to Gwen’s cranky Aunt Lucy (Elspeth Dudgeon), who recommends her boyfriend, PI Lance O’Leary (Dick Purcell).

Gwen’s own beau is played by William Hopper - yes, Paul Drake from Perry Mason. Here he’s a society fop with an insipid smile and enough makeup to suggest he wandered in from a silent film. His main talent? Looking game for gin rummy even after a supposed suicide.

At Lance’s urging, Gwen gathers suspects for a weekend hunt at her country estate.

Tension simmers; secrets hover. One guest hints at explosive knowledge - then turns up dead, another “suicide.” The police? Never summoned. Lance inspects the body, pockets evidence, and deduces strangulation by a wire from the now-broken radio.

Purcell brings expected vigor to the role, his athletic ease lending the PI some presence. Sheridan, known as “The Oomph Girl,” does what she can with thin dialogue - though one longs for Technicolor to revel in her red hair. Ben Welden, in a toupee, plays against his usual lug type as a respectable if pushy exec.

Based on a mystery by Mignon Eberhart - once dubbed the “American Agatha Christie” - the film offers locked-room intrigue, country-house tension, and a dash of pulp charm. Forgotten today, it’s still a curious relic for fans of B-movie sleuthing.

As for clothes, the mystery is set in winter so the fur-trimmed coats are pretty nice. The cars are swanky; that might be a cool 1938 Ford Deluxe Tudor Sedan.  At only an hour, this works for a Saturday evening in winter.

Perry Mason 166: Respectability on Trial

Note: Erle Stanley Gardner came to Perry Mason with two useful educations. One was acquired in the small mining towns of his youth, where power rarely showcased itself but was understood through money, reputation, and long acquaintance. The other came from legal practice, where he saw how such informal arrangements could shape formal outcomes, particularly for outsiders. Together they help explain a recurring pattern in the Mason novels: tightly knit local elites, suspicion directed toward the socially vulnerable, and justice arriving only when an outsider breaks the circle.

Respectability on Trial: How the Rural Elite Rig the Game (Until Mason Shows Up)

Gardner's small towns often resemble a miniature version of what C. Wright Mills would later describe as a power elite. Property owners, professionals, and established families do more than possess wealth; they help determine what counts as common sense. Influence accumulates into networks. Families, attorneys, business associates, and dependents form interlocking circles whose judgments have a curious habit of aligning with their interests.

In The Case of the Golddigger's Purse (1945) and The Case of the Cautious Coquette (1949), reputation is a form of capital guarded as jealously as any stash of undeclared income. When scandal threatens, suspicion drifts toward those at the margins, often women whose social standing is uncertain. The machinery of law initially serves as a social reflex: protect the inner ring and export blame. Facts are smothered beneath more convenient interpretations.

The Case of the Lame Canary (1937) shows the same dynamic in a harsher key. Divorce law, social standing, and the threat of public scandal become tools of domination. The resulting violence grows from unequal power, while the impostures and misdirections that follow reveal how confidently privileged figures assume they can avoid scrutiny.

In The Case of the Screaming Woman (1958), Gardner examines power at its most subtle. Credibility attaches itself to status before evidence has even entered the room. Property owners and professionals are presumed truthful; the lone dissenter is treated as suspect. Persistence itself becomes evidence of instability. Disbelief functions as social control.

Running through these novels is a quieter but revealing pattern. Trust circulates within a closed circuit. Legal representation, financial oversight, guardianship, and family interests often occupy the same social orbit. No grand conspiracy is necessary. Familiarity provides its own protection.

This is where Perry Mason becomes important. He acts as a detective who is a disruptive force. He insists that claims be tested by evidence rather than station, and he breaks the tacit agreements that shield respectable people from uncomfortable questions. His real offense is treating respectability not as proof but as background.

The larger implication of Gardner's fiction is that injustice rarely presents itself wearing a villain's cape. More often it arrives in a clean suit, sits on the chamber-of-commerce board, and speaks confidently about community standards. Wherever a cohesive local elite dominates the landscape, the danger is not merely corruption but a narrowing of perception itself. Truth becomes filtered through status. It takes an outsider, or at least an outsider's method, to pry it loose.

