Perry Mason 131: Casting Cool & Lam

Note: In the noir-lite mysteries penned by Erle Stanley Gardner under the pseudonym A.A. Fair, the detective duo of Bertha Cool and Donald Lam is a study in delightful contradiction. Gardner, ever the courtroom trickster, flips the genre’s tropes. Bertha Cool is brash, overweight, and unapologetically vulgar - a bulldozer in dripping in diamonds. Donald Lam, her partner, is the anti-Mike Hammer: diminutive, cerebral, and empathetic. Casting these two from the golden age of Hollywood is no easy feat, but let’s give it the old studio try.

Donald Lam: The Underdog with a Law Degree

Lam is no trench-coated bruiser. He’s the little guy who wins the fight by knowing the law better than the authorities and the crooks. He’s clever, slippery, and always underestimated. So who could play him without turning him into a just a lucky wise-ass?

·         James Cagney: He’s got the size and the speed, and he could talk circles around a DA. But Cagney’s default setting is “ready to punch,” and Lam wins with brains, not fists. Verdict: Too much peppy pugnacity, not enough heft in the brains department.

·         Dick Powell: Post-songbird Powell gave us a credible Marlowe, and he’s got the sardonic deadpan down cold. But Lam’s intellect is scalpel-sharp, and his well-concealed emotions warm. Verdict: Close, but not quite cutting it.

·         William Powell: Too old? Nick Charles had Lam’s charm and smarts, but he also had a cocktail in hand and Nora on his arm. Lam’s world is grittier, less tuxedoed. Verdict: Too debonair, too charming.

·         Dana Andrews: Andrews brings the brooding intensity, but Lam isn’t haunted - he’s harried by clients and cops, bad guys and Bertha. He’s a man dodging punches and talks with the DA, not ghosts. Verdict: Too tragic, not enough hustle.

·         Alan Ladd: Physically perfect, and his performance in This Gun for Hire proves he can play underestimated. But Lam needs to talk fast and think faster. Ladd’s controlled insecurity might come off as self-doubt. Verdict: Right size, wrong temperature.

·         I admit I'm stuck - Gig Young? Jack Lemmon? Martin Milner?

Bertha Cool: The Bulldozer in Diamonds

Bertha Cool is a casting challenge Hollywood often fumbles on the one-yard line. She’s loud and large. She’s not comic relief; she may or may not have a heart buried somewhere under layers of sarcasm and cigarette smoke.

·         Marie Dressler: Dressler had the heft and the humor, but Bertha’s bite is sharper than Dressler’s maternal warmth. Verdict: Too cuddly for Cool.

·         Thelma Ritter: Ritter’s wisecracks are legendary, and she could sell Bertha’s street smarts. But Bertha needs to fill a room physically and vocally. Verdict: Too compact for the role.

·         Marjorie Main: Main could bulldoze with the best of them, and her Ma Kettle had the grit. But Bertha’s urban jungle isn’t Main’s backwoods. Verdict: A maybe.

·         Margaret Rutherford: Rutherford’s Miss Marple had the eccentricity, but Bertha’s not quaint - she’s caustic. Verdict: Too British, too genteel.

·         Lucille Ball: Ball had the brass and the timing, but Bertha’s vulgarity isn’t sitcom-ready. Could Lucy go full-on ferocious? Verdict: Tempting, but risky.

Perry Mason 130: Shame They Got Kilt

Note. On the classic TV series the Mason murder victim is usually a scamp doing crimes like blackmail, so detestable that we figure they needed killing, like they say in Texas. And we hope the killer gets the sentence meted out to cops and judges gone wrong.

Shame They Got Kilt

Killed in Error. Poor Flavia is mistakenly poisoned in place of her husband and his lover in The Case of the Madcap Modiste. One of the few on-screen killings in the show, the poisoning scene is uniquely gruesome, complete with death rattle. In The Case of the Sleepwalker's Niece, too accommodating for his own good, Uncle Phillip trades bedrooms with a dastard. And thinking it’s the dastard, the cold-blooded killer knifes Uncle Phillip in his sleep. That’ll learn would-be perps, as Mickey Rourke said in Body Heat (1981), “Any time you try a decent crime, you got fifty ways you're gonna fuck up. If you think of twenty-five of them, then you’re a genius - and you ain’t no genius.”

Harmless Geezer Buys the Farm. In The Case of the Sun Bather’s Diary, a nice guy who likes a little potation, George Ballard is uncle to the red-headed beauty of the title. He is murdered with a knife to the back for no motive that I can discern unless maybe it was robbery or to keep him silent or both. When his dog Sandy guards and whimpers over Uncle George’s corpse, it’s pitiful. Just as pitiful is the killing of another Uncle George in The Case of the Shoplifter's Shoe. He likes a drink so much that before he goes on a toot he mails his car keys to himself. He was killed to keep him silent and his niece goes all to pieces. Nobody was as adept at sobbing on cue as Margaret O’Brien. She used to ask directors “When I cry, do you want the tears to run all the way or shall I stop halfway down?”

Paragon Meets Unjust Deserts. In The Case of the Sulky Girl, sadly, virtue turns out to be less than its own reward. Not that I’m blaming the victim, mind, but a factor in the motive was Uncle Edward being an uncompromising model of rectitude. Perhaps if Uncle 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.

Commendable Motives of a Boss from Hell. A multi-million-dollar space project is six weeks behind schedule in The Case of the Angry Astronaut. James Coburn’s General Addison Brand is brought in to get things on track. Speaking in a hectoring voice, he screws up his belligerent face into a visage of dynamism and purpose.  If fulfilling his duty involves kicking ass and blasting complacencies, that’s the way it is going to be. Ironically, he is not murdered for doing his duty in an obsessed fashion. We feel the federal government will miss such a hard-charging can-do manager.

The Worst Case. In The Case of the Nine Dolls, a tyrannical oil baron repudiates a seven-year-old grand-daughter until he meets her. He then sees with his own eyes that she is the exact duplicate of her mother at that age. Naturally the joyful reunion calls for a change in the millionaire’s will in favor of the newly found member of the family. This amendment is not something certain interested parties will tolerate. They kill the old man out of sheer greed and cowardice. They are quite OK with the old man’s niece going the gas chamber in their place. That the heart-warming reunion provokes such a terrible crime is ironic and tragic, making this episode especially melancholy. But as disturbing is another scene: in Perry’s hotel room a mangled doll is left by a note saying, “This can happen to little girls too.” It’s one hell of an episode, certainly in my Top 3 Favorites.

Clearly, being an uncle is a risk factor in Perry Mason mysteries.

The Nones of William Talman: City that Never Sleeps

Note: Growing up in Detroit’s exclusive Indian Village, William Talman was exposed to the theater and acting when he was only about ten years old in the mid-Twenties in his father’s Players Club. Talman and his brothers attended the elite Cranbrook academy in Bloomfield Hills and joined the drama club. His brother said “Bill had the most brilliant mind in the family. He could read a page once, turn it over, and recite every word by heart.” This ability probably helped him digest all the legal mumbo-jumbo he needed in his role as the district attorney Hamilton Burger on the classic TV series Perry Mason.

City that Never Sleeps
1953 / 1:30
Tagline: “… from the Honky Tonks to the penthouses … the creeps, the hoods, the killers come out to war with the city!”
[internet archive]

Republic Pictures pulls a fast one with this moody little crime drama, opening on Chicago in foggy greys like it’s auditioning for noir status. Don’t be fooled, however, the film flirts with noir but never quite gets there. It’s more about the ache of frustrated ambition than overheated emotion and light through venetian blinds.

Everyone here wants out of their life. Policeman Johnny (Gig Young) dreams of fishing boats on the Pacific, but mostly he’s stuck delivering babies once a month and grinding through the job. His wife Kathy earns more than he does, which gnaws at his pride. Enter Sally (Mala Powers), a nightclub dancer who once aimed for ballet and now hoofs it with poodles. Her despair is so thick she’s considering a comedy act with a mime called The Mechanical Man - performance art as existential shouting into the abyss.

Hovering above is Penrod Biddel (Edward Arnold), a mob lawyer who collects people like stamps. He “rescues” Lydia (Marie Windsor) from a lunch counter and remakes her as a trophy wife. He “reforms” Hayes Stewart (William Talman), a pickpocket turned magician. Both protégés rebel, because living someone else’s script feels like slow death. That’s the film’s pulse: autonomy versus control.

