I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over
at My
Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2015. The challenge is to read
books that you already own.
The Case of the Lame Canary – Erle Stanley Gardner
After the school year
began, my reading had really fallen off when I read this in mid-October. Perhaps
distracted with work concerns, I found this late 1930s outing hard to follow.
There were too many characters to keep track of for my depleted attention span. Gardner didn’t draw the characters vividly enough to keep my attention involved. This was the 11th novel with Perry Mason so Gardner does feel comfortable with the recurring characters.
This was one of the times when Perry proposes to Della. I’m not spoiling anything by indicating that she turns him down. Her argument is sound. If she married him, she’d have to spend time at home, never seeing him and never taking part in adventures.
It’s strange though that we long-time readers – or at least one of them, me - have no problem assuming Perry and Della maintain a platonic relationship whereas it’s really easy to assume Donald and Elsie are sleeping together in the Cool & Lam novels. Of course, sexy rarely raises its head in Mason novels, while Cool and Lam novels are very sexy indeed, with women giving Donald the come-hither look constantly.
There were too many characters to keep track of for my depleted attention span. Gardner didn’t draw the characters vividly enough to keep my attention involved. This was the 11th novel with Perry Mason so Gardner does feel comfortable with the recurring characters.
This was one of the times when Perry proposes to Della. I’m not spoiling anything by indicating that she turns him down. Her argument is sound. If she married him, she’d have to spend time at home, never seeing him and never taking part in adventures.
It’s strange though that we long-time readers – or at least one of them, me - have no problem assuming Perry and Della maintain a platonic relationship whereas it’s really easy to assume Donald and Elsie are sleeping together in the Cool & Lam novels. Of course, sexy rarely raises its head in Mason novels, while Cool and Lam novels are very sexy indeed, with women giving Donald the come-hither look constantly.
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