Note: Vintage mysteries can often be read as snapshots of life as it really felt to the people living it. Astute readers will find things not mentioned even in popular histories. The background to the story reviewed this month is an example of Gardner unwittingly writing the first draft of the history of the home front during WWII. The backdrop of the war adds credibility and depth to this forgotten mystery.
The Case of the Smoking Chimney - Erle Stanley Gardner
In the early 1940s, the creator of Perry Mason wrote a pair of mysteries starring Gramps Wiggins. The first was The Case of the Turning Tide (1941) and this novel was the sequel. Gramps must have been psychic, able to anticipate the trend of the American retiree to live on the move in a trailer. Gramps is apt to show up in the driveway of his grand-daughter Milred’s house in a swanky neighborhood of a Californian small city. Milred is married to Frank Duryea, who’s the DA for Santa Delbarra County, which may be a pun on Santa Barbara.
Gardner opens the mystery by introducing the rum characters. Ralph Pressman, with sharp elbows in the oil business, is buying up leases in Santa Delbarra County. Due to the human tendency to assume the future will not be so terribly different from the present, the local farmers have figured that nobody was ever going to use the leases to extract oil. So when Pressman sinks a test well, they remember what happened to their ancestors and accordingly get nervous about being tricked and exploited and robbed of their land and livelihoods. Not above working with main-chancers as bad as Pressman, Hugh Sonders, the leader of the farmers, works with George Karper, another hardhearted opportunist in development and extraction.
Harvey Stanford is Pressman’s auditor. Young and so dumb he thinks he’s smart, he plays the casino game with a mean house edge: roulette. Inevitably he finds himself in debt to the tune of $17,000, about $300K in today’s money. His girlfriend is a “gifted amateur with commercial tendencies” Eva Raymond, who likes excitement too much for her own good (how she puts up with sitting at Harv’s side at the slow-paced roulette table is a poser; she sounds more like a gal for the craps table).
Pressman has a wife Sophie that is twenty years younger than him and feeling unloved because Pressman is cold, austere, undemonstrative, and dedicated to the pursuit of wealth and property. Pressman’s loyal secretary Jane Graven tries to hide a private eye’s report about Sophie’s cheating with young rich guy Pelly Baxter but Sophie is too ruthless for Jane and gets her mitts on the reports and the negatives of her and her Pelly doing stuff to make poor Jane blush.
Basically, the verisimilitude comes out of many believable characters having believable personal and professional agendas. Also feeling true to this scheming world is the business background of outside interests in the extraction business catching small-town folks unawares. Gardner was from a mining family and lawyered in small-town California so he was familiar with thorny legal and social issues connected with mining and oil drilling ventures.
As a character, Gramp Wiggins is as American as hot dogs in his frank manner, independent ways, humor, warmth, and friendliness. In his seventies, he’s a ball of energy, always into new enthusiasms. He’s friendly, talkative, sociable and milks information out of people in spite of their initial suspicion of his interest in the inevitable murder. Gramps treads warily, never exploiting his in-law relationship with Frank the DA.
But Frank has to be patient when Gramps horns in on the murder investigation by possibly fabricating evidence to protect somebody he likes and point Frank and the cops in the direction he thinks they should look. After all, at the next election half of the public will trash him for disloyalty if he puts a relative in jail. And the other half will trash him if he shows nepotism by not putting a relative in jail. Gardner had a good feeling for the political and social pressures small-town DA’s had to face. It’s also a change from the Mason novels to view the murder investigation from the DA/cop point of view.
In the Mason and Cool & Lam novels of the 1940s, Gardner, to my mind, was at the top of his game. But I thought without the familiar characters this would be mediocre. But this was way better than middling. The story, setting, and characterization are utterly plausible. The humor moves the story along and Gramps provide comic relief in funny dialogues. The third-person omniscient narrator causes us to hear conversations among persons of interest, handling each other with antsy mistrust and fearing that they are being set up to be the fall guy.
Gardner was careful not to date his novels with topical
references, but uncharacteristically, he dates this 1942 story by referring to
wartime austerities. In the shadow of tire rationing, Gramps offers his
grandson-in-law a ride to “save rubber.” To spit in the eye of rationing, foodie
Gardner gives suggestions for eating magnificently. No sugar? Hotcakes with
maple syrup. No flour or eggs? Strawberry shortcake. No meat? Make hash more
palatable with lots of garlic.