Talman's Hayes slinks through boiler rooms and catwalks like a reptile, all cold audacity and sleight‑of‑hand menace. When the stakes spike, he turns vicious without blinking. His snarl - “I’ve stolen lots of things in my life but never someone’s wife” - lands like a smack. Later, blaming Marie Windsor for his downfall, he lies with chilling conviction.

The supporting cast does its job. Gig Young sells Johnny’s weary decency. Powers, cast against perky type, sometimes strains at hard‑boiled bitterness but nails the bewildered anger. Arnold brings sadistic polish; Windsor channels her inner Maria Ouspenskaya (her acting teacher) with gusto.

Visually, a few close‑ups scream early television, but the nightclub scenes hum with tension. Showgirls wear smiles like masks. The safe‑cracking sequence is tight as a drum, and the climactic chase along commuter tracks is pure Republic adrenaline.

This isn’t just a B‑movie time‑killer. It’s a sharp, stylish riff on identity and ambition, totally unexpected by this viewer at least. Watch it for Talman - he’s the real deal.

As for the connection with the classic TV series Perry Mason, Marie Windsor was great it all four of her appearances: TCOT Daring Decoy (cheated on wife), TCOT Madcap Modiste (victim killed in error), TCOT Tarnished Trademark (noble woman who suffers) and TCOT Wednesday Woman (monstrous perp).

Perry Mason 129: TCOT Grinning Gorilla

Note: Mason and Street’s romance? Always a non-starter - thanks to Della, the ultimate realist. Her logic? ‘If I marry him, I lose all the fun of speeding, committing B and E, and letting the air out of Paul Drake’ So, she’s kept it strictly professional … until now. Cut to Della, blushing like a teenager because her fortune cookie just declared, ‘You’re about to fall for someone in a snazzy suit.’ Cue Mason smirking, cue audience laughter.

The Case of the Grinning Gorilla - Erle Stanley Gardner

In 1952, Perry Mason acquires - mindfully - the diaries of Helen Cadmus. She is either dead or missing, either drowned or vanished, either tragic or up to something. The authorities, as usual, are plodding. Mason is not.

The diaries, bought for five dollars at auction, are immediately contested. A man named Nathan Fallon appears. He is a cousin, allegedly. He is also, unmistakably, a crook. His sponsor is Benjamin Addicks, a millionaire with interests in gorilla neurology. Addicks offers money. Mason declines. It is not about money. He doesn’t like being lied to and taken for a chump.

Paul Drake, who is Mason’s investigator and cultivates the bland facelessness of a politician afraid of his own opinions, discovers that Addicks is the poster boy for the eccentricity of the rich. The mansion is fortified. The gorillas are real. The science is speculative bordering on Boris Karloff in The Ape. Mason and Della Street, who is always present, visit the crazy old house. There is a confrontation. There is a gorilla. There is a murder.

Addicks is found dead. The weapon is sharp.

The accused is Josephine Kempton, a housekeeper with an aptitude for being economical with the truth. She withholds facts. She calls it discretion. Mason calls it usual for a client who is scared and not about to talk of intimate matters and bad choices to strangers.

The case feels pulpy, but not quite. It is noir, but not entirely. It is existential, in the way that only stories involving gorilla brains and mad scientist millionaires can be. Mason is nearly killed - twice. The city vibrates, quaking at the uncharacteristic violence. The truth is elusive and slightly absurd.

This is a weird Perry Mason novel. Unique in the canon.

The Kalends of William Talman: Two Gun Lady

Note: Let's take a break from Perry Goddamn Mason. No less a cultural arbiter than TV Guide acknowledged William Talman in this cheapo western as “the U.S. Marshal who lends a hand …” and remarked that Talman “efficiently takes care of a trio of heavies,” indicating he brought a steady, workmanlike energy to the role. Talman played the DA in the greatest courtroom drama in the history of broadcast television.

Two Gun Lady
1956 / 1:11
Tagline: “A two-timing petticoat built to break a man's heart!”
[internet archive]

This isn’t your standard shoot-’em-up with a square-jawed hero and a schoolmarm waiting in the wings. It’s a Western boiled down to gristle and bone, where men swagger like alpha roosters and then die like flies. The surprise is that it's not about men. It’s about Kate Masters, a woman who walks into this moral wasteland with pistols on her hips and vengeance in her veins. Forget the Annie Oakley tricks - those are just the window dressing. What matters is that Kate is the only one in this dried-up world who understands that she can choose personal vendetta or the law, that justice isn’t just a bullet to the brainpan.

The men are a sorry lot. Jud Ivers, a patriarch with a soul of soot, thinks violence will buy him peace. His son Ben is a walking pathology case - cruel to animals, crueler to women, and dumb enough to think a gun makes him a demi-god. Dan Corwin, the law with a grin, imagines he’s Kate’s savior, but he’s just another deluded pissant in pants. They all drink, brag, and brawl, as if noise could drown out the emptiness in their souls.

What makes this curio worth a look is its bleak honesty. The script may be thin and the sets cheaper than a dime-store cap-gun, but the theme cuts deep: men’s hearts are dark, and their ways are cruel. Into that darkness rides Kate - a woman forged in massacre, carrying her own brand of justice. When the smoke clears, the moral is clear: in a world of endless violence by angry lost men, retribution is more just when pursued legally.

And yes, William Talman shows up, doing the mixed-up guy archetype of James Dean and Monty Clift, but the other surprise is that the film flirts with revisionism. It’s grim, it’s fierce, and it dares to focus on a woman’s wrath in a genre that usually treats women like furniture, in a culture uncomfortable with the anger of women. 

For a Western from the Fifties, the claim that justice is grounded in moral choice, not gender roles, may be one reason it is worth an hour and change on a rainy afternoon in spring.

European Reading Challenge #3

I read this for the European Reading Challenge 2026.

Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State - Götz Aly

In this detailed analysis, historian Götz Aly explains how the Nazi regime established and maintained public support by providing material comfort to German citizens. This comfort was obtained through systematic plunder. The regime financed its social programs by looting occupied territories and confiscating assets, particularly from Jewish communities.

Aly traces the flow of money and goods to show how the Nazi state operated as a vast criminal enterprise. Its leaders orchestrated the plundering, but ordinary Germans benefited, shielded from war’s consequences by policies designed to maintain the approval of the masses. The regime’s redistribution of stolen wealth ensured widespread complicity.

The final section of Aly’s work focuses on “The Plunder of the Jews,” revealing how Jewish wealth was targeted to settle Nazi debts. This wasn’t limited to Germany: governments and individuals in Bulgaria, Greece, France, Romania, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia also profited from the confiscation of Jewish property. Aly cites studies like Holocaust of the Jews of Greece, historian Michael Molho’s account of the riches seized in Thessaloniki, which rivaled fictional treasures in their scale.

Ultimately, Aly argues that the Holocaust was enabled not just by ideology, but by economic incentives. Many across Europe materially benefited from the persecution and murder of Jewish people. It’s disturbing to think that Europeans may have lived with a German-dominated Europe - without any Jewish people - had the Nazis been less rigid, less greedy, less brutal, less thieving.

Perry Mason 128: The DA Calls It Murder

Note: For nine novels, Doug Selby is the DA Gardner threw into Madison County, California to slug it out with the sleaze, the hacks, the lawyers who think ethics means coercion should be used only when necessary. He’s human, yeah, but relentless, like justice on too much coffee from South Sulawesi.

The DA Calls It Murder – Erle Stanley Gardner

Doug Selby’s first outing as Madison County’s new district attorney starts with a bang - literally, a corpse in a hotel room. He and Sheriff Max Brandon, his election-day partner-in-crime-fighting, are still riding the high of victory when the call comes in. Madison City sits a hundred miles north of Hollywood, but the trouble Selby’s about to wade into has Tinseltown fingerprints all over it.

Max is the kind of straight-shooting lawman you’d expect to see in a pulp Western, loyal to the bone. Sylvia Martin, Selby’s girlfriend, is no shrinking violet either - smart, quick, and ready to dive into the mess. She’s the kind of woman who knows when to hold your hand and when to frog-march you toward the truth.

The dead man isn’t the only mystery. There’s an envelope fat with five grand, a lawsuit snarled around an estate, and a movie script so overwrought it’s Gardner doing parody - Lest Ye Be Judged. Toss in a poisoned German Shepherd (don’t worry, the dog pulls through) and a camera that’s cutting-edge for 1937, and you’ve got Gardner’s signature: a plot that twists and cool technology.

Hollywood glamour slinks into the picture in the form of Shirley Arden, a star with more brains than her studio gives her credit for. Like John O'Hara did with his shabby glamorous characters, Gardner lets her speak with a candor that slices through the hype. Heaven knows, Gardner liked his short digression but this monologue on fame and privacy is unique in the canon.

