European Reading Challange #2

Professor Martens' Departure - Jaan Kross

The setting is a train trip from Pärnu, Estonia to St. Petersburg. The time is 1909, near the end of the road for Czarist Russia. Professor Martens, diplomat and expert in international law, is doing what thinking people do on long dull train trips: ruminating about personal and professional topics.

In complex yet accessible stream of consciousness, Martens remembers his humble beginnings, struggling student days in law school, and his success as a legal expert and writer of treaties. However, in their arrogance and stupidity about his Estonian origins, his superiors who are Russian aristocrats treat him like the hired help and claim his contributions as their own. He is even disdained when he persuades the West to bail out Russia with the loan and so he wonders about the merit of enabling a brutal, stupid regime to hold on to power.

In monologues addressed to his wife Kati, he confesses infidelities but asserts he always loved his wife. Reading the chapter about the love affair with an art student, I found it incredible how Jaan Kross could write in such detail from the protagonist’s point of view.

The narrator seems self-serving, hypocritical, conservative, and defensive, but overall he’s easy to spend 300 pages with, since his story is the story of many people in the 20th century, people who had to weigh the claims of their conscience and integrity with the service to the state, especially when the state is run by people who have the integrity of gangsters. It was a question especially hard for non-Russian people serving Mean Mother Russia.

Today is The Emperor's Birthday

天皇誕生日 Tennō Tanjōbi. The birthday of the reigning emperor has been a national holiday since 1868. Emperor Naruhito was born on this day in 1960. You know you’re getting up there when Japanese Emperors become younger than you are. Let’s light the candles despite this sobering thought by reading a non-fiction book about Japan.

Some Japanese Portraits - Donald Keene

Born in 1922, Keene was the perfect age to study Japanese and become an intelligence officer in the Pacific Theater during World War II. Postwar he received master’s degrees from Columbia and Cambridge and a doctorate from Columbia. He devoted his long career to studying and teaching Japanese literature.

This book is a collection of essays about Japanese poetry, plays, and fiction from the 15th to the 19th centuries. Originally written in Japanese for a weekly magazine, the articles on unjustly forgotten writers are engrossing, articulate and a delight to read. The only problem I had is that Keene assumes his readers are Japanese and thus know as a matter of course things like the modern name of Bingo Province (備後国 Bingo no kuni).

What's interesting is that Keene delivers incredible factoids. For instance, he says the first contemporary European novel translated into Japanese in 1879 was Bulwer-Lytton's novel Ernest Maltravers about which Thackeray fumed, “We cannot conceive an [author] to have failed more completely. He wishes to paint an amiable man and he succeeds in drawing a scoundrel. He says he will give us the likeness of a genius and it is only the picture of a humbug.”

It's so strange that this inept novel inspired the very first Japanese political novel in which a geisha named “Rights” takes a lover named “Popular Government in Japan” and her other boyfriend is named “Inspiring Instances of Statesmanship.” Probably sounds better with the original Chinese characters.

In conclusion, an excellent book for readers into the more obscure byways of Japanese literature.

Japanese Lit Challenge 18 #6

I read this book for the Japanese Literature Challenge 18.

After the Banquet – Yukio Mishima

The main character of this novel is Kazu Fukuzawa. She grew up during Japan’s early 20^th century when her native snow county was desperately impoverished.

Kazu herself beat the odds against her survival being born poor, female, and rural by sidestepping an early death due to malnutrition, infections, and injuries or wounds. She also avoided the occupational hazard of the water trade, shinjū  心中 suicide of two (or more, see Quicksand) individuals bound by love and unfortunate karma. Not so lucky were the men who went down in the world, pissed away their fortunes or did away with themselves all because of Kazu.