The Kalends of Crime: The Maltese Falcon

Note: Don't get your feathers up, as Sam Spade warns, but you won’t find comparisons with the John Huston’s 1941 version in this review of the 1931 version. Comparisons are odious  - they obscure a film’s own merits. Refusing to compare demands discipline: to judge a work on its own terms. I assume, despite industry pressures, the filmmakers aimed in good faith to make a solid movie. Besides, Una Merkel, Thelma Todd, and Bebe Daniels all turn up in the same movie. At that point, everything else is merely a formality.

The Maltese Falcon
1931 / 1:18
Tagline: “Hard as nails, leader of a crime ring, but still a woman.”
[internet archive]

This Pre-Code version of the Dashiell Hammett’s 1929 novel kicks off with the implication that private detective Sam Spade (Ricardo Cortez) has just had intimate congress with a woman in his office. During working hours, no less. Spade and his secretary Effie (Una Merkel) exchange knowing looks as the woman leaves the office after adjusting her hosiery.

That the Spade character is quite the ladies’ man is confirmed as his partner Miles Archer (Walter Long) listens in on the extension to gather that Spade and his wife Iva Archer (Thelma Todd) are having an affair. The new client, a worried Ruth Wonderly (Bebe Daniels), in a fur trimmed outfit, hires the two detectives to locate her missing sister.

In a beautifully filmed scene, a dark bedroom with the breeze blowing in the curtains, Spade is woken by his ringing telephone. The police inform him that apparently while on the job, Miles Archer was murdered, shot to death in an alley.  Near the scene of the crime, Spade speaks in Cantonese with a Chinese-American merchant. The police learn of Spade and Iva’s affair so they figure Spade as the perp.  The only way for Spade to get out from under police suspicion and scrutiny is to find the real killer, but his meeting with three manic collectors looking for the statuette of a black bird impedes his efforts to clear himself.

Near the beginning of the movie the lines are delivered in a kind of stagey way, as if they are being declaimed rather than spoken in a natural way. The delivery gets better as the movie unfolds. Bebe Daniels has limpid lamps, as wide and wet as the eyes of a Dandie Dinmont Terrier. Her femme fatale is persuasive: attractive and “using her charms to her great advantage.” “Don't you ever get lonesome” she asks Spade as if she could something about that. Daniels in the bubble bath is Pre-Code as is her being strip searched in the kitchen. Also, in Pre-Code fashion, it’s obvious that Spade and Wonderly sleep together.

Ricardo Cortez puts in a good, not great, performance as the satanic PI who only seems to be looking out for himself. Spade’s goat-like lechery is a creepy act to make people let down their guard by underestimating him. Robert Elliott and J. Farrell MacDonald as San Francisco police detectives are both excellent: tough as nails but too middle-aged weary to employ the rubber hose.

Dudley Digges (the heavy in Condemned) plays the Guttman character as jumpy on the outside but bleak on the inside. In Pre-Code fashion, it’s evident that Guttman and Wilmer (Dwight Frye, looking psycho) sleep together when Guttman strokes Frye’s cheek. Guttman sincerely regrets sending Wilmer over as the fall guy.

Spade becomes rather a flat character because his self-revealing monologue at the end of the novel is not persuasive. At least he says, “I'll get over it in time” which shows he’s philosopher enough to take the long view, which helps in run of the mill dilemmas like handing over to the law somebody one has slept with.

This picture has a final scene in which Spade visits Wonderly in jail. I thought it worked because the cell block was dismal beyond words, the incarcerated women deserted and hopeless. Just an amateur critic, I’m easy-going enough to march where the director points.

European Reading Challenge #8

I read this for the European Reading Challenge 2026.

A Voice in the Night – Andrea Camilleri

Inspector Salvo Montalbano works in Vigata, Scility, where the sun bakes the streets and the rot runs centuries deep. He’s got two cases on his desk: a supermarket manager found dead by his own hand, and a young woman butchered in her apartment. The supermarket’s owned by the Cuffaro crime family. The girl’s boyfriend is the son of the provincial president - a spoiled brat with too much money and too little conscience.

Montalbano’s used to this kind of mess. The criminals are predictably stupid and ferocious. The politicians are worse. His bosses are scared of stepping on the wrong toes, and the mafia has its fingers in every pie. So Montalbano does what he always does: he digs with his bare hands when there’s no shovel in sight.