[Fans]'re like telegraph poles whizzing by when you're traveling on a Pullman train, if you know what I mean. They tell me things about themselves and I smile at them sympathetically and work my eyes; but all the time I'm thinking about my last income tax return, how long I'm apt to be working on this present picture, whether the director is going to listen to what I have to say about the way I should say "Farewell" to my lover or whether he's going to insist on doing it according to some standards which don't register with me. I give my fan my autograph and turn loose my best smile on him. I know I'm never going to see him again and he's in sort of a daze anyway which he's conjured up to wrap around me as an aura.

Selby nearly gets hypnotized by her - literally - and their verbal sparring has the smoky tension of an Ida Lupino - Ronald Colman scene.

The novel’s heartbeat, though, comes in a quiet room where Selby and Sylvia break the news to Mrs. Larrabie, the widow of the murdered man. Gardner drops the hard-boiled mask for a moment and shows us something rare: women carrying each other through grief. Sylvia steps up, comforting a stranger until her own composure cracks and in a twist of human grace, the widow consoles her. It’s a scene where Gardner tries to do something out of his lane. It works, I think, but I'm as easy-goingly uncritical a reader as you'll find anywhere.

The D.A. Calls It Murder is a puzzle box of subplots and clues. It is also Gardner doing something different, perhaps to test himself, peeling back the gloss of Hollywood and the grit of small-town realities to show us what ambition and compassion look like when the stakes are high.

Perry Mason 127: Clear & Present Risks

Abstract: This analysis examines the social, political, psychological, and emotional risks associated with excessive exposure to Perry Mason novels. While Erle Stanley Gardner’s legal fiction is widely regarded as harmless entertainment, prolonged immersion may generate subtle but cumulatively significant distortions in readers’ expectations about society, institutions, and the self.

Social Risks
From communication and sociological perspectives, habitual reading of Perry Mason novels may foster unrealistic expectations about interpersonal competence. Mason’s near-superhuman capacity to outwit authorities and evil-doers, detect deception and prevarication, and conduct incisive cross-examinations can encourage readers to overestimate the efficacy of fluent cleverness in everyday social interaction.

Naïve or impressionable Mason fans may also fail to apprehend the inescapable fact that over a prolonged period few enjoy the company of a garrulous know-all that asks too many questions. This may result in conversational grandiosity, inordinate suspicion of others’ motives, or an inflated belief that every disagreement can be “won” through rhetorical maneuvering rather than compromise. Over time, such tendencies risk social alienation, particularly in contexts - like the world of work - that reward collaboration over courtroom-style confrontation.

Political Risks
Politically, excessive Mason consumption may subtly reshape attitudes toward legal and civic institutions. The novels’ persistent depiction of weak-brained police, narrow-minded prosecutors, and unreliable eye-witness testimony can promote a skewed belief that our systems of criminal justice are obstacles made effective for justice and safe for the innocent only by heroic individual intervention. While healthy skepticism of authority is a democratic virtue, its exaggerated form may harden into bitter cynicism and avoidance of any civic engagement. Readers may come to believe that justice is best achieved not through collective norms or gradual institutional reform, but through the intervention of singularly brilliant agents – i.e. superheroes - operating in opposition to established legitimate authority.

Psychological Risks
Psychologically, prolonged exposure to Mason’s sense of empathy for his clients may contribute to cognitive distortions. Readers may develop what could be termed the “latent exculpatory fantasy,” the unhelpful belief that any personal error or ethical lapse could, under sympathetic scrutiny, be revealed as justified or misunderstood only by ill-willed observers such as police officers. This mindset risks weakening accountability and encouraging rationalization.

In extreme cases, habitual immersion in Perry Mason’s airtight resolutions can condition readers to expect definitive answers. When real life presents murky motives, conflicting alternatives, insoluble problems, or ethical gray zones, such readers may feel unease or impatience, having internalized the promise of the Perryverse that truth always emerges cleanly and conclusively, without uncertainty.

Emotional Risks
The Perry Mason novels quietly train readers - especially those prone to stress, discomfort, and anxiety, which is to say nearly everyone - to regard the police not as neutral civil servants but as fundamentally menacing forces. Cops are depicted as biased gatherers of circumstantial trivia, cavalier about constitutional rights, quick to presume guilt, eager to prime witnesses, and chronically inclined to read ordinary nervousness as evidence of deception. For readers burdened with secret shames - which, again, is most readers - this portrayal encourages a grim inference: because everyone is guilty of something, even the most cursory investigation can unearth a chargeable offense.

For such unhappy people, the mere sound of sirens signals impending exposure and humiliation; a routine traffic stop feels like the first move in a frame‑up. Perry Mason’s brilliance only intensifies this capiophobia. His virtuoso rescues imply that justice is not a normal outcome of the system but an extraordinary exception - possible only through luck or the dazzling intervention of a singular hero. In a world of overcharging, racial disparities, and the cognitive shortcuts humans apply unthinkingly, fairness, sense, and mercy appear absent by default. The novels thus whisper a chilling lesson: if you have a plausible motive, lack an airtight alibi, and fit the circumstantial evidence, cops and prosecutors do not particularly care whether you are innocent.

Conclusion
In moderation, the Perry Mason novels function as an efficient vehicle for consolation and reading pleasure. When consumed in excess, however, they risk cultivating distorted expectations about both law and life - encouraging readers to assume that reality ought to unfold with the coherence, moral certainty, and inevitability of a legal thriller, and to experience frustration or indignation when it does not.

More troublingly, the novels may foster a bleak fatalism: the conviction that, absent the intervention of an action figure like Perry Mason, no safeguard exists against a criminal justice system whose agents are routinely capricious and malevolent. In this view, justice is not an institutional norm but a contingent miracle, and the ordinary individual stands largely defenseless once the machinery of prosecution has been set in motion.

Perry Mason 126: TCOT Moth-Eaten Mink

Note: We true fans of the Perry Mason novels have always known Lt. Tragg as the honest cop who plays fair with Mason, while Sgt. Holcomb and D.A. Hamilton Burger are charter members of the “Burn Mason’s Briefs” club. In the case of this 1952 novel Tragg is never more likable and we even feel a pang of sympathy for him. He’s working overtime in a finale where he shows grit and attitude.

The Case of the Moth-Eaten Mink – Erle Stanley Gardner

More than a few Perry Mason mysteries kick off in restaurants. Mason and his confidential assistant, Della Street, are relaxing after a long day when trouble breaks up a quiet dinner.

Waitress Dixie Dayton vanishes mid-shift, leaving behind a paycheck and a shabby mink coat. Soon, someone tries to run her down, then another villain takes a shot at her. She lands in the hospital, only to disappear again.

Her jittery boss, Morris Alburg, hires Mason to find out why Dixie bolted. Mason inspects the mink and discovers a pawn ticket from a Seattle shop. The police learn Dixie pawned a diamond ring and, more ominously for her, a gun. Ballistics tie the weapon to the killing of a police officer. Dixie’s boyfriend, Thomas E. Sedgwick, becomes suspect number one. Unusually for a Mason novel, the body count rises: Dixie and Moe are linked to the murder of George Fayette, a hardcase with plenty of enemies. Mason, of course, takes Tom and Dixie on as clients.

This case brims with oddities. Two lipstick messages scrawled in a seedy hotel room. Mason serving as both defense counsel and prosecution witness. A Paul Drake operative with a shady streak. Two witnesses boasting exceptional memory skills. The solution withheld until the last page. Dixie Dayton revealed as an alias - her real name never disclosed, a mystery forever. 

Gardner’s formula is unmistakable: rapid tempo, dialogue-driven scenes, and faith that forensic science will overcome police blunders born of corner-cutting and mental shortcuts. Readers craving lush descriptions or deep character studies should look elsewhere. Gardner’s style was narrow, but within those limits, he was inventive at plotting and superb at setting a pace.

Perry Mason 125: Top of the Heap

Note: Published in 1952, this is the thirteenth of 29 novels starring the PI partnership of Bertha Cool and Donald Lam that were written by Erle Stanley Gardner under the pen name of A.A. Fair. Though not a fan of comparisons, I think that Fair’s Cool and Lam novels are smarter, sexier, wittier and just more entertaining than Gardner’s Perry Mason novels.

Top of the Heap – Erle Stanley Gardner writing as A.A. Fair

John Carver Billings II strode into Cool and Lam’s office doing his damnedest to seem confident.

