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

Perry Mason 118: The Meh Sixties

Note: Some artists, faced with age and success, reinvent themselves. Gardner took the other professional path - the Louis Armstrong path - giving audiences the tune exactly as they wanted it, right to the final chorus. In the 1960s he was juggling television script oversight, the Cool & Lam sideline, endless public appearances, and the demands of a “fiction factory” that never slept. Under that kind of pressure, the novels inevitably show a little wobble here, an overly familiar device there - a veteran performer leaning on a well-rehearsed routine. The novels reviewed in this and the next two entries were released in the Sixties - when Gardner’s groove was still steady, but you could hear some of the wear, skips, and crackles in the vinyl.

Bottom‑Shelf Perry Mason: The Meh 1960s

The Case of the Careless Cupid (1968)
A wealthy widow faces accusations of poisoning her first husband while hostile relatives scheme to block her forthcoming marriage. The early “romance‑agency” angle is brisk and promising, and Gardner still shows his knack for creating tangled motives with efficient strokes. But the cast feels generic - types rather than people - and the plot’s rhythm remains predictable even by Mason standards. The milieu is curiously pale: no vivid subculture, no textured backdrop, just a grey, anonymous narrative blank. Though mechanically written, the novel offers solid female characters, real‑world touches like pilot Pinky Brier, movement, and competent courtroom maneuvering. Pleasant enough, but unmistakably Sixties Gardner on an off day.

The Case of the Fabulous Fake (1969)
Diana Douglas steps in after her brother Edgar, suspected of skimming ten thousand dollars, is blackmailed and left comatose after a car crash. When the blackmailer turns up murdered with Edgar’s gun, Diana becomes the prime suspect. Hardcore fans may view this as late‑career Gardner doing an impression of his 1940s self - an earnest attempt that lands somewhere in an uncanny valley of shadows. The art‑fraud setup has attraction, but Gardner approaches it with the energy of a man checking boxes on a form. The plot trots along, though the coincidence‑heavy twists feel tied up with gloves on rather than deftly woven. Characters come in Who But W.B. Mason cardboard and the atmosphere is barely sketched in. To end on a note of nice: it’s shorter than usual and readable.

The Case of the Horrified Heirs (1964)
The novel opens with a jolt - Mason averting a frame‑up and briefly denting The Combine’s armor - but soon expands into forged wills, a decaying wealthy family, poison appearing like aspirin, and poor Virginia Baxter enduring one calamity after another. Momentum eventually fades into a tidy, flat confession ending, though the ride includes flashes of the taut, gritty Gardner of old. The inheritance intrigue encourages us novelty-seekers, but the plot wanders, the heirs blur together like spirit‑duplicator copies, and Mason solves half the case by near‑clairvoyance. The wrap‑up comes with Gardner’s customary thump. Moms and The Bride urge me to tell you at least it’s readable and moderately lively.

The Case of the Spurious Spinster (1961)
This is Sixties Gardner keeping plates spinning: not a triumph, not a wreck, just a serviceable cruise through familiar territory. It begins with a working girl in escalating trouble and an intriguing titular spinster, but soon the plot wanders into the usual thicket of dubious wills, sudden corpses, and suspects seemingly beamed over from earlier, better books. The long setup delays the murder; the rushed trial shortchanges Burger; and the finale is delivered with Gardner’s reliable wham-bang. Though it reads quickly enough, it’s for completists only.

The Case of the Daring Divorcee (1964)
The opening hook is lively in this 72nd Mason novel: Adelle Hastings’ stolen purse - containing $3,000 and a fired .38 - ties her to her estranged husband’s murder. But soon we hear grinding gears: a harried young woman in peril, marital scheming, and Mason trying to keep the whole mess from collapsing like an iffy soufflé. The plot meanders and the supporting cast might as well be marionettes. I’ll grant that it’s swift and sturdier than several of its 1960s neighbors. Highlights include Mason’s amusing lineup trick on Tragg and Gardner’s sharp jabs at prosecutorial overcharging - an issue that dogs us still today.

