Note: On the 15th of every month for about the last three years or so, I have posted a review of a Perry Mason mystery. For the hell of it. But I find the ones written in the Sixties just aren’t up the usual standard and, getting older myself, I don’t feel I have the time for mediocre mysteries.
The Case of the Troubled Trustee – Erle Stanley Gardner
Some of Gardner’s productions near the end of his writing days in the mid-Sixties smacked of the routine and bordered on the garbled. This 1965 outing is easy enough to follow but the plot and incidents are not narrated in the usual smooth, organized manner.
Mason’s client, for once, is not a beautiful female, but a male investment counselor. Kerry Dutton, in his late twenties, has violated his fiduciary duties in his ham-handed attempt to protect a comely trust beneficiary Desiree Ellis, whom he loves though she’s told him she thinks of him as a brother. Kerry feels responsible for protecting his lady-love from a beatnik user and his dragon mother. A proxy fight over an oil stock that Kerry should not have sold out of the trust leads to the inevitable murder.
The trial sequence feels slightly too long, despite the fun fireworks and crafty stalking during DA Hamilton’s Burger’s cross-examination of defense witnesses. Putting two and two together, Mason effects a batty plan to catch the murderer.
The true fan finishes this mystery only because to bail
out of a Mason mystery after the trial has begun just isn’t a done
thing in my Perryverse.
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