He told a story as shaky as his hands. His date Maurine vanished after a party where Billings played escort. Slipped away with someone else. For most men, a bruised ego. For Billings, a big problem.

Because hours later, Gabby Garvanza - Maurine's dangerous boyfriend - was shot. Gabby is lying in a hospital bed, riddled with bullets, and the police are circling. Billings needs an alibi but fast.

Billings claims he spent the night with two other women. By morning, they were gone too. Three women missing. Coincidence - or is Fate teeing up John the Second?

What follows is classic Gardner in a case that starts simple and twists into a maze of lies and greed. Lam's PI partner Bertha Cool smells money. Three hundred dollars already paid in retainer, five hundred more promised. Simple job: find the girls, clear Billings. Lam sees the cracks, the details that don’t fit. And with his every step, the ground shifts. Mining assets, they call them. Lam knows better and follows his usual inclination not to tell anybody - not the reader; certainly not Bertha - what he suspects is afoot.

Top of the Heap exemplifies Gardner’s signature formula: murder as a side effect of scams and schemes gone sideways. Bertha Cool, a comic miser in the Mr. Krabs mold, clashes hilariously with Lam’s understated brilliance. His quiet finesse and patient listening make him irresistible to women - despite his short stature and Bertha’s stingy pay.

Hard Case Crime’s 2004 reissue was a masterstroke, rescuing a gem that proves Gardner’s Cool and Lam novels deserve a place beside the best of hardboiled fiction.

Lilias Folan

Note: March is Women’s History month. So I think it is appropriate to mark the passing of a wonderful soul whose spark went back to the big fire March 9, 2026, at the age of 90. Though I started yoga in the summer of 1992 with a Richard Hittleman videotape, it was Lilias on WNED-TV in the late 1990s that really kept me on the mat.

America's Best-known Yoga Teacher

In the middle Sixties, Lilias Folan seemingly had it all: a loving husband, two healthy little boys, two labbies, the big house in the chi-chi suburbs of the Big Apple. But she felt lousy, logy, and bored, smoked too much, and was overweight. Her PCP ordered her to take up an exercise program. Because golf and tennis didn’t excite her, she took a yoga class at the local YMCA.

Her decision was influenced by Jess Stearn’s 1965 book Yoga, Youth, and Reincarnation. This is still worth reading if you like memoirs by seekers. He’s skeptical, funny and not afraid of telling stories on himself. It’s also a tribute to his teacher Marcia Moore* whose equanimity his teasing never ruffled. Stearn testified that though he started as a skeptic, after practicing yoga and mindfulness meditation, his mental health improved and he was able to deal with demons from his past. For Lilias, this rang a bell, because like many seekers, she was an unloved child, a casualty of upper crust parents that were uninvolved in the lives of their children.

She loved yoga from the get-go. It made her feel wonderful. She quit smoking. She slept better. She also became more mindful, making friends with the observer self within that judges not. Her love of the spiritual side of life deepened. 

Lilias learned about watching the mind and getting a grip on the inner chatter. Focus on the body and breath. Quiet the mind down and deepen attention with breathing and asanas and observation. Become spacious. Be present, here, right now. This breath. And another. Who you are becomes deeper and deeper, more serene, more fair, kind, compassionate (if a bit detached).

Due to the dad's job transfer, the Folans moved to Cincinnati's Indian Hill in 1968. Lilias taught a local YWCA class. A yogine enjoyed her teaching and recommended Lilias to her producer-husband, who worked for Cincinnati's PBS station, WCET. Good-looking but not too, with her bright eyes and luminous smile, and that long braid, she was a natural for TV, making up for the spartan set and microphone in the floor that didn't always pick up what she said. 

Lilias, Yoga and You ran on PBS from 1972 until 1999 with 500 episodes in all. She introduced yoga to millions of viewers by meeting them where they already were: in their living rooms. At the time, yoga was often seen as weird or fringe, associated with bodybuilding, vegan diets, and nudist communes. Folan challenged those narrow assumptions.

She never saw it as a show starring Lilias Folan, but a class in which she was a teacher doing what she was put on earth to do:  share with people how they can get on the yoga bus. She was encouraged by the cards and letters grateful viewers sent her in thanks. The show covered its costs and made a little money for WCET so it got renewed for years until the crazes of "hot yoga" and "power yoga" made her hatha yoga seem outdated.

Her teaching style was warm, welcoming, practical, and relatable. She showed viewers that yoga was neither hippie-ish nor a religion, did not require special clothes or gear, and was not restricted to the young or flexible. Anyone could integrate it into their physical fitness routine. Her message was simple and radical for its time: yoga was for ordinary people, at any age, with any body shape, size or appearance.

Lilias offered more than postures. She included breathing, relaxation, reflection, and mindfulness, helping viewers understand yoga as something that could support their existing beliefs and daily lives, not replace them. Deeply influenced by her studies with Indian teachers and traditions such as Vedanta philosophy, Lilias translated complex ideas into plain language. She offered the benefits of yoga without asking anyone to retreat to an ashram or radically change their lifestyle.

Despite her national recognition, Lilias showed little interest in celebrity. She continued teaching classes and workshops well into later life, even when doctors advised her to slow down and not travel so much. Some modern yoga teachers have dismissed her work as outdated,** and her passing in March 2026 received little public acknowledgment.*** Yet through decades on public television, along with books and instructional videos, Lilias helped normalize yoga as a gentle, life-enhancing practice rooted in kindness and love. 

At the heart of Lilias’ philosophy was the idea that yoga is a personal, lifelong path toward emotional balance and self-understanding. She spoke of yoga as something that helped her “grow up,” not stay young, an important distinction in a culture that often equates all things healthy with youth. She modeled an approach to aging grounded in focus, observation, and presence.

For Lilias, yoga was inseparable from daily life. She saw it as a way to work honestly with emotions, develop patience, and cultivate compassion when life threw its inevitable curve balls. When she underwent chemotherapy for breast cancer in 2013, she shared how breathing and relaxation techniques helped her cope with chemo.

Teaching yoga, for Lilias, was both a service and a continuation of her own learning. She believed yoga helped people face stress, dissatisfaction, and temptation with greater steadiness. Her lasting legacy is not just that she popularized yoga, but that she made it accessible and deeply humane on and off the mat.

* Moore was an early ketamine enthusiast. Her end was terrible and sad.

** Twenty years ago, when a yoga teacher asked where I had got that, I answered "Lilias" and she rolled her eyes.

*** Even the TV station CET had de nada in the way of an obit on their blog, reminding us why decent people despise mass media.

The Ides of Charle Chan: In the Chinese Cat

Note: Hollywood script writers got wrong Charlie Chan referring to his own wife as “honorable wife.” You must never be so arrogant as to refer to your own family or your things with honorifics like “honorable.” Should your time machine whisk you back to traditional Japan, when talking to superiors, you say “my wife” with a humble word like “gusai” 愚妻 which means “my silly wife.” I don’t know but I would predict with confidence Chinese polite language would not be so different on this score.

Charlie Chan in the Chinese Cat
1944 / 1:06
Tagline: “"MUST CONFESS. HONORABLE SON...This Is My Most Baffling Case!"”
[WGN Christmas 1985]

The film opens with a striking premise: a wealthy San Francisco magnate is shot dead while pondering a chess problem. His body is discovered by his wife and stepdaughter. Neither are heartbroken, since his marriage was a financial transaction. Enter a publicity-hungry criminologist who publishes a sensational book all but accusing the widow of murder. Mortified, the daughter turns to Charlie Chan to clear her mother’s name. Chan hesitates to reopen the cold case but relents under pressure from his #3 son, Tommy, and a wager with the criminologist that will benefit Chinese war relief.

What’s a Charlie Chan film without comic relief that is now awkward in 2026? Fortunately, Benson Fong’s Tommy plays it straight. He’s brave and resilient, enduring a beating without betraying his father: “You can’t make a Chan talk.” His rapport with Mantan Moreland, as taxi driver Birmingham Brown, feels warm and genuine. Moreland, often cast as the easily frightened sidekick, adds nuance when he voices sharp complaints about being dragged into danger. Moreland's comic timing remains impeccable, as always.

Sidney Toler’s portrayal of Chan demands a caveat: the yellowface convention is dismaying. Yet, beyond that, Toler’s Chan is neither servile nor caricatured. He’s calm, courteous, and implacably logical. A professional with dry wit. His English is fluent, idiomatic, and laced with aphorisms. When Tommy boasts, “I’ve got a case that will knock your hat off,” Chan deadpans, “I need no assistance in taking off my hat.” To his son’s overeager help: “Your assistance is as welcome as water in a sinking ship.” He even dispenses fortune-cookie wisdom with sly ambiguity: “You should get married and have a large family. Once you have a large family all other troubles mean nothing.” These lines, delivered with understated authority, give Chan a distinctive voice.

