The Ides of Perry Mason 90

Note. The is the second Perry Mason novel, published in 1933. The courtroom scene really is a rocker – it’s easy to see why the mystery reading public went crazy over Mason novels. H.R.F. Keating, critic and no mean crime novelist himself, included this mystery in his list-book, Crime & Mystery: The 100 Best Books.

The Case of the Sulky Girl – Erle Stanley Gardner

Sulky Frances Celene brings to Perry Mason's attention a problem that would make any young rich lively woman pout. Performing the helpless girl routine for which Mason doesn’t fall, Fran explains that after her father passed away, the terms of his will had it that Fran could marry anytime she wanted, as long as she contented herself with a lump-sum payment of $5,000 (about $120,000 in our 2025 dollars). But if she held off marrying until after she was 25 she would receive a million-dollar fortune (about $23 million smackeroonies).

Though Our Favorite Lawyer had cautioned her that he is not much interested in cases that involve wills, he perks up considerably at the mention of a million dollars. Perry Mason in the Dirty Thirties was tougher and shiftier than he was to be during the Eisenhower years. Hey, hard times and all, sometimes a guy has to get dubious – shonky, like the Australians say – to get the job done.

The will also stipulated that her large fortune is be managed by her uncle Edward Norton. In the event that Norton gives up the duty or is unable to carry out the duty, the entire fortune passes to Fran. Later the cops will put a bow on that motive.

Fran requests that Mason visit her Uncle Edward in order to convince him to find the wisdom and kindness in his flinty heart to grant his consent to her marrying a young man named Rob Gleason. Perry goes to Norton's mansion, only to find out that Norton is a scrupulously honest trustee that has actually grown the inheritance in the slough of the Depression.

However, Norton is so full of integrity, as inflexible as an adding machine, that it is no-can-do on Fran marrying Rob at the age of 23. The paragon of virtue remembers Fran being a wild teenager in the Roaring Twenties. Unc is determined to prevent Fran from losing a pile of simoleons to a fortune-hunter, or given it’s Southern California, a gambler or a blackmailer or a con-artist or a fortuneteller or a cult leader.

Sadly, virtue turns out to be less than its own reward. Not that I’m pardoning the killer or blaming the victim, mind, but a factor in the motive was Uncle Edward being an uncompromising model of rectitude. Perhaps if Unc had been less ready to call the cops when he thought a crime was going down, the killer would not have bashed in his skull with a walking stick. Wrapping up Fran’s motive with the cute bow, the nameless cops and Deputy DA Claude Drumm put Fran and Rob on trial for murder in the first degree.

Sure, we get the stock characters of the pulps: the shyster lawyer, the cynical newspaper man, the knuckle-walking cops, and the unethical DA that “loses” notes of an inconvenient interview. Also dating this are running boards, cuspidors, and cameras with flash lamps (I wonder how acrid magnesium flash powder smelled). Men wear hats and pince-nez on black ribbon.

But for my money the period touches are just incidental. They don’t make the setting quaint or distract from the narrative magic. Gardner assumed his readers would use their imagination to fill in descriptions of people, places, interiors, and weather. He correctly thought that readers wanted a fast-paced story in which a resourceful hero assisted an underdog to come out on top, their innocence exonerated, while The Authorities would hang* innocent people due to crooked thinking, misinterpretation of evidence and arrogant certainty they are doing the right thing.

 

*The last execution by hanging in The Golden State took place in Q on May 1, 1942, nine years after the release of this mystery.