Mount TBR #45

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2016. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

The Case of the Lucky Legs – Erle Stanley Gardner

This is the third of seventy-five Perry Mason mysteries, born in 1936 when America still smelled of cigar smoke and leaded gasoline. The scenery is a valentine to the past: cigar stores, soda fountains, speakeasies, and hotels where the wallpaper knew secrets. Even the slang is a museum piece - people “know their onions” and try not to “look common.” You can almost hear the click of a nickel in the payphone.

But don’t expect the Mason you know from the postwar years. Here, Della Street is practically a potted plant - no sly confidante, no accomplice in evidence shenanigans. She doesn’t even take notes while Perry grills a client. Paul Drake and Mason circle each other like two tomcats, stiff and wary. Mason himself? A housebreaker with skeleton keys and a temper that threatens fists. The prose plods in places another interrogation, and then another - until you want to shout, “Get on with it!”

And the smoking! Whole scenes devoted to the poetry of rising smoke, as if nicotine were a muse. Publishers who dream of sanitizing these books will need buckets of black ink.

Yet, credit where due: the characters breathe more life than usual. Four principals and two hard-nosed cops feel plausible, and the villain is a clever fox. In an amazing departure - as if Celine Dion covered Gimme a Pigfoot & A Bottle of Beer  - no courtroom theatrics. Just Mason, raw and unvarnished, learning his trade in a world that still believed a cigarette could solve a problem.