The screenplay by George Callahan avoids formulaic shortcuts. Clues don’t fall from heaven; the mystery unfolds with genuine unpredictability. Director Phil Rosen bathes the story in early noir atmosphere - foggy streets, looming shadows - suggesting a debt to Robert Florey’s visual style. The climax in a funhouse of mirrors, skeletons, and wax figures is an eerie set piece coming off suspenseful and darkly comic, heightened by an effective score.

Viewed today, the film is a cultural artifact - baffling in its racial casting yet fascinating in its craft. It offers a layered experience: a solid whodunit, a glimpse of wartime Hollywood, and a study in how humor and heroism were portrayed on screen. For those willing to deal with what are now missteps, this Chan entry remains an atmospheric, engaging mystery with moments of genuine cinematic flair.

Perry Mason 124: Mara Maru

Note: Raymond Burr appeared in a couple dozen feature films between 1946 and 1957. He was typecast as the villain because his stoutness gave him a menacing presence. One wonders if he was parodying his own typecasting when he appeared in the 1955 comedy musical You're Never Too Young. Jerry Lewis plays a barber who is involved in Burr's theft of a diamond. So to get the diamond back grown-man Jerry masquerades as a 12-year-old child - totally something I'm going to piss away 1:42 I would never get back.

Mara Maru
1952 / 1:38
Tagline: “Tropical Treasure! Typhoon! and Temptation!”
[internet archive]

Gregory Mason (Errol Flynn), an American adrift in Manila, ekes out a living salvaging wrecks with his hard-drinking partner Andy Callahan (Richard Webb). Callahan’s drunken threats – “Someday I’m gonna kill you” - sound less like bar talk and more like prophecy. Stella Callahan (Ruth Roman, who is great) is unhappy in the horror of abroad, failing to adjust smoothly to expatriate life. Her beef with time zones - “It’s last night in New York!” - captures her dislocation perfectly.

When Callahan turns up dead, suspicion falls on Mason - until a greasy PI provides an alibi. Enter Brock Benedict (Raymond Burr), a suave treasure hunter dangling a fortune in sunken diamonds. Mason resists - until someone torches his boat.

This is a noir adventure movie made by Warner Brothers, which always cared about keeping it real, at least as to how things look. Though a movie-goer doesn’t feel the humidity of Manila, enjoyable are the camera angles of noir. Robert Burks - Hitchcock’s go-to cameraman - bathes Manila in noir shadows: gritty bars, peeling apartments, solemn churches. As for adventure, we get fires, foot chases and typhoons at sea. As the aftermath of Mason’s torched boat, we even get a death of a child scene, made more pathetic since as life ebbs out of the kid, his elder brother, breaking up, promises him a ride in the jeepney they would buy after they got rich.

The actors seem unconnected as if they are under-rehearsed. Flynn moves like a man whose charm has soured - sometimes vibrant, often just going through the motions. Raymond Burr, lethal in a white suit, radiates menace with mogul polish - murder as a business option. Roman steals scenes with a mix of allure and pragmatism, nailing the film’s thesis: ‘All you men are crazy about the same thing – money.”

As for the connection to the classic Perry Mason TV series, the heavy-handed detective is stout Dan Seymour, who played pushy guys in seven episodes. Richard Webb was in two shows, in one of which, my favorite TCOT Impetuous Imp, before he gets knocked off, he lays a film noir truism on Our Girl Bonnie Jones, “You're a very pretty girl, Diana, and pretty girls like pretty things. And pretty things cost money.” Webb played the well-deserving victim again as the obnoxious husband of Patricia Barry in TCOT Velvet Claws.

The Nones of Charle Chan: In Honolulu

Note: We take a break from Our Fave Lawyer to examine Sidney Toler’s debut as Charlie Chan. This B-movie has earned praise for warm family dynamics, fast pacing, and Toler’s engaging, lighter touch in the title role. Critics note the mystery often takes second fiddle to broad humor, exotic animals, and comic antics, offering dated stereotypes that make us post-moderns groan. But is has a nostalgic charm for hardcore readers who watched these movies when the family TV got only a half-dozen channels. 

Charlie Chan in Honolulu
1938 / 1:07
Tagline: “The New Chan Thriller you've been Waiting for!”
[internet archive]

Teenager Jimmy (Victor Sen Yung), the #2 Son of the famous Chinese detective, aspires to be a detective and so does his tween brother Tommy (Layne Tom Jr.). All of Charlie Chan’s thirteen kids, in fact, are positively American in their brainpower, ambition and high spirits.

In contrast, the movie-goer doubts the intelligence of a culprit who murders a courier in the confines a tramp freighter. But despite the fact that only six passengers were aboard, the victim receiving a payment of $300,000 in cash was shot dead. And the money goes missing.

Jimmy impersonates his father to get on the ship and investigate the murder-robbery. His brother Tommy tags along to get in on the action. Both boys forget their mission and their rivalry for their father’s attention and praise when they are scared brickless by the zoo animals that are lightly supervised by the comic relief zookeeper Al (Eddie Collins).

The studio spent money on the sets so all the well-lit sets are convincing. This is a lucky decision since most of the action occurs on the freighter, not at all in picturesque Honolulu like the beautiful 1931 Chan movie The Black Camel. Also convincing as a prop was Dr. Cardigan’s (George Zucco) apparatus for keeping alive the brain of executed master criminal Chang Ho-Pin.

Zucco, as always, totally convinces us movie-goers he is a mad psychiatrist as he uses calipers to measure heads for further study of the subject’s criminal tendencies. The cowardly zookeeper not being Mantan Moreland or Stepan Fetchit is surprising, making us relieved movie-goers wonder how the casting director missed that trick. Eddie Collins, a “funny mouth noises” kind of burlesque comedian, is most well-known for voicing Dopey in Snow White and Her Seven Boyfriends.

This outing was Sidney Toler’s first as the famous detective. As for mannerisms and physical quirks, Toler's presence is substantial in the obligatory white suit, with minimal gesturing, upright posture, and deliberate movements. He conveys the speaker is a non-native speaker of English by not replacing sounds (like d for th), but through rhythm of speech, by minimizing the ups and downs of American English. Toler also brings an amiable if sly sarcasm in word and facial expression to the character, as if the tough detective has no illusions about the world. Smilingly, he lets Jimmy and Tommy twist in the wind when their impersonation is revealed, as if to learn them a lesson in patience and restraint they won’t soon forget.

The Thirties expressions are cool “tough egg” for a person who is secretive, guarded, aloof, or reserved, “stir-bug’ for a person made crazy by incarceration and a “sneak-out” for a secret departure. Ditto for some of the inevitable proverbs with the stand-out being “When money talk, few are deaf.”

Recommended for the atmosphere and non-stop action.

Perry Mason 123: Capitalism in the Dock

Note: Erle Stanley Gardner advocated for justice, particularly for marginalized groups. He defended poor Chinese and Mexican immigrants early in his legal career. He founded the Court of Last Resort in the 1940s to help people who were wrongfully convicted or unable to get fair trials. These actions suggest a strong belief in individual rights and due process, for personal liberty, for accountability, against exploitation of the vulnerable, against abuse of state power. His series hero Perry Mason is the hero fighting the impunity of the rich, the corruption of the powerful, and the flaws of the criminal justice system.

Capitalism in the Dock: Perry Mason and the Price of Greed

Erle Stanley Gardner was no naïve cheerleader for capitalism. He probably believed it offered the widest berth for individual ambition, but his Perry Mason novels are clear minded examinations of the dark side of capitalism. Look beneath the roiling Mason plot and you’ll almost always find money as the shark stirring up the water. Stock manipulations, contested wills, insurance fraud, blackmail, embezzlement, and inheritances are Gardner’s leading players. Crimes come out of fear of loss: missing out on a money making opportunity or looking irrelevant or powerless or foolish due to a loss of status, etc.

Why this fixation on financial chicanery? Because Gardner took for granted the American nervous system. His stories pulse with the anxiety of a culture that worships wealth yet fears loss more than death, pretending money can buy happiness but knowing it can’t. Mason debuted in 1933, a year after the worst year of the Great Depression. Stressed readers knew fortunes could evaporate overnight, knew it was stupid to base happiness on what’s easily lost but did it anyway. Gardner’s villains are rarely Perry and Dick-type outcasts. They’re brokers, heirs, executives, respectable players who discover to their dismay that somebody smarter and more ruthless is always out there. Their desperation is familiar: the terror of losing money and status, the temptation to cut corners, the risk-taker’s faith that cleverness and luck will outrun accountability.

