The Ides of Perry Mason 44

On the 15^th of every month, we deal with a topic related to Our Favorite Lawyer. 

The Case of the Beautiful Beggar – Erle Stanley Gardner

Twenty-two year old knockout Daphne Shelby claims to be the niece of seventy-five year old Horace Shelby. She has been instructed by her uncle to cash a check for $125,000 (in today’s money, about $920K). Then she was to have Mason prepare a will leaving all uncle’s property to her and bring it to the house for his signature. But she has found the bank account cleaned out. And to her alarm, shrewd and designing relatives have had Horace declared incompetent, committed to a rest home by a dodgy medico, and gotten themselves appointed conservators of his goods and chattels.

Mason knows crooked relatives when he sees them. Feeling sorry for the young woman and her vulnerable uncle, Mason handles the civil proceedings as to the competency hearing. He also engineers a banking sleight of hand to get some of his client’s money back.

The first half of the book moves along briskly and interestingly, but we veteran Gardner fans do wonder when the killing is going to occur. It finally does, but the murder, the trial, and the reveal seem rather mechanical, as if Gardner were just connecting the dots for the average reader that’s sitting in a waiting room and needing some diversion.

In fact, that trial and reveal side is treated so routinely and hastily hints that Gardner was more interested in writing about a theme important to himself. He was, like the victimized codger in this book, 75 years old when he wrote this mystery. He puts extra energy and insight into examining what it must feel to be like to be old, vulnerable, and the target of heartless users who want to undermine his sanity, strip him of his property, and warehouse him in a crappy nursing home until he dies.

Recall in 1965, Medicare was a new unfamiliar program, 65 was considered old, and getting old meant a prison-like “rest home.” In 1965, only about 9% of white males born in 1890 where still alive so Gardner was writing about a relatively rare situation, though obviously of extreme import to the victim involved. Heaven knows, because people are living longer, exploitation of the elderly is more common nowadays, making this mystery approach the definition of literature, in Ezra Pound’s words, “news that stays news.”

Sometimes the Mason novels of the 1960s mildly disappoint but because Gardner is writing about a topic urgent to him, this is well worth reading for hardcore Mason readers of a certain age.