Along with an indomitable will, boundless energy, and a child-like honesty, Kazu has no illusions about herself, her customers, or ordinary people. She became the shrewd and street-wise owner-operator of a high-class Tokyo restaurant called the Setsugoan, where she entertains bigwigs in politics, government, and industry. Taking a daily stroll in her garden (which Mishima describes masterfully) keeps clean her moral compass, simple and practical as it is.

In her fifties in about Showa 35 (1960), Kazu is concerned about that old mortality. Not for the sake of creature comforts in old age (she’s set for those), but she worries about what’s in store for her in the afterlife, given those silly paramours doing away with themselves in her early career and given the torments of Buddhistic Hell. When she meets ex-diplomat Noguchi, she realizes how lonely she’s feeling and they fall in love like giddy teenagers. Kazu also figures being connected to an upright family will count for much come the Judgement Day. She wants to ensure that a Noguchi descendent will tend her tomb so that she doesn’t end up in Hamlet’s “little, little grave, an obscure grave.”

Noguchi and Kazu marry. Only to prove that while opposites will attract, they ought not marry each other, especially not in the flashbang of romantic love. An intellectual with rigid morals, tired and listless Noguchi is the worst kind of clueless male: the man who’s positive he’s got a good bead on things. On the other hand, Kazu remains a cauldron of activity, boiling over with initiative and practical sense. She supports her husband in his bid for the governorship of Tokyo by bankrolling and aggressively working in the campaign. She is supported by political professional Yamazaki, who is her link to party big wheels. Yamazaki also acts as a go-between assigned the task of balancing the opposite styles of the two spouses.

But despite Kazu's hefty expenditures of money, time and energy, the snake pit of politics proves too much even for her. Mishima satirizes political campaigning, noting that Kazu’s terrible speechifying on the hustings is still tolerated by average Japanese voters, who have an amused affection for “inept speakers.”  Calling Orange’s babbling and playacting to mind, Kazu’s transparent attempts to be “just folks” takes in no sensible adult, but voters still feel tender toward a suffering savior who’s willing to act the goat for them.

Mishima is great at description of sensory experience though sometimes the minute details of Kazu’s kimono colors and obi patterns went right over my head. But his eye for nature is up there with Hudson, Tomlinson, and Turgenev, awakening that old sense of wonder. His plotting is near perfect with pace and rhythm. His sense of comedy runs from gross to droll. And he can set a scene: incredible are the set pieces about the Omizutori (the water-drawing festival at Tōdaiji in Nara) and the ghastly rally when Kazu realizes that people are just staring at her as if they believed she were a fiend from hell.

He Killed for Love … And Loved to Kill!

Note: Gail Patrick’s film debut was in 1932, a scene in If I had a Million. After a couple of uncredited parts in 1933, she got a speaking role in this picture. Down the road, in 1938, Patrick landed the role for which we old movie buffs remember her, the mean sister Cornelia in My Man Godfrey. For good or ill, that part typed her as The Haughty One in many of the 60 roles she landed in the coming years, up to her last outing in Two in the Dark in 1948. Retirement bored her, so in 1957 Gail Patrick Jackson created her own full-time job by becoming the executive producer for the greatest courtroom drama TV series ever, Perry Mason. Raymond Burr was to have ups and downs with her in the coming years about workload and quality of scripts, but he reportedly said she was the soul of the series.

Murders in the Zoo
1933 / 65 minutes
Tagline: “DEATH SET FREE! Striking at a Madman's Bidding in a Zoo Full of Pleasure-Seekers!”
[internet archive]

In this inverted mystery, Lionel Atwill plays a philanthropist of contrasts. On the light side, he generously donates animals he captures to the Zoo. On the dark, he selfishly murders men who flirt with his wife Katheleen Burke. To cover his murder of his wife, he has the zoo shut down. Can the nice couple of Randolph Scott and Gail Patrick save the zoo and stop the killer?