Enter Perry “Man of No Illusions” Mason, who accepts the system as it is. In the early novels, he barely stirs until the scent of big money wafts into his office. His genius lies in understanding the contradictions of a society that proclaims hard work and equal opportunity while enthroning profit as if there were no rules and admiring leaders with the ethics of buccaneers. The courtroom becomes Gardner’s platform, a stage where the social order, though shaken by the conspirators of unchecked capitalism is theatrically restored. The formula comforts. Yes, the system grinds and squeaks. Yes, it indulges the covetous. But a brilliant advocate can still make justice take up a sword against greedy malefactors.

Time passes, however. Today’s reader barely flinches. A forged will? A crooked stock deal? These seem crimes as bucolic as tractor joyrides and stealing crops beside the algorithmic labyrinth of modern financial skullduggery – social media grift, pushing addiction buttons for user data and ad revenue, crypto four-flushing, kleptocracies, scam industries that rely on human trafficking and modern slavery. Gardner’s financial crimes belong to an age when capitalism was personal, when fortunes hinged on smiles, handshakes, and signatures in blue ink. Not servers and signed PDFs.

Still, the novels endure among we happy few. They are morality plays for a society that believed in rules even as it mocked them. Given they no longer stoke outrage, they remain reminders of uncomfortable American truths.

The Kalends of Charlie Chan: At the Olympics

Note: Taking a break from Our Favorite Lawyer, this fast-moving  B‑movie mystery is set against real 1936 Berlin Olympic footage. It blends espionage, familial warmth, and old-school exoticism. Critics praise its pacing and period intrigue, yet deplore dated stereotypes and Warner Oland’s yellowface.  Entertaining but be prepared to make the usual allowances.

Charlie Chan at the Olympics
1937 / 1:11
Tagline: “Murderous Spies invade Olympic Games!”
[youtube]

This above-average Charlie Chan movie leans more toward espionage thriller than traditional whodunit. Set at a U.S. airbase near Honolulu, the plot revolves around foreign agents attempting to steal a device capable of remotely controlling aircraft. Their scheme escalates when they hijack a test plane and silence the pilot permanently.

Honolulu police enlist detective Charlie Chan (Werner Oland) to dismantle the spy ring. The pursuit spans continents: Lee Chan (#1 Son, played by Keye Luke) sails aboard the Manhattan liner, while Chan travels on the Zeppelin Hindenburg – the same airship that had a rendezvous with Destiny in New Jersey  in 1937. The film incorporates authentic footage from the Berlin Olympics, including Jesse Owens’ historic relay performance, though marred by the voice-over: “Look at that boy run!” The climax delivers genuine suspense and a satisfying reveal.

While the use of yellowface is rightly criticized today, Oland offers one of his stronger portrayals of Chan. The character’s defining trait - unflappable self-control - emerges through his courteous interactions with allies and adversaries alike. When Lee is kidnapped, Chan’s paternal concern feels authentic and moving.

The film opens ironically with Chan passing his annual physical with ease. In reality, Werner Oland died in 1938 at age 58, weakened by chronic alcoholism and COPD aggravated by smoking.

European Reading Challenge #2

I read this for the European Reading Challenge 2026.

The Fall - Albert Camus

This is a novel of confession, a monologue from a man who shouts into the abyss, not expecting any reply. Jean-Baptiste Clamence, once a respected Parisian lawyer, now wanders the bars of Amsterdam, recounting his descent with the clarity of one who has lost faith not only in others but in himself.

His crimes are various. A road rage incident, a woman poised to leap into the Seine - he did nothing. And in doing nothing, he became something else: not a coward, not a villain, but a watcher. A man who sees too clearly the absurd theater of daily life, the endless posing, the judgments, the masks. He is not defiant, not repentant. He is ironic. Detached. Silent. Not a monster but an imp, assenting to beliefs that don’t do him any good.

To mistake Clamence for Camus is to miss the point. The narrator is not the author’s mouthpiece but his warning. Clamence is what happens when one lives without authenticity, without responsibility. For us hardcore readers - especially those hardened by work and literature, tempted by postmodern games - Clamence is a cautionary figure. He reminds us that thoughts, words, and actions - inaction too - are not abstractions. They have weight. They leave marks.

The title The Fall is not merely personal. It is historical. It evokes the collapse of complacencies and illusions after the Great War and The Slump and the Second World War, the revelation of what humanity is capable of under pressure - internal, external, ideological, economic, social. Camus, in this slim novel, delivers philosophical ideas concisely.

Some critics call The Fall Camus’s greatest achievement. It is certainly his most intimate. In awarding him the Nobel Prize in 1957, the world recognized not just a writer, but a man who understood that the modern soul, stripped of its certainties, must still bear the challenge of freedom and the consequences of silence.

Japanese Literature Challenge 2026

I read this for the Japanese Literature Challenge 19.

A Man – Keiichiro Hirano

In this 2018 novel, the titular man lives under someone else's name and identity. Using that alias, he marries a divorced woman and leads a happy life in provincial Japan, but after he dies in a logging accident, his widow discovers he was using a false identity.

The story unfolds as the widow and her Tokyo lawyer explore the mystery of who her husband really was. The plot explores some deep questions, such as the adequacy of pessimism as a general guide to life; the formation of identity through ageing, trauma and memory; and the fear of death versus death’s inevitability making mundane life sweeter (or not: "Stop whatever you're doing for a moment and ask yourself: Am I afraid of death because I won't be able to do this anymore?” asks Marcus Aurelius).

Hirano’s lawyer hero is a middle-aged guy with existential anxiety. Hirano also refers to the music in the background, from Billy Preston in the 1970s to Japanese pop stars. These tendencies will make us hardcore readers call to mind Haruki Murakami. However, Hirano is more interior and philosophical, probing how identity is constructed and performed in a social milieu. Hirano’s people are seeking clarity about their own authenticity so they can fulfill their obligations to other people. Murakami's people are intentionally opaque, blank, or emotionally flattened and they drift rather than evolve.

This story seems highly promising, but it's actually a bit haphazard. The reveal unfolds too slowly and the flashbacks don't seem deftly structured. The pseudo-private detective lawyer solves the mystery not through investigative methods or clever deductive reasoning or a dramatic confession, but through sheer chance.

Nevertheless, it's a fairly enjoyable story. The central themes of identity and trauma are present throughout. Hirano makes heartening points about the solace of reading serious fiction. Hirano skillfully captures the way powerful emotions make themselves known in the body, which readers into mindfulness meditation will connect with. He provides informative digressions about how an event like the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011 challenges a sclerotic Japanese bureaucracy to make more difficult the lives of vulnerable people in need of help.

Perry Mason 122: TCOT Bigamous Spouse

Note: This 1961 novel (65^th  out of 86) first appeared in a version in The Saturday Evening Post - abridged because despite what the old folks say, back then patience was not a virtue. And once again, we have a brilliant time-shift twist where everyone nails the murder time… just kidding, they all get it spectacularly wrong for reasons that sound good, but are actually terrible, as Mason proves.

Perryism RE Values Formation & Negative Visualization: It’s more than being loyal to your clients. It’s being loyal to the basic principles of justice. And when you’re trying to do that, you have to take it on the chin once in a while - or at least be ready to.

The Case of the Bigamous Spouse - Erle Stanley Gardner

Gwynn Elston sells kiddie books door to door in the days before going on somebody’s porch would get you shot. One day she knocks on the door of Franklin Gillett. The man’s kid looks like Felting Grimes, husband of Nell - Gwynn’s best friend and housemate. Then she sees Gillett’s photo. Same face. Same guy? Gwynn goes home uneasy.

Felting starts asking questions about her day. Too many questions. Later, he hands her a drink that tastes wrong. Bitter. Gwynn figures she’s in trouble. She calls Perry Mason. Perry tells her to keep quiet and stay sharp 

Trouble doesn’t wait. Felting Grimes takes a bullet. Dead. Lt. Tragg and DA Burger smell blood and line Gwynn up as the shooter. Perry warns her: don’t talk. Talking never helps. But cops lie. They tell her she can go home if she spills. She spills. She’s kept in custody. Surprise.