The Case of the Troubled Trustee (1965)
Investment counselor Kerry Dutton, trying to protect ladylove Desiree Ellis, mishandles client funds and sparks a proxy fight, scandal, and murder. The novel shows unmistakable late‑career fatigue: the setup groans, the plot moseys like a college student with their face in a phone, and the suspects seem re-animated from Gardner’s recycling bin. Mason performs his heroic heavy lifting, though his final reveal is a shade eccentric even for late‑period Gardner. On the positive side, it’s readable in that familiar way: the pages turn, the story never offends, and the whole enterprise manages – somehow - not to blow away utterly due to its own thinness (which proves hardcore readers like us can read anything).

The Case of the Amorous Aunt (1963)
The setup has spark: Linda Calhoun fears slick Montrose Dewitt is exploiting her wealthy Aunt Lorraine and seeks Mason’s help. The chase ends with Dewitt murdered in a desert motel and Lorraine entangled in her own lies. But the plot plods, the suspects could be swapped out without anyone noticing, and the mystery hides its best ideas beneath clutter. Only in the final stretch does Gardner revive some courtroom sharpness, though the story offers scant clues and an abrupt culprit. I can’t deny it moves, it entertains a little.

 

Perry Mason 117: The Fiction Factory

Note: This and the next three articles are about writer Erle Stanley Gardner and the 20 Perry Mason novels published in Gardner’s last decade, the Sixties.  What follows is, admittedly, an exercise in half-informed speculation. The evidence is real enough: publication dates, production schedules, the roar of celebrity machinery. But the causal chains we draw from them inevitably require more than a little imaginative soldering. In 2026 we hardcore readers and fans cannot peer into Erle Stanley Gardner’s skull circa 1959 or calculate the precise degree to which dictation, deadlines, or That Old Mortality influenced his work. At best, we can observe patterns and venture possibilities based on our own observations of people – like ourselves – who have left middle-age in the rear-view mirror but kept working full-time. Readers are thus invited to treat the following argument as an exploratory sketch rather than a verdict - an attempt to illuminate, not to criticize.

The Fiction Factory That Ate Its Maker

The whole business about Erle Stanley Gardner “declining” once he took to dictation has always felt like one of those cultural red herrings cooked up by romantics who imitate Neil Gaiman and his fountain pen or neuroscientists who argue different parts of the brain are harnessed to handle talking and typing. Dictation isn’t the villain. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Powers used voice recognition software to write The Echo Maker. Gardner himself had been whispering sweet mysteries into a Dictaphone since the early 1940s, and nobody was clutching pearls over TCOT Careless Kitten, TCOT Buried Clock, or TCOT Crooked Candle. Those were tight, bright, and swinging - no harm done by the machine.

No, the real kicker arrived with success - the kind that folds you into a velvet chokehold. By the late Fifties Gardner wasn’t just a writer; he was an institution, an entertainment enterprise. He was approving scripts for a hit television show, juggling Perry Mason novels like burning torches, moonlighting as A.A. Fair for Cool & Lam, and captaining his very own “fiction factory,” his own phrase that suggests equal parts success story and sweatshop. Add awards dinners, speaking engagements, fan luncheons, and whatever civic flattery and requests from charities a man of his fame had to endure - you begin to glimpse the mad circus. One wonders how many hours he spent asleep, or if he simply stood in a corner each night, eyes open, recharging like a noir‑tinted writing device.

In that crucible of busy celebrity in the US, dictation becomes a magnifying glass. Whatever tendencies a writer has - speed, shortcuts, vagueness, flatness - start glowing like uranium. And Gardner, no spring chicken by the 1960s, had the universal experience of our species – ageing and health scares - working against him. Things loosened. Repetition crept in. A little wobble in the joints of the plot. The kind of wobble that comes for us all, if we hang around long enough.

But the real trap wasn’t plot mechanics or style or Perry’s hunches; it was mythic. By the late Fifties Gardner was too big to fail - or to change. His readers, longtime and newcomers too, wanted Perry Mason delivered in the same reliable packaging, hot and fast, like a McLam-burger and McCool shake. His publishers certainly weren’t yearning for experimentation. Innovation becomes an indulgent sport when your livelihood – and that of others - depend on repeating the magic trick, not reinventing it. Ask Jerry Garcia’s bandmates who sweated when they saw Jerry enjoying non-Grateful Dead projects too much. 