But the experienced movie-goer knows trouble is brewing if top billing is Charles Ruggles. He’s a barrel of laughs as the comic relief: he’s probably most fondly remembered as the eccentric big-game hunter in Bringing Up Baby. But here as the lead, his comical voices and fantods are not enough to sustain scenes. And in fact his clowning seems out of place compared with Lionel Atwill’s frowning, glowering, strutting, and forcing on his wife unwanted embraces. But even as he reaches for evil and diabolical, for me, Atwill never manages to deliver the chilly threat that emanates from George Zucco. I realize mine is the minority opinion re Lionel Atwill.

With her marvelous almond eyes, Kathleen Burke has a persuasive scene in which she withdraws into herself, finally deciding to tell her brutal husband she’s outta here. Rarely smiling, she has that melancholy sensuality going for her. Though it’s a welcome change to see strapping Randolph Scott play a toxicologist (they didn’t make him wear glasses!), Scott produces a high-pitched yelp when sneak-attacked by Atwill.  It's comical, inadvertently. Scott and Gail Patrick’s parts, sadly, could have been played by anybody. But as for Gail Patrick’s life-saving injection, let’s have three cheers for women in the sciences and bio-technology, about the only bright spot in this mercifully short movie 

Groteskeries include a guy having his mouth sewn shut and a woman being tossed to the crocodiles, both crimes by the jealous Atwill. These Pre-Code shockers got the movie banned in Germany, Sweden, and Latvia and continue to gross us squeamish movie-goers out in 2025. Also, with zoos so controversial in our day, the distressed bears, chained with rings around their necks, give us post-moderns pause.

The Ides of Perry Mason 72

Note: In the ancient Roman calendar, the Kalends, Nones, and Ides were three special days that marked the beginning, middle, and end of a month's counting period. In hat tip to those Stoic Romans in late antiquity (may their wisdom inspire us), on the first, fifth or seventh, and the fifteen of every month, we will run an article about Erle Stanley Gardner's various contributions to the mystery genre. So many pieces are in the can, why not release more often? It's not like saving them accrues interest and I'm not exempt from the universal experience of our species. 

Three Perry Masons

Author Michael McDowell has published three Jack and Susan mysteries: Jack and Susan in 1913, Jack and Susan in 1933, and Jack and Susan in 1953. The titular pair are always 27 years old. They always keep a white shaggy dog. And Jack always ends up exonerating Susan when she finds herself accused of murder.

How could agelessness as artistic and marketing choice not bring to mind Our Favorite Lawyer? Perry Mason is always the same age even if the Mason novel is set in the era of depression, wartime, nervous prosperity, or tumultuous change. His sidekicks Paul Drake and Della Street and his nemeses Lt. Arthur Tragg and DA Hamilton Burger are ageless as well. In a 1986 interview, Raymond Burr said, “[Gardner] also feared that making Perry and Della a certain age would date the books, which always remained in print for years. He learned that lesson once when he used the running board of a car as a major plot element—and then cars stopped having running boards.”

A lifelong learner, Gardner did use changing law, forensics, technology, and cultural values in the Mason novels, but as Burr said above, he had the marketing intuition not to age his characters.

And that’s okay.

Despite this agelessness, Gardner’s most famous character changes as three eras come and go. From the early Thirties to the early Forties, the Perry Mason character is true to his pulp roots. Gardner was a professional writer down to his toes. As such, he was committed to give the pulp audience – mainly male – what it expected: non-stop action and a smart-ass hero.  Mason is cocky, outspoken or cagey depending on the situation. His silences resonate. He can speak “tonelessly.” He’s harsh in conversation with crooks and impudent with cops. He smiles “fiendishly” and calls women “sister.” He speeds and takes corners at 30 (not easy, I imagine, in giant cars with no power brakes or power steering). He punches bad guys. He throws shyster lawyers out by the seat of their pants. He uses skeleton keys for illegal entry. He pulls shenanigans with evidence.