His crew is the usual cast. Fazio takes notes like he’s building a case against time and space. Catarella mangles names and addresses with comic precision. Dr. Pasquano curses like a sailor and pokes at Montalbano’s creeping fear that age is catching up with him. The inspector feels it in his bones - he’s not as sharp as he used to be, and the world isn’t getting any cleaner.

Camilleri’s prose moves fast, like a car chase through narrow alleys. Dialogue drives the story, and the scenes play out like a stage drama - misunderstandings, interrogations, midnight break-ins. Montalbano lies when he has to, manipulates when he must. He knows when to wait and when to strike, even if it means flushing out the guilty with a TV interview or a voice in the dark.

There’s no hottie love interest half his age this time, thank the stars. Just Montalbano, aging, stubborn, and still trying to hold the line in a country sleepwalking through corruption. Camilleri’s voice is clear and skeptical, like a man who’s seen too much and still cares. The crimes are brutal, the politics worse, but Montalbano keeps going. Someone has to.

Perry Mason 165: TCOT Caretaker’s Cat

Note. The year 1932 was the worst year of the Depression in the USA. Many adult men (i.e. the readers of pulp mysteries) were feeling demoralized by long-term under- or unemployment and difficulties supporting a family. So in digressions in the novels Erle Stanley Gardner sometimes donned his life coach hat.

Perryisms to Live By:  “What the hell can a man lose? He can't lose his life because he doesn't own that anyway. He has only a lease on life. He can lose money and money doesn't mean one damn thing as compared with character. All that really counts is a man's ability to live life, to get the most out of it as he goes through it, and he gets the most kick out of it by playing a no-limit game.”

The Case of the Caretaker’s Cat – Erle Stanley Gardner

So dig this: 1935, the Great Depression still doing its slow grind, and here comes a Perry Mason yarn that kicks off with Karl Jackson, Mason’s short-lived assistant, laying out the Laxter family soap opera with the clarity of a bookie reading off odds. Old Peter Laxter croaks in a house fire, leaves his grandsons Sam and Frank sitting pretty, while granddaughter Winifred gets the royal shaft. The caretaker, Ashton - crippled, cranky, and living in a basement with his Persian cat named Clinker (named after the coal furnace crud, for you non-stokers) - gets a job for life. Cozy, right?

Except Sam hates the cat. Claims Clinker’s a bed-muddying menace, running up laundry bills like a Beverly Hills princess. Threatens to poison the poor beast. Ashton, who’s got a bankroll fat enough to choke a horse, stomps into Mason’s office, waving his wad but balking at a $500 retainer. Settles for $250 to keep Clinker breathing. Mason, cool as a gin fizz, dictates a letter to Della Street warning Sam he’ll lose his inheritance if he so much as looks at the cat cross-eyed. Ashton exits, and Della spots him being tailed by a guy in a green Packard - because of course.

Cue Nathaniel Shuster, bargain-basement shyster with a rep for jury bribing, barging in with Sam and Frank in tow. Wants to settle Winifred’s beef out of court. Mason says he’s only in it for the cat, tosses them out like yesterday’s racing form. Then tells Paul Drake they’re gonna challenge the will “over a cat.” Drake’s assignment: find Winifred, dig dirt on the grandsons, and sniff out the truth about Peter’s crispy demise.

Winifred turns up flipping waffles at a joint called Winnie’s Waffles - because nothing says American grit like syrup and batter. She’s signed away her rights thanks to Shuster’s sweet talk, but doesn’t care. She’s hell-bent on making it solo in the cold, hard world. Mason, digging her style, drops a line fit for a motivational poster: “It’s not the future that matters; it’s the present. It’s not what you save, but what you make and how you make it.” Heavy, man. Then he mentions the cat, and good-hearted Winifred’s all in. Her boyfriend Doug Keene tosses Edith DeVoe, Peter’s nurse, into the mix, and suddenly the plot’s got more twists than a pretzel factory.

From there, it’s pure pulp fireworks: Edith spins a lurid yarn, Mason huddles with DA Hamilton Burger, they dig up Peter’s charred remains, and then - bang! - a strangulation murder, a blunt-instrument murder, missing diamonds, Holcomb slamming desks and chasing streetcars like a Keystone Cop on Benzedrine. Della breaks speed limits, Perry plays square-shooter hero, and the courtroom finale rocks harder than a Chick Webb set at the Savoy Ballroom. All this, and we’re still sweating bullets over that damn cat.

