The Ides of Perry Mason 64

Note: The 15^th of the month features a piece about Our Favorite Lawyer in the novels or on the tube. This novel was made into the second episode of the series, aired September 28, 1957. Darryl Hickman plays Steve Harris. He looks familiar because as a kid actor he was in The Grapes of Wrath, among others. His little brother Dwayne played Dobie Gillis on The Many Loves of ~, a show I liked when I was around ten for Bob Denver as Maynard Krebs (Work!! still sums up my attitude) and Sheila James as Zelda Gilroy (even as a boy I knew the best girls were the smart kind loyal girls).

The Case of the Sleepwalker’s Niece – Erle Stanley Gardner

Perry Mason’s would-be client, Peter B. Kent, has psychological, marital and commercial anxieties so severe that he is driven to walking in his sleep. The titular niece, Edna Hammer, tells a weird story as she seeks lawyer Mason's advice.

While sleepwalking, Uncle Pete took up a carving knife and wandered about his mansion. He was found by the police outside the bedroom door, which his alimony hound of a wife, Doris, had locked against his attack. Although Doris is making lovey-dovey noises about a reconciliation to support her disturbed husband, she wants big bucks. She might try to get Uncle Pete declared incompetent, warehouse him in a nursing home, and take charge of his sizeable estate and holdings. Edna Hammer wants Mason to facilitate Uncle Pete’s divorce so that he can marry his selfless nurse Lucille Mays.

As if the personal front didn’t provide enough anxiety to provoke midnight strolls, his iffy business partner Frank Maddox and Maddox’s niggling lawyer, John Duncan, are being difficult about contracts and settlements. Holed up in Uncle Pete’s mansion for negotiations, Mason makes no secret of his disgust quibbling about the verbiage of contracts instead of making a fool of DA Hamilton Burger in open court during a murder trial.

In an Agatha Christie move, Gardner has the characters spend the night in Uncle Pete’s old dark mansion. The next morning all hell breaks loose with a corpse found in the guest room and a bloodstained carving knife found under Uncle Pete’s pillow.

At the levers of the criminal justice mincing machine is Lt. Tragg’s brutish predecessor Sgt. Holcombe. He sensibly concludes that Uncle Pete is the culprit, in light of previous history of a sleep disorder, prolonged stress, and the carving knife incident. It’s up to Mason and his team to determine if Uncle Pete committed the murder at all and if he did, his culpability given he was sleepwalking during the commission of the crime.

The courtroom scene in the last third of the book is not too slow or too complicated.

In the early novels such as this 1936 mystery (the eighth of about 80), Mason is blunt and outspoken, not the gallant suave Mason of the Fifties. True to smirking, sarcastic pulp heroes, Mason is a hardboiled tough guy for the low-brows and a quick-witted professional for the high-brows. He smiles “fiendishly” and calls women “sister.” He expresses outrageous opinions, like advocating blackmail as a way for a woman to get her money back from a man who squeezed cash out of her by pretending to love her. A self-confident and bold Leo, Mason brusquely disbelieves Edna’s astrological analysis of Uncle Pete’s character.   

Typical of the style of pulp magazines, the writing is so concise as to be terse, with dialogue briskly moving the plot.  Gardner catered to the male readers of Black Mask with lots of action, surprises, wisecracks and banter, and good old American scorn for and resistance to authority. Joy in foiling The Man’s determination to put an innocent person in the gas chamber may be an expression of defiance sharpened by the Depression. Also pulpy is the rapidly sketched out parade of characters:  a hypochondriac, a gold digger, a crackpot inventor, and a New Age niece before woo-woo really took off during the Age of Aquarius.

It’s odd that though Gardner assumed readers craved action over characters, we loyal Mason fans like not only the page-turning narrative magic but also the interaction among Perry, Della, and Paul. 

John Putnam Thatcher #22

Right on the Money - Emma Lathen

Given the background of this mystery is a corporate merger in 1993, I wouldn’t blame a reader to label "not likely to read" a mystery set in a business environment as dead as the dodo. In fact the author makes the merger the focus of good old American drive, pride, optimism, but also the stuff of Greek drama, with fatal flaws bringing about tragedy.

In the 22^nd mystery starring John Putnam Thatcher, the banker and amateur detective has to get to the bottom of the murder of a loudmouth so ambitious for attention and promotions that an insurance adjustor expresses surprise that the victim made it as far as 32 years of age.

Aqua Supplies, Inc. (ASI) is too big, too bureaucratic, and too complacent to fire anybody and so not able to develop new countertop appliances that middle-class consumers might actually want to buy. So it fixes to merge – that is, gobble up whole without so much as a belch – with Ecker, a small family owned and operated designer and maker of nifty percolators and such. Since the disability retirement of the Ecker heir, its main assets are its inventive but ageing founder and its highly talented female CFO.

ASI assistant division manager Victor Hunnicut rolls his eyes at the kool-aid stand ways of Ecker. His skill set, he realizes, would not make him a candidate for running Ecker so he puts his ambition above the interests of employer and makes plans to quash the merger plans. He fears that other middle managers will leapfrog over him, thus cutting him off from chances to shine for his superiors. While giving Ecker a get-acquainted tour, the hotshot comes off a snot and intimates to Ken Nicholls that factions in both companies are duking it out over the merger plans. Ken Nicholls is a junior banking exec who’s often sent by hero John Putnam Thatcher to gather information.

After the tour, things start to get criminous. The quaint old mill that stored Ecker’s financial computers and files for research and development is torched by an arsonist. Go-getter Vic Hunnicut is murdered at the annual trade show.