From the early Forties to the mid-Fifties, determined to appeal to a mass audience in big circulation weekly magazines, Gardner smoothed Mason’s rough edges. Mason began speaking more temperately. He rarely slugged anybody. Gardner teased readers with a love interest between Della and Perry. Mason was less prone to resort to evidentiary hijinks. In public service digressions, Perry counseled readers to drive safely. In brief tangents, Mason takes the role of the life coach, helpfully suggesting that being on time for appointments establishes a professional image.

From the late Fifties to the mid-Sixties, the TV Mason began to influence the Mason of print. For many of us fans born in the Fifties, because we watched episodes in syndication before we read the books, Perry Mason is Raymond Burr when Burr was in his early 40s and at his most lissome in the late 1950s.

Although Burr lost 60 pounds to land the TV part, he steadily put a percentage of it back on as the nine years of the series went by. One disgruntled fan likened a stationary Burr to a refrigerator. On the other hand, the extra weight contributed to that imposing presence and gravitas that contribute to the caliber of Our Favorite Lawyer. As DeLillo had a character observe in White Noise, “I suggested there was an honesty inherent in bulkiness if it is just the right amount. People trust a certain amount of bulk in others.”

Burr’s Mason of the piercing eyes rarely smiled. He was grave, self-possessed, and ever polite. The only time he was rough was when he zeroed in on the wretched culprit quaking on the stand. “But you couldn't wait. You were tired of being poor. You were tired of playing the nice, clean-cut boy. And once you and Edna were married, you'd wind up with the money in your hands. Isn’t that so? Isn’t it?”

I’ve never taken to watching Burr in his late sixties in the Mason movies produced from 1985 to 1995. The fourth Perry Mason just doesn’t work for me. And not just due to the salt and pepper beard and looking nearly 300 pounds. The stories seemed as far-fetched as an episode of Columbo, not all too plausible like the original series’ plain illustrations of the consequences of letting fear, love, hate, lust, money, property, ambition, vanity, envy, shame, contempt, anger or sheer foolishness shove reason and caution aside.

Lots of people became lawyers because they were inspired by Perry Mason, but uncountable must be the fans who have taken him for a role model of integrity, rationality, resourcefulness, and professional markers like imperturbability and snazzy attire.

Japanese Lit Challenge 18 #5

I read this for the Japanese Literature Challenge 18. 

From Edward Seidensticker's obituary in the New York Times 8/31/07:

"Tanizaki wrote clear, rational sentences," Mr. Seidensticker wrote [in his autobiography Tokyo Central]. "I do not, certainly, wish to suggest that I disapprove of such sentences; but translating them is not very interesting. There was little I felt inclined to ask Tanizaki about."

 Not so with Kawabata. "Do you not, sensei, find this a rather impenetrable passage?" Mr. Seidensticker recalled asking him, ever so gently, during the translation of Snow Country.

 "He would dutifully scrutinize the passage, and answer: 'Yes,' " Mr. Seidensticker wrote. "Nothing more."

The Master of Go – Kawabata Yasunari (tr. Edward Seidensticker)

In the late Thirties, Kawabata was hired by the Mainichi newspaper group to cover a championship match between the master of Go, the elderly unwell Shusai, and the younger, lower-ranked Otake. Kawabata uses in this novel some excerpts from his reporting, but adds much fictionalizing, since for Japanese modernists the genre “shosetsu | novel” was all about experimentation with literary techniques.

The Go championship emerges as a great mirror reflecting conflicts between the generations, between tradition and modernity, between East and West, between stoical and expressive. Go, for master Shusai, is a competition in which the old and traditional people can wield their whimsical and arbitrary prerogatives, as they have done for literally centuries. It’s been so long since he lost he can’t imagine not being invincible. Otake does not see Go as a pure and ineffable art form that requires detachment from mundane cares and concerns. He believes in Western gimmicks such as logic and productivity and efficiency. He quibbles about process and tweaks rules to his advantage, because the more rules proliferate, the more ingenuity humans bring to bending them. The master feels and intuits. Otake thinks and schemes.