Nell Grimes isn’t just a wife - she’s a fighter. In Gardner’s world, lots of women aren’t shrinking violets. Nell swings her heels at Perry in a car. Could take an eye out. Gwynn’s no pushover either. She’s a working girl who knows how to handle wolves and mashers. Gardner liked women tough.

The case drags Perry and Della Street up to a mountain town. Gardner slows down, sketches two locals: an undertaker with dry humor and a poacher who blushes around Della. Nice touch - Della feels her loyalty to Perry in a quiet moment. Gardner could do that in two lines.

Late career Gardner still moves time like a pro, but you start wondering: after all these years, was Gardner writing the novels with the idea they would be adapted into an episode of the TV show? This one was in fact an episode in Season 7.

I read it. Glad I did, for its plot and storytelling. Proud to be one of the last Gardner fans still above ground. This one’s fine.

  

Perry Mason 121: The Women of Cool & Lam

Note: This fan gets the feeling that Erle Stanley Gardner wrote the Perry Mason novels in order to meet the payroll but had fun writing the Cool & Lam books. The Cool & Lam novels have deeper characterization and more vivid scene setting. I don’t much like comparing so I will leave it by saying the Cool & Lam stories hinge on the comic interplay between oil Bertha and water Donald while Mason novels usually just rise to droll.

The Women of Cool & Lam

Bertha Cool smashes the china shop of the hard-boiled genre like Charles Ruggles in If I Had a Million. Private eye novels usually feature lean, tight-lipped men and sultry femme fatales. Bertha blows up these detective novel stereotypes: overweight, middle-aged, mercenary, inflexible, and indifferent to lady-like ways.  She dresses well and wears expensive jewelry to please herself, couldn’t care less about male-gazey expectations concerning deportment or docility.

She’s the boss, hiring disbarred lawyer Donald Lam as her underling and cutting deals with clients on her own terms. Bertha is well-aware she has a narrow skill set but she possesses supreme confidence in her own realism about the basic motives: love and hate, lust and money. Bertha doesn’t take men too seriously because they are too easy to manipulate and too liable to get carried away by petty emotions and stupid urges.

Gardner’s depictions of women with agency don’t stop with Bertha. His Cool & Lam women – clients and suspects – manipulate others to conceal their ambition. An heiress feigns helplessness while plotting like Machiavelli (Beware the Curves); a playgirl weds a codger for her financial security but fondly indulges his kicks in his twilight years (Some Women Won’t Wait); a savvy city woman is determined nothing and nobody will interfere with her freedom (Some Slips Don't Show). These independent women indirectly suggest nothing replaces having self-respect and thinking for one’s self and clear goals are useful to have in a society merciless to the ignorant and passive.

In a genre that usually puts men center stage, Gardner’s women invite readers to question the extent to which virtue and vice are anything more than conventions to deal with the economic realities that our culture imposes on all of us.

Perry Mason 120: Best O' The Sixties

Note: By the time the 1960s rolled around, Erle Stanley Gardner was no longer merely writing Perry Mason novels - he was presiding over a booming entertainment empire. The TV show needed scripts approved, the Cool & Lam books demanded their share of attention, and the “fiction factory” he’d built chugged along like a well-oiled if overworked locomotive. In this carnival of deadlines, banquets, fan clubs, and civic obligations, Gardner kept producing the Mason books with the efficiency of a man who normalized feeling sleep deprived. But that kind of relentless success has a cost: the bag of tricks and repetitions that begins to fray with overuse. But below are well worth reading.

Perry Mason in the Sixties: The Ones That Didn’t Limp

The Case of the Stepdaughter’s Secret (1963)
Set in the 1963 Los Angeles heat, this longer and bleaker late‑career entry opens when three estranged members of the Bancroft family separately approach Perry Mason after a blackmail note surfaces. Wealthy patriarch Harlow panics that his criminal past is exposed; daughter Rosena is being watched and manipulated; and wife Phyllis pays blackmailers in a futile attempt to maintain control. Mason counters with elaborate tactics that work, though the family remains fractured. The prose is sparse, the logic cool, and the emotional temperature low, yet a sharp reveal and Gardner’s stripped‑down style make the novel succeed despite its emotional austerity.

The Case of the Queenly Contestant (1967)
Mason advises poised buyer Ellen Adair, who fears her long‑hidden past will be exposed: a teenage pageant win, a vanished Hollywood trip, and, in the phrase of the day, an illegitimate child. Seeking private‑counsel guidance, she withholds key facts, prompting Mason to unravel a tangle involving a duplicitous lawyer, a vanished tycoon, blackmail, and a murdered nurse. While Mason, Della, and Drake feel flatter than in earlier novels and the supporting cast leans on stock types, the plot is tighter than many Sixties entries. It also explores evolving attitudes toward single mothers with more empathy than we would expect from a man born in the late Victorian era and raised in a rural area.

The Case of the Waylaid Wolf (1960)
This sturdier entry opens with Loring Lamont luring stenographer Arlene Ferris to a cabin, where his advances escalate toward attempted date rape. She escapes and consults Mason, determined to press charges despite the threat to her reputation. When Lamont is later found stabbed, police turn to her as the obvious suspect. Gardner explores witness misidentification, physical doubles, and the tension of Mason trusting a client whose honesty sometimes clouds the facts. As the 100th Perry Mason novel, it has more moral bite than expected, a sharper edge, and a justice‑minded energy that makes it one of the more vigorous books of the decade.

The Case of the Worried Waitress (1966)
A troubled waitress seeks Mason’s help after learning her miserly aunt hoards cash and fakes blindness. Before Mason can intervene, Kit is accused of robbery and assault, and corporate feuds complicate matters. The anxious young client is one of Gardner’s more fully human creations, her mix of fear, loyalty, and vulnerability giving the novel warmth Gardner usually did not do. While the mystery is simpler and less mechanical than Gardner’s trick-heavy designs, the mix of diners, boarding houses, and small‑time operators delivers a “working‑class Los Angeles” texture reminiscent of the early Cool and Lam novels. Emotion outweighs puzzle, but the book holds together through sincerity and momentum.

The Case of the Ice‑Cold Hands (1962)
One of the stronger, more atmospheric early‑Sixties entries, this 1962 novel reworks familiar Mason components - an unmissed victim, evasive client, and layers of deception - but remains pleasant, brisk reading. The racetrack betting milieu gives the story a vivid sense of place, benefiting from Gardner’s longstanding fondness for specialized subcultures. Gamblers, touts, and shady operators stand out more sharply than the interchangeable models and heiresses and earnest young suitors who populated some Sixties stories. Though not intricate, the plot is tight and the environment well textured, making this a highlight of the decade.

The Case of the Shapely Shadow (1960)
Secretary Janice Wainwright brings Mason a briefcase of cash tied to her boss’s blackmail mess. After Mason counts it, Janice leaves with the money and vanishes, followed soon by the boss himself being found killed. Janice is charged with murder, and Mason’s courtroom maneuvers unravel a layered puzzle featuring impersonation, doubles, and a mysterious look‑alike whose “shadow” becomes the book’s thematic spine. Unlike many sagging Sixties entries, this one moves briskly, its clues, testimony, and red herrings coming neatly into place. Stylish, twist‑heavy, and energized, it is one of the decade’s strongest 

The Case of the Duplicate Daughter (1960)
This fast, teasing cat‑and‑mouse mystery begins when Carter Gilman disappears, leaving behind blood, cash, and a note for Mason. Imposters, threats, fake identities, and blackmail follow, culminating in a discovered body and a puzzle revolving around a possibly duplicated daughter. The melodramatic identity ambiguity is handled with Gardner’s usual speed and clarity, and the pacing is more energetic than many Sixties entries, avoiding the mid‑book becalmed feeling. The clients have enough emotional weight to raise the stakes, and the tangled identities generate real heat. Mason lacks his usual near‑omniscient smoothness – refreshingly - needing maneuver, improvisation, and deduction to win. Some of the identity complications rely on coincidence, but the overall construction remains lively and engaging.

Perry Mason 119: The Middling Sixties

Note: By the late Fifties, Erle Stanley Gardner had become something of a cultural phenomenon: not just a bestselling author but a brand, a guarantee, a machine that had to keep producing Perry Mason on schedule. His audience wanted the same flavor every time, hot off the grill - no experimenting, no departures, no late-style eccentricities. And the publishers weren’t about to encourage risk in a franchise that paid everyone’s rent. The Mason novels under review come from that era, when Gardner was a master craftsman caught in the velvet chokehold of his own popularity, repeating the enchanter’s tricks with professional polish even as age and fatigue gently tugged at the cords of the Dictaphone.

