The Case of the
Reluctant Model - Erle Stanley Gardner
Millionaire collector of pictures Otto Olney wants to sue
art maven Colin Durant for slander, claiming that Durant is saying that a
painting purchased by Olney is a fake.
Lawyer-series hero Perry Mason discourages the slander
suit but provides his usual sage legal advice. He later realizes that Durant
might be plotting an intricate scam with the coerced help of model Maxine
Lindsay. Maxine ends up in trouble deep after Mason and Della Street find a
body in Maxine's apartment and Maxine nowhere to be found. DA Burger and Homicide
Detective Lt. Tragg are not amused that Mason keeps finding corpses.
I liked this one because it did not follow the lockstep
stages of a typical Mason novel. Also, I clearly shouldn’t read too many Mason novels because
Gardner’s antique Americanisms – “no doubt of it on earth” or “take a powder”
or “the shank of the evening” or “as dead as a mackerel” - seep into my vocabulary and make 50-something
women at work say wonderingly to me, “You sound like my dad.”
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