With the master’s defeat and subsequent death, magnificently rendered by Kawabata, traditional Japan passes from the scene, withering due to contact with the West. Like Kawabata’s other novels, this is an elegy. Seidensticker points out in the introduction that while Kawabata didn’t give much thought to wartime xenophobia and austerities, he didn’t think much of democracy and science either.

And reading it in 2025 the reader confronts the remote. A tournament for a board game being covered by a major national newspaper. The rarefied world of professional Go where fans notice in silent consensus both spectacular moves and outrageous gaffes. People born in the Meiji Era who are not only traditional but feudal, with disciple-students that live with the master’s family, like apprentices in the Tokugawa era.

About a lost, elusive world. We think we are getting a bead on how life is, but conditions change, we age, other people don't stay the same and in all this flux the old ways gradually fade from memory. Kinds of products vanish and so do kinds of people and the way they thought and acted.

Today is National Foundation Day

建国記念の日 Kenkoku Kinen no Hi. From 1872 to 1948, on February 11 the Japanese observed Kigen-setsu 紀元節, a holiday commemorating the day on which the legendary Emperor Jimmu is said by Nihon Shoki to have acceded the throne in 660 BCE. Due to such ultra-nationalistic associations, the modern form of the holiday was established in 1966 as a day to encourage a more contemporary sense of wholesome patriotism. Let’s celebrate by reading a nonfiction book about Japan.

Depression in Japan: Psychiatric Cures for a Society in Distress – Junko Kitanaka

In a world where young women catch Tourette’s Syndrome from TikTok influencers, it is not hard to accept the fact that elements in our culture shape our thinking about and experience of mental health and mental illness. Up to the 1990s, many Japanese people were unfamiliar with the word utsubyo, depression, and didn’t associate their “feeling down” with a clinical diagnosis of “depression” that might ever be applied to them. Medical anthropologist Kitanaka narrates how all that changed in Japan.

In the first part of this fascinating book, Dr. Kitanaka gives a history of the concept of utsubyo in Japan. In the 1700s, symptoms were explained away as caused by mental and physical laziness. Due to a young girl’s or dissipated man’s sluggish reluctance to do anything, their vital force of ki stagnated in the body. This condition was not seen in what us post-moderns could call medical terms. After all, the Buddha said life was full of suffering and what sane person would pathologize a fact? And poetry and prose were shot through with mono no aware, the sweet melancholy dwelling on the transience of all things. Furthermore, pre-modern Japanese didn’t see suicidal ideation as pathological either. Instead, in many cases they saw doing away with one’s self as a moral and social act of free will that preserved honor, atoned for wrong-doing, or cast blame on survivors to serve them right and fix their wagon but good.

Part 2 reports Kitanaka’s ethnographic research in the psychiatric department of a Japanese medical school circa the 2010’s. She observes the treatment of depression in a clinical setting and finds, oddly to my mind, that the psychiatrists resolutely avoid talking about “psychological” concepts with clients. Instead, the doctors prescribe meds and urge the patients to realize their blues and jitters come out of their sheer physical exhaustion brought on by overwork. If they just worked fewer hours, slept more, had better diets with less alcohol, and managed stress more effectively, they would feel more energetic and stronger and not feel so listless and not want to commit suicide anymore. Unbelievably, the docs saw between 30 and 60 patients a day. It boggles the mind.

Part 3 examines with the economic downturn of the 1990s and spreading knowledge about the symptoms of depression, by the year 2000, the Japanese were widely discussing depression and suicide as results of the stress and exhaustion of overwork. The web of course provided many listicles and quizzes so that people could self-diagnose.