Perry Mason in the Sixties: The Middling

The Case of the Bigamous Spouse (1961)
Gwynn Elston suspects her friend’s husband, Felting Grimes, is living a double life after noticing uncanny resemblances and surviving a possible poisoning. Mason advises caution, but Felting is soon shot dead, and Gwynn becomes the prime suspect after police trick her into talking. The bigamy hook snaps, the identity tangles have real energy, and - for once - Mason must think his way forward rather than glide in on his usual omniscient hunches. To my mild dismay, the standard 1961 décor is present: characters sturdy as manila folders and dialogue dictated while lending half an ear to Vin Scully calling the Dodgers. Yet compared to its weary Sixties neighbors, the novel showcases strong women, colorful side characters, and a brief but welcome flicker of the old Gardner magic.

The Case of the Reluctant Model (1962)
Millionaire art collector Otto Olney wants to sue critic Colin Durant for calling one of his paintings a fake. Mason advises against it but senses a deeper con involving Durant and reluctant model Maxine Lindsay. When Mason and Della Street discover a corpse in Maxine’s apartment - and Maxine missing - Tragg and Burger resume their long‑standing irritation with Mason’s talent for stumbling into bodies. The art‑world angle promises glamor but mostly delivers that unsettling Tiki mask on Mason’s office wall. Granted, the plot moves briskly, Mason actually does investigative labor rather than omnisciently materializing answers, and the characters - flat as pancakes - serve their purpose.

The Case of the Mischievous Doll (1963)
Dorrie Ambler arrives terrified, flashing an appendectomy scar as proof of identity. After gunshots at the airport, she’s arrested and unmasked as heiress Minerva Minden. The mysterious doll with hidden clues, switched identities, and tangled domestic backstories give the book a pulpy, slightly eccentric flavor - exactly the sort of Sixties oddity Gardner sometimes used to jolt Mason out of his signature unflappability. The premise intrigues even as the characters stay thin and the plotting mechanical. The investigation wanders with too many interviews and too little narrative zip, and the ending resolves everything abruptly enough to make readers suspect Gardner was writing this as a treatment for the TV script it was soon to become. Yet the prose stays clean and professional, even if inspiration is in short supply.

The Case of the Blonde Bonanza (1962)
Here Gardner gives us Perry Mason on a strict budget of plot, energy, and possibly sleep. The dieting‑resort premise promises fizzy fun, but the novel arrives thin - ironically the only thing in the story that does. Characters drift through like underpaid extras, the mystery holds together with the literary equivalent of staples. The silver linings: the pages turn, the prose hustles, and Mason performs his contractual quota of cleverness. Not dreadful - simply Gardner pressed for time and somehow getting the job done. Trollope wasn’t the only writer who viewed fiction as a job rather than a mystical calling.

The Case of the Phantom Fortune (1964)
This entry offers another Sixties amble through the Perryverse, where fortunes appear, disappear, and reappear with the solidity of a stage magician’s rabbit. The premise - mysterious inheritances, vanishing assets, rummy heirs - has potential, but Gardner handles it with the airy commitment of a man trying to finish so he can go fishing. The plot rambles amiably, characters shuffle in with the enthusiasm of tax auditors, and Mason solves matters simply by knowing more than the author bothers to reveal. Not truly bad, just exasperatingly thin: a phantom fortune indeed, flickering briefly before vanishing into deadline smoke. On the plus side, the novel reads fast - always Gardner’s indestructible superpower.

The Case of the Beautiful Beggar (1965)
This 1965 novel finds Gardner guiding Mason through another Sixties contraption involving an attractive young woman in peril. Daphne Shelby seeks help when her uncle’s bank account is drained and scheming relatives declare him incompetent in order to seize his assets. Mason battles the conservatorship and recovers funds through legal maneuvers, but the later murder and trial feel obligatory rather than inspired. The premise - reflecting aging Gardner’s sharp interest in elder exploitation - is compelling, but the plot shuffles where it should jog, the supporting cast could be swapped out like AA batteries, and the wrap‑up arrives with Gardner’s usual abruptness. The upside is that the pages flip, Mason gets his licks in, and the book passes painlessly - late Gardner’s minimal but reliable standard of excellence. Or, if you will, okayness

The Ides of Gail Patrick: The Madonna’s Secret

Note: This is the final review of a Gail Patrick movie. She retired from acting in 1948, spent a few years focusing on family life with her third husband, Thomas Cornwell Jackson, and their adopted children. Once they were settled, boredom set in - bridge with the LA ladies wasn’t cutting it. Thanks to Jackson’s ties to Erle Stanley Gardner, she co-founded Paisano Productions and launched the Perry Mason TV series. “I don’t have the soul of an actress,” she told TV Guide in 1962. “I have a dollar sign for a soul.” I won’t weigh in on soul-searching, but maybe Jackson, a lifelong Democrat, nudged the writers toward themes of women’s struggles, class friction, marginalized voices, and corruption. So I don’t think money was really at the top of her list of values.

The Madonna’s Secret
1946 / 1:19
[internet archive]

Consider a French painter (Francis Lederer) living in New York with his American mother (Leona Roberts). His apartment is oppressively quiet, and his mental state soaks in depression and anxiety. In Paris, he was acquitted of a model’s drowning, a fact that anchors subsequent judgments on the part of the cops and public opinion. When another model disappears and is found dead, a journalist recalls this sad narrative and feels alarm. The availability of a vivid past event drives his intuition: “He kills for inspiration.” This is psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s classic System 1 thinking  - fast, associative, and wrong.

The journalist enlists the victim’s sister (Ann Rutherford) to pose for the painter, hoping to confirm his hypothesis. This maneuver illustrates confirmation bias: evidence is sought to fit a story, not to test it. Yet, as the woman spends time with the painter, conversation - mere words - shifts her perception. Emotional reasoning overrides probabilistic thinking: “I like him; therefore, he cannot be guilty.” Kahneman would call this the affect heuristic – gut feelings as a substitute for facts.

Social dynamics add noise. A wealthy socialite (Gail Patrick), dismissive and shallow, competes for the painter’s attention. Her disappearance triggers another leap: the police, primed by two prior drownings, infer guilt from a torn scrap of clothing. This is anchoring in action - early information exerts disproportionate influence on present thinking. Intercultural cognition complicates matters further. When the American woman declares, “I fear death,” the painter responds with cool Gallic logic: “Why fear the inevitable?” Different priors, different frames.

The film becomes a study in cognitive errors:

·         Mind reading: The journalist imagines motives without evidence.

·         Overgeneralization: Two deaths become a causal pattern.

·         Emotional reasoning: Affection blinds judgment.

·         Cultural framing: Fear and fatalism collide.

Memorable scenes reinforce the tension. A nightclub act features a knife-throwing assistant who sings while blades fly - an example of risk normalized. In another, the painter dishevels the woman’s hair, a gesture oscillating between intimacy and menace. Touch, often coercive, signals gendered power asymmetries. The police, predictably, act with narrow-minded certainty - brutal, impatient, and armed to the teeth. In Kahneman’s terms, they trust intuition over analysis, substituting “What happened?” with “Who fits the story?” They’re just human beings, after all, and subject to the same mental shortcuts as anybody else.

This noir narrative is less about crime than cognition. It dramatizes how humans, under uncertainty, default to heuristics - anchoring, availability, affect - while ignoring alternative plausible hypotheses. The result is a cascade of errors, each psychologically plausible, all avoidable.

As for the connections to the classic Perry Mason TV series, the wonderful Geraldine Wall plays the journalist’s secretary who’s no-nonsense but funny. She was in a half-dozen PM episodes but her best outing was in TCOT Baited Hook, as that very rare species on the show, the perp with whom we movie-goers sympathize. She would’ve been a great Bertha Cool.

Will Wright played Jerry the Riverman in a brief scene. He was in three episodes as his character, the cantankerous coot, with the best performance as a partner in TCOT Petulant Partner. He looks like he’s going to blow a gasket when his long-time partner R.G. Armstrong comments on his ridiculous-for-his-age shirt, “You goin’ to a Sweet 16 party in that get-up?”

Other Gail Patrick Movies: Click on the title to go to the review
·         If I Had a Million
·         The Phantom Broadcast
·         The Murders in the Zoo
·         Death Takes a Holiday
·         The Crime of Helen Stanley
·         Murder at the Vanities
·         The Preview Murder Mystery
·         My Man Godrey
·         Murder by Pictures
·         Artists and Models
·         King of Alcatraz
·         Wives Under Suspicion
·         Disbarred
·         Quiet Please Murder