Note: ESG was savvy at marketing. He avoided topical references so as not to date his novels and hurt sales. World War II, however, made such a huge impact on American society that he could hardly ignore its effect on the home front. The references to wartime austerities make this story more interesting.
The Case of the Drowsy Mosquito – Erle Stanley Gardner
His doc told Banning Clarke to take it easy on account of his cornflake heart. But Banning Clarke’s old prospecting pard Salty Bowers urges him to stop babying himself, that old prospectors go downhill in a jiffy if they don’t live under sun and stars and tramp all day looking for precious metals. So Banning Clarke takes to sleeping in his mansion's rock garden, which has been planted with cactus and saltbush.
His nervous-nellie cardiologist has insisted that nurse Velma Starler live there 24-7, ever ready with medication and cautions to take it easy. Also living in the big house are his in-laws the Bradissons (mother and son), the son’s mining broker Hayward Small, and his cook-housekeeper Nell Sims and her con-man husband.
Banning Clarke has retained ace lawyer Perry Mason to represent him in a fraud case. The plot thickens when the Bradissons and then Perry and his assistant Della Street are poisoned with arsenic. After the inevitable murder, an interesting legal question comes up: who is culpable for the killing if the victim is shot after ingesting a big bad dose of arsenic?
This is doubtless one of the best Masons I’ve read, and I’ve read a stack of them. To appeal to the kid in us, Gardner includes material about the legendary lost gold mines of California. The legal twists are so snaky that even Mason gets ahead of himself. Gardner trusted readers' intelligence enough to follow the complex legal reasoning of the opposing attorneys.
Gardner puts in more comic relief that usual, with PI Paul Drake posing as a drunken prospector and Nell Sims as a known Mrs. Malaprop who mangles proverbs such as “A stich in time saves a pound of cure.” While Gardner’s nature writing about the austere beauty of the desert is not exactly W.H. Hudson, it’s enjoyable to read his advocacy of the simple outdoors life and nature’s lessons of self-reliance and resilience.
Finally, as the novel was written in 1942, during WWII, the topical references give us post-moderns a sense of how the rationing of sugar and fresh produce, for example, influenced the daily behavior of ordinary people.
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