The author discusses how depression in Japan became medicalized, shifting from being seen as a personal issue to a bio-social disease caused by work stress. The landmark Dentsū case in 2000, where an advertising agency admitted responsibility for an employee’s suicide due to overwork, marked a significant change in how such cases were viewed legally. The government and corporations became liable for workers’ suicides, prompting new policies to address mental health. Companies now monitor employees’ psychological well-being and offer resilience training, though taking sick leave remains stigmatized.

Pharmaceutical companies marketed SSRIs heavily, leading to a surge in diagnoses and prescriptions. However, the effectiveness of these medications was later questioned, and many patients did not improve, with some even experiencing worsened symptoms.

Despite the complex social science jargon, the book provides an intriguing exploration of cross-cultural psychiatry, medical anthropology, and Japanese studies. It has received multiple awards, including the American Anthropological Association’s Francis Hsu Prize in 2013.

Japanese Lit Challenge 18 #4

I read this for the Japanese Literature Challenge 18.

Kitchen – Banana Yoshimoto 

The narrator Mikage is an orphan raised by her grandmother. Mikage attends college. Before she died, Mikage’s grandmother sang the praises of a college-aged boy, Yuichi, who totes and lifts in the neighborhood flower shop. After granny died, Yuichi called Mikage and invited her to stay with his mother Eriko and him until Mikage felt better.

A heavy and bittersweet story unfolds quietly. Mikage and Yuichi both seem to be too alone for their age. They don’t seem to have friends they can talk to, so the death of a family member feels to them like being pushed to the edge of despair. In deep depression and anxiety due to grief, Mikage is rescued by Yuichi. Later Yuichi has to deal with a senseless sudden death, and Mikage helps him. The mutual support between the two characters is reassuring and full of hope.

The author matter-of-factly uses magic realism in terms of dreams. A good novice cook, Mikage works for a celebrity chef so the content about food is done, well, deliciously,  bringing to mind and tastebuds that other 1980s love letter to eating Tampopo. Another reference that plunged me into nostalgia was to okonomiyaki, literally “your favorite yaki,” rendered as “egg and vegetable pancakes.” In a cute climax, when she finds out that Yuichi is suffering at a retreat that serves only tofu dishes, she scales walls to deliver to him take-away katsudon.

One wonders if this novel is one written with university-aged readers as the target audience. The author deals with the theme of ` young people dealing with grief' in an unflinching way, maybe in a revealing way for young readers but maybe less than novel to older readers who have buried parents but also have had to say sudden goodbyes to friends and colleagues taken too soon in their forties and fifties.

The Nones of Perry Mason 71

Note: Buffs of classic Hollywood know that Raymond Burr played the murdering husband identified by apartment-bound James Stewart in Hitchcock’s Rear Window. But only hardcore readers who have somehow found their way to this blog know that before he landed the Perry Mason role in 1957 that was to be his ticket to immortality, Raymond Burr was the Prince of Noir.

Please Murder Me
1956 / 1:20
Tagline: “You Are Going to Commit Another Murder...”
[internet archive]

Raymond Burr unexpectedly takes the lead role as a good guy, trustworthy and warm, though a movie-goer has to grant everybody has their shortcomings, since he’s got to tell his fellow Marine and war buddy, “My brother, your wife and I are in love.” His battle companion ends up shot dead by the wife Angela Lansbury. During her trial criminal lawyer Burr argues self-defense.

But the wife’s innocence is called into question. Burr is persuasive as he gradually realizes he’s being played for a fool. As fine an actress as she is, Lansbury still can’t do much with an underwritten part; the lines don’t allow her to be as persuasive compared to what she conjured up for The Worst Mother in the World in The Manchurian Candidate.

This is an entertaining way to wile away 80 minutes on a cold winter’s evening. The gritty streets and the opening sequence of “preparing the gun” fulfill our noirish expectations. Oddly enough, the poor quality of the print adds to the movie watching experience. The monochrome murkiness gives a feeling that we are watching the struggles of wretches abandoned by their Creator in a corrupt world of deception.