The Thirties Mason? He’s less buttoned-down barrister, more two-fisted adventurer, grousing to Della about paperwork while dodging death and dishing Stoicism. Sure, the cars have running boards and California still hangs its killers, but the vibe? Timeless. Cool as a cat named Clinker.

Perry Mason 164: The Mean Girl Rewrites the Script

Note: Gail Patrick left law school to become a movie actress. Often cast as the bad girl or the other woman, she appeared in more than 60 feature films between 1932 and 1948, notably Stage Door and My Favorite Wife. Retirement bored her so she created her job as executive producer for the hit TV show Perry Mason from 1957 to 1966.

The Mean Girl Rewrites the Script (and Wins the Case)

It is hardly a contradiction, though it can appear that way at first glance. Gail Patrick, cool, lacquered, bored, amused, built an acting career on surfaces that concealed intent. She played the socialite, the interloper, the mean girl, the woman lingering just beyond the boundaries of propriety and therefore exercising influence over them. In My Man Godfrey among others, she embodied something subtler than chaos. She was an arrangement of tone, posture, and advantage. Of self-knowledge as well: social butterfly Cornelia understood perfectly that she was squandering her time, energy, and talent; super-thief Myra possessed the icy confidence required to match wits with the cunning George Sanders in Quiet Please: Murder.

Then came television. Executive producer of Perry Mason. Less performance than stewardship of performance. Something carries across. As producer, Patrick favored scripts and characterizations that rewarded intelligence, discipline, and competence, particularly in the portrayal of Della Street.

The look of the series, its restraint, polish, and almost chilly cleanliness, feels more like an insistence than an aesthetic preference. Nothing extraneous. Every gesture purposeful. One can hear the echo of those earlier roles: the woman who knew exactly when to speak, when to hold back, how to allow silence to accomplish its work.

Many of Patrick's screen roles centered on social performance and concealed motives. As producer, she showed a similar sensitivity to credibility, helping maintain Perry Mason's disciplined tone and avoiding the melodramatic excess common in contemporary television.

And the women, often relegated to the margins in comparable series, are altered here, quietly but decisively. Della Street neither flutters nor waits. She anticipates, investigates, and verifies. Her work functions less as secretarial support than as a parallel enterprise. She is competent without fanfare, and because the series treats that competence as routine rather than remarkable, it becomes all the more convincing.

This matters, if only because the period so reliably preferred the opposite. The endangered woman, the nosy neighbor, the childlike witness, the decorative secretary still appear in Perry Mason, yet they are displaced, or more accurately, balanced by another possibility. Della, and often other women* moving through the show's tight architecture, possess a self-command that resists easy categorizing. Rescue never enters the equation; they are already in motion, solving, adjusting, correcting.

Whether this emphasis originated directly with Patrick or emerged from a broader creative collaboration is difficult to determine. Nevertheless, the show's treatment of Della Street reflects qualities associated with Patrick's best screen performances: intelligence, composure, and self-possession.

So the irony, villainess turned arbiter of truth, dissolves somewhat. Villainy was never the essence of those performances. What mattered was expertise in appearances: understanding how deception settles into the body, how it sounds when it speaks. Repurposed, that knowledge becomes vigilance. The architect of duplicity becomes, quite plausibly, its most efficient detector.

The skills that made Patrick effective as an actress - discipline, observation, and control - appear in a different form in the series she helped produce. Patrick spent much of her acting career portraying women whose intelligence carried a hint of menace. On Perry Mason, that intelligence loses its threatening quality and becomes professional competence. Della Street and many of the series' female characters are neither ornaments nor victims. They are people with work to do, and the show takes that work seriously. If Patrick helped shape that perspective, her most lasting role may have taken place behind the camera rather than in front of it.

Links to Gail Patrick movies and my reviews can be found here.

* Amazing actresses such as Constance Ford, Audrey Totter, Frances Reid, Joyce Meadows, Marie Windsor, Katherine Squire, Geraldine Wall, Lurene Tuttle, Sheila Bromley, Louise Latham, and Jeanne Cooper, to name only a few. They all played women with souls – and elbows.