The Ides of Perry Mason 49

Note: On the 15th of every month, we run a column related to Our Favorite Lawyer in the mysteries or on the tube in the original series. This month is a departure, a merciful one, for the sake of variety. And in future I'm going to run reviews of Gardner's other notable series, the PI adventures starring miserly hard-charging Bertha Cool, her office manager Elsie Brand, and Donald Lam, sensitive subtle disbarred lawyer all the city girls in a peck of trouble inevitably fall for.

Dead Men’s Letters – Erle Stanley Gardner

The creator of Perry Mason learned to be a professional writer in the 1920s by writing literally millions of words for pulp magazines such as Black Mask. Writing under the pen name of Charles M. Green, Gardner wrote 72 short stories starring Ed Jenkins, the Phantom Crook. This 1991 collection by Carroll & Graf pulls together six stories that were first published during the height of the Jazz Age.

Our hero is wanted in three countries and six states for unspecified crimes, but he enjoys immunity in the Golden State because of a legal technicality. But the cops and crooks know who he is, as does the general public since the yellow press gleefully runs stories about him in their Sunday supplements.

No scandal sheet will resist an outsider that lives by his own rules, beholden to no higher authorities, friend of the downtrodden and vulnerable, and chivalrous to flappers. Jenkins is a timeless figure in the American popular imagination, shrewd ancestor to one-man armies like John Wick and Jack Reacher.

But wait.

There’s more to Jenkins than a deadly left jab and a lot of attitude. Fluent in Cantonese, he maintains friendships with Southern Chinese both good and bad in Frisco’s Chinatown. He’s the world’s greatest cracksman because he has invented his own hi-tech safecracking device. He carries a cane that features not only the inevitable sword but also a burglar’s kit. He has a canine sidekick, the wonder-dog Bobo who helps him scout, track, flush, guard, and get in good with flappers. As if all these hallmarks of a super-hero don’t impress our inner ten-year-old enough, Jenkins is a master of disguise. 

Shades of Sherlock Holmes!

Gardner spends more words describing characters’ appearance than he was to in Mason novels, but he must have done so because I think making heavies vividly hideous was a pulp convention. Also in the tradition: the setting is always in a city, the time of day is always after dark, the cops are always flat-footed. A professional that believed in the delivering what the audience expected, Gardner ratchets up the action till it’s nearly non-stop.

I suppose pulp fiction from the Twenties is not everybody’s cup of tea. And some readers – like my no-canine-is-a-stranger wife - will be put out that Bobo appears in only two stories. But readers who are looking for non-stop thrills and getting a kick out of corn as a side-dish won’t go wrong with Ed Jenkins, Phantom Crook.