As for the connection with the Perry Mason TV series, veteran actors are Robert Griffin (perp twice) and Denver Pyle (victim once, accused twice, perp thrice).

Japanese Lit Challenge 18 #3

I read this for the Japanese Literature Challenge 18.

Spring Snow - Yukio Mishima

Set in about 1913, obviously in Tokyo, in a refined milieu of idle aristocrats and hyperactive parvenues. This poetic and wonderful novel is a tragic story of young love between Kiyoaki and Satoko told partly from the point of Kiyoaki’s best school friend Honda. The two young men are decidedly different though they attend the same school for sons of the elite. Honda is studious and serious, most comfortable when books are within reach, while Kiyoaki is dominated by his raw emotions and Heian esteem for elegance. The difference between the two is emphasized throughout the novel, highlighting how their choices are influenced by a sense of ethics or a sense of melancholy.

Decidedly not a quick read, the background is a relatively obscure period, Japan during the Taisho era, i.e., the transition period between the Meiji determination to modernize and the Showa determination to eradicate the language and culture of Taiwan, Korea and Okinawa and transform East and Southeast Asia into a vast slave labor camp. Mishima describes the feelings of the characters in flowery metaphors, which, while attractive, drive the reader outside for a walk to escape the overpowering scents. The pace picks up in the last quarter – so much so that it becomes un-put-down-able - and ends with a ruefully sad, inevitable resolution.

With brilliant characterization, plotting, and pace, Mishima is ambitious in this novel. He inserts tiny essays on philosophy, both Western and Buddhistic. He depicts the reality of the characters and their transgressive love as charged with risk, hazard and tension, but always with a feeling of transience and melancholy.

He’s also a modernist in the way he challenges the reader with the main character. Very young, Kiyoaki is selfish and self-centered. He has an inferiority complex which pushes him to take everything immoderately, or in a twisted way, even the most neutral observations. He treats Satoko as badly as Richard Ellsworth Savage treats Texas idealist Anne Trent in 1919. And even when Kiyoaki evolves in the course of the novel, we readers can’t shake the feeling that everything he does is only for his own benefit, without worrying about the dire consequences to others.

Such is Mishima and his translator’s sureness of touch, though, the tone never feels grim or bleak or over the top. At the end of the novel in which there is no shortage of anxiety and death, the reader feels becalmed by the atmosphere of melancholy that spreads over the entire work. It’s almost as if even the strongest emotions and the most dramatic situations were filtered through the sense that all we have to do is wait a little time and we will all be nobody and nowhere, and all will be gone.

The Kalends of Perry Mason 70

Note: In the Roman calendar, the Kalends, Nones, and Ides were three days that marked the month's counting period. In a hat tip to those tough old Romans (may their example inspire our courage), on the first, fifth or seventh, and the fifteen of every month, I will run an article about Erle Stanley Gardner's contributions to the mystery genre (Perry Mason is mostly Late Stoic). Fact is, so many articles are in the can, I figure why not release more often? Saving them doesn't earn interest and it's not like I'm exempt from the universal experience of humankind.

Your friends may not help you much, but they can do you a lot of harm if you offend them.

In the classic TV series, now and then Mason and Pals visit a small California town, maybe a market town or mountain resort or a mining town past its halcyon days. Following the traditional noir stereotype, small towns are anything but quaint and cozy, with covetousness, profligacy, and anger seething beneath the surface, the folks a mix of nice, naughty, crafty, and prone to gossip, secrets, and felony.

Logan City: The Case of the Drowning Duck (October 12, 1957)

Scene after scene emphasizes how frickin’ hot Logan City is in the late summer. It would be, located in the desert east of L.A. near the Nevada border. No wonder our Woman With A Past, Lois Reed, looks blissful when she chug-a-lugs a Pabst from the can, while her sexy blouse and silk drawers hang to dry in the kitchenette of her motel room. Small-town cronyism has allowed an innocent man to be executed for murder eighteen years before this story. Then, at the behest of the village potentate, the cops and DA dutifully build a case against the innocent’s son on the flimsiest of motives and skimpiest of evidence.

