Friday, June 1, 2018

Mount TBR #12


I read this book for the Mount TBR 2018 Reading Challenge.

The Case of the One-Eyed Witness – Erle Stanley Gardner

A skeptic might argue if you’ve read one Perry Mason mystery, you’ve read them all, and so re-reading them is the greatest waste of time since social media.

In any Mason story, the inevitable killing comes out of an intricate scam. Though Perry Mason hires Paul Drake’s detectives, Perry and his savvy secretary Della Street do much of their own legwork in interviewing witnesses and persons of interest. The cops misconstrue evidence not because they want to frame Perry’s client but because they are filtering evidence through the wrong assumption that Perry’s client is guilty. The DA has the same confirmation bias and thus thinks all is fair – like priming witnesses or depriving the suspect of sleep and food for easier interrogation - in ushering Perry’s guilty as hell client into the gas chamber.

Despite Perry’s warning not to talk to the cops, his clients always do, assuming “just telling the truth” to the cops and DA will help despite the fact that it never helps because the cops assume the suspect is lying. We long-time Perry fans also expect in every novel that his clients will act irrationally by not telling Perry all the facts, becoming listless and apathetic, or pursuing a selfish agenda. However, Perry assumes they are innocent of first-degree murder and have a right to a defense. Perry can be counted on to fight for a fair trial, especially when the breaks are going against his clients. Perry feels such commitment to the truth that he will not suppress, conceal, or distort any of the actual evidence.

We fans therefore return to Perry Mason novels because he represents an ideal lawyer that will fight for us when crooks steal our property and the criminal justice system disregards our rights. Mason knows that human beings, being fallible and unknowing and careless and malicious, will make mistakes. Crooks blunder because they are ignorant, cops and prosecutors because of bad assumptions, evidence suppression, cognitive inertia, and corner-cutting. Knowing that courts will uphold palpably unreasonable conduct on the part of the police, Perry fights with legwork, logic and argument based on the law. He feeds our fantasy wish for somebody that will protect us when life plays a dirty trick on us and we get in a world of shit with the authorities.

Fans re-read Mason novels simply because we like Perry, Della, and Paul, give Lt. Tragg the benefit of the doubt that he in fact has a soul, and detest preening DA Hamilton Burger. We like the period Americana of soda fountains, phone booths, gladstone bags, and retro expressions like “Are you trying to make a monkey out of me.” Like writers such as Dickens, Trollope, Collins and Wharton, Gardner has fun with naming characters: Pierre LaRue, Celinda Gilson, Percy R. Danvers, Dr. Carlton D. Radcliffe and Medford D. Carlin.

By the way, in this one Myrtle Fargo is accused of stabbing her husband Arthman D. Fargo to death. Appearing for the state on the stand is Mrs. Newton Maynard, with one eye bandaged, thus the title. Admittedly, this one has an edge involving racism, an issue still hot in post-Japanese-American internment in California in 1950 when this book was published. Gardner was against unfairness and injustice in all its forms so I don’t see the racism as casual in this book, as it is taken for granted in much genre fiction of the time. Gardner invariably has a sympathetic portrait of a female character who is pushing hard to make it in a world where men dominate. Also, the racket in this outing is particularly slimy, as Gardner approaches gritty noir.

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