Emma Lathen was the pen name of Mary Latsis (economic analyst) and Martha Hennissart (attorney). Both knew the worlds of business at all levels from clerks to CEOs, so they felt at home in a constantly changing business environment and the variety of personalities to be found in the private sector. Sure the business environment has changed in the last 35 years, but human nature has not. As old-school feminists, they have acerbic fun satirizing businessmen who are buoyed up by secretaries and female middle-managers but attribute their success to their own intelligence and diligence. This is hardly a phenomenon unknown in 2024.

Click on the title to see the review.

• Banking on Death (1961)
• A Place for Murder (1963)
• Accounting for Murder (1964); Silver Dagger Award
• Murder Makes the Wheels Go Round (1966)
• Death Shall Overcome (1966)
• Murder Against the Grain (1967); Gold Dagger Award
• A Stitch in Time (1968)
• Come to Dust (1968)
• When in Greece (1969); shortlisted for the Edgar Award
• Murder to Go (1969)
• Pick Up Sticks (1970)
• Ashes to Ashes (1971)
• The Longer the Thread (1971)
• Murder Without Icing (1972)
• Sweet and Low (1974)
• By Hook or by Crook (1975)
• Double, Double, Oil and Trouble (1978)
• Going for Gold (1981)
• Green Grow the Dollars (1982)
• Something in the Air (1988)
• East is East (1991)
• Right on the Money (1993)
• Brewing Up a Storm (1996)
• A Shark Out of Water (1997)

 

Reading Those Classics #15

Modernist Classic set in Japan. The writer was so revered in Japan that his portrait appeared on the ¥1000 bill from 1984 to 2007. He is best known for his serio-comic novels Botchan and I am a Cat, both observations of early 20^th century intellectuals, neurotic, aimless, and stuck from not adjusting to modernization during the Meiji era. Besides, fall is coming. In Japan, everybody from esoteric philosophers to pop culture mavens values 読書の秋 Dokusho no Aki. This expression means that autumn is the season for reading books. Come fall, people ought to read, think and reflect on the transience of life in order to savor daily life. Like Aurelius said, “In a little while you will have forgotten everything; in a little while everything will have forgotten you.”

The Three-Cornered World - Natsume Soseki

This novel, which is also known in English as The Grass Pillow (草枕 Kusamakura), has comic relief in which the narrator is being roughly shaved by a Tokyo barber who ended up in a country barbershop. But mainly the tone is quiet, somber, and a little stoned and dreamy. More a travel diary, the book takes the reader along the itinerary of the narrator, on a journey in search of himself. A young artist is a painter which inevitably means a poet as well. On turning thirty, he ventures down a narrow road into a small Japanese village. He feels the need to leave behind the impurity of desire and aversions, and to become an artist in the fullest sense.

You may feel the human realm is a difficult place, but there is surely no better world to live in. You will find another only by going to the nonhuman; and the nonhuman realm would surely be a far more difficult place to inhabit than the human.

So if this best of worlds proves a hard one for you, you must simply do your best to settle in and relax as you can, and make this short life of ours, if only briefly, an easier place in which to make your home. Herein lies the poet's true calling, the artist's vocation. We owe our humble gratitude to all practitioners of the arts, for they mellow the harshness of our human world and enrich the human heart.

Yes, a poem, a painting, can draw the sting of troubles from a troubled world and lay in its place a blessed realm before our grateful eyes.

Disguised as the story of an artist who travels to a mountain resort to look for subjects and meditate, it's an extended essay about mono no aware, the empathy and sensitivity to the ephemeral nature of life, the wistful sadness of its rapid passing, and the wisdom of savoring every single day. So, it is the perfect book for autumn as the leaves fall and plants, animals and people in a Northern place brace for another winter.

Soseki grants that Japanese artists do not have a monopoly on 'melancholy of things' as R.H. Blythe showed in Zen and English Literature and Oriental Classics. A reader may have reservations about detachment in art or the tendency of the artist to handle other people as mere source material for art or as the servants of artists who need to be fed and whose dishes have to be done by somebody. See The Children's Book and The Moon and Sixpence.

Delicate, magical, evocative, a little slow, this is a must-read for readers who feel ready for a short dip in the cement pond of Japanese aesthetics as typified by modern novels that are somehow not novels.

 

 

One of the Best Titles Ever

The Year of Living Dangerously - Christopher Koch

Prejudiced snot that I am, I don’t read novels whose characters are unsavory types like urban professionals, college professors, and newspaper reporters. I made an exception for this 1978 classic by an Australian writer.

It is set in Indonesia in the months running up to the September 30, 1965 riots which killed about 500,000 ethnic Chinese merchants and their families, suspected communists and anybody with whom a rioter had a beef. With adjectives that never go over the top, Koch evokes the punishing climates, both natural and political. 

The plot follows the ups and downs of Guy Hamilton, journalist, who's covering dictator Sukarno's Indonesia. Guy is assisted by Billy Kwan a Chinese-Australian cameraman. Both have issues about cultural identity. Guy is Singapore English but carries an Australian passport. He's yearning for lost empire. Passionately interested in westernization, Billy studies the politics of modernization. His daily battle is dealing with prejudice concerning his height and ethnic makeup. Guy, detached, figures that he can score career points working close to action but not get so deeply involved that politics will do him any damage. His career goals get mixed up in his love life with flawed Jill, an espiocrat in the British embassy.

It's a solid story that held my interest. The novel is narrated by Cook (Koch?) also known as Cookie. He is a western journalist too but is able to tell the story from a selfless point of view. He refers to Javanese puppet shows: his scenes are often backlit with dancing, fluid light and he sympathizes with Billy Kwan's rejection of egoistic striving. Cookie’s is the third way between Guy’s stance of incessant action to keep from thinking too much and competition and Kwan’s Zen-like extinguishing of desire.