Logan City: The Case of the Perjured Parrot (December 20, 1958)

In the past year since Drowning Duck, Logan City has miraculously grown a lake that looks suspiciously like Malibou Lake between Malibu and Agoura, CA. Thus, the flora makes no sense as desert flora and the squirrel Della tries to feed is not of the species that lives in the desert. Ecological boo-boos aside, this is a great episode. Joseph Kearns – Mr. Wilson on Dennis the Menace – plays a self-styled criminologist nervous that his imposter syndrome will be exposed by the city lawyer. To exonerate the innocent librarian, Perry calmly uses logic to blow up the circumstantial evidence submitted by the big fish in the small pond.

Piñon City: The Case of the Barefaced Witness (March 18, 1961)

Iris has grown up in the small town. You’d think she’d have friends that would stick by her when tongues wag and accusing fingers point at her for being in on an embezzling scheme. But no, the smarmy hypocrites kick her to the curb when the going gets rough. Since in a small town there’s no escaping one’s past, she has to leave for the big city with her reputation in tatters. And Iris’ Aunt Sarah is so scared of small-minded public opinion that she pays blackmail to keep a common law marriage secret. Sheesh, give me the alienation from society and self and an anonymous death in the city anytime.

Outcast: The Case of the Ominous Outcast (May 21, 1961)

The corrupt small-town setting and theme of the past haunting the present are about as noir as it gets. A bearded stranger shows up in town. You'd expect in 1960 in a hot dusty California village the beard would be enough to provoke the vigilance committee to ready the rope and drag the stranger to the old oak tree with the yellow ribbons. Worse, the stranger is the spit and image of a man that committed a terrible crime against the town 20 years before. Now the dear hearts and gentle people don’t know if the stranger is the son of the criminal nor do they care the stranger was only a toddler when the atrocity went down. The peasants go crazy anyway, taking the stranger for a fiend from the past that going to drag them to the searing hell their consciences know they richly deserve.

Placer Hill: The Case of the Lurid Letter (December 6, 1962)

I'm not a keen fan of the 1960s episodes whose relevance and preaching have not worn well. This episode, however, examines problems in high school education that have hardly gone away: bullying of teachers by students, teen sexuality and mental health, alcohol abuse among minors, unsafe school climate, hysterical parental involvement, and lack of respect for teachers among the public. Like in wealthy suburban counties today, in this small town the high school’s female teachers are subject to sexual harassment, sexual assault, and threats of violence from the boys whose impunity is coddled by parent-pleasing principals.  Perry Mason takes the moral high ground against small-town in-group favoritism and mobocracy, scolding the whole town in a public meeting in the climax. But the ending in which the victimized teacher makes nice-nice with the weak-brained and narrow-minded parent-victimizers is kind of sickening.

Burgess: The Case of the Reckless Rockhound (November 26, 1964)

An ex-business partner returns to a small mining town, waving around a contract that he claims makes him entitled to half the mine’s profits for the years he was away. He ends up murdered, his corpse deposited in a sluice for separating gold from gravel. It is a grisly, grotesque touch, unusual for TV at the time. The small-town aspect feels convincing due to the fine acting from the likes of Elisha Cook Jr. (The Maltese Falcon), Bruce Bennett (The Treasure of Sierra Madre), Audrey Totter (The Lady in the Lake) and Ted de Corsia (The Enforcer). They portray tough people who take for granted helping themselves means helping each other and circling the wagons when outsiders threaten their interests. It’s an episode that for once esteems the venerable small-town virtues of self-reliance blending with loyalty to one’s own, especially when one’s own are hardly saints.

Note: The green-highlighted title is from Country Town Sayings. Check 'em out for thems that are true, half true, and no longer true.