Some writers manage Houdini‑level escapes - your Rex Stouts of the world, pulling late‑style miracles out of fedoras. Like Louis Armstrong, Gardner chose another path: the path of the consummate professional who knows the audience wants the tune played just so. And so he played it. Over and over. Until the groove, inevitably, wore thin.

The Nones of Gail Patrick: Quiet Please: Murder

Note: Gail Patrick moved beyond the ingenue parts when she played Cornelia the mean sister in My Man Godrey. After 60 or so parts as the haughty girl, retirement from acting drove her crazy. With her husband, Cornwell Jackson, she formed the production company behind the greatest courtroom TV series from 1957 to 1966. She was the soul of the series, said Raymond Burr. One wonders if it was due to Jackson that the writers so often returned to serious themes such as the struggle of women in a man’s world and the perils of emotional reasoning and all or nothing thinking.

Quiet Please: Murder
1942 / 1:10 minutes
Tagline: “Their Love Thrived on DANGER”
[internet archive]

There’s an entire genre of wartime home-front movies - no surprise, given the size of that war -cherished by fans of scrappy B-pictures and early noir. What makes this one worth your time isn’t the gunplay or the blackout relics of it time - it’s the dialogue. Someone in the writing department clearly had a library card and wasn’t afraid to use it. George Sanders tosses off references to Freud, Lombroso, and Havelock Ellis like cocktail chatter, which is not what you expect in a movie made on a shoestring. It’s almost as if the script assumes the audience has a few neurons to rub together. Imagine that.

The tone is pure alley-cat ethics: everyone’s on the grift, and patriotism is mostly a prop - except for Richard Denning, who manages to sound sincere while mooning over a librarian whose boyfriend is off fighting the war. There’s even a moment where Denning reads the title of You Can’t Do Business with Hitler. I once saw that book in a Prudenville antique store forty years ago and didn’t buy it. Still kicking myself.

The best thing here is the attitude: brisk, literate, and just cynical enough to feel like gritty noir. Gail Patrick plays her schemer role with icy confidence, while Sanders - always the dry martini of actors - reminds me of a lout’s idea of sophistication. The whole thing runs barely over an hour, but it crams in forgery, shootouts, and a surprise ending that feels true to wartime home-front logic.

Bottom line: worth watching. Not because it’s perfect, but because it’s smart enough to respect your intelligence while giving you a good time.

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

Perry Mason 116: FBI Girl

Note: Before the Perry Mason TV series, in almost all his movies Raymond Burr played The Bad Guy. With his heavyset stature, deep commanding voice and expressive eyes, he was the brightest light in nearly forgotten film noir outings such as Walk a Crooked Mile (1948), Borderline (1950), The Whip Hand (1951) and this movie in 1952.

FBI Girl
1952 / 1:14
Tagline: “Woman ... on a Man-hunt”
[internet archive]

Raymond Greenleaf has kept his skirts clean as Governor of Capitol City for 20 years. Now his politician’s peepers are fixed on the U.S. Senate - but a decades-old first-degree murder conviction under another name threatens to haunt him. He is concerned that a special investigative committee may have his fingerprints sent to the FBI and thus dash his dreams of joining that most prestigious gathering of solons in the world.

Greenleaf's Mr. Fix-It, Raymond Burr, in heartless mode, recalls Burt Lancaster’s ruthless flack in Sweet Smell of Success. Here, Burr suborns two FBI clerks to steal the governor’s fingerprint records - a move that triggers three murders and the death of his own assassin, a larger-than-life Southerner played by Alexander Pope.

As the heavy, Burr cuts a leaner figure this time - his suits sharp, his ethics nonexistent. When the Governor has feelings of remorse and anxiety, thinking it might be best to come clean, Burr tells him to buck up, determined not crash in flames with the governor. The spider in the middle of the web, his eyes look wary, remote, calculating. A victim of his plots warns Burr to stay away in the future and Burr smiles gently and says chillingly, “Well, that depends.”

Caesar Romero and George Brent play FBI men who relentlessly tumble to the fact that somebody big in Capitol City is behind the death of a clerk in their own fingerprint department. In police procedural style, they interview a variety of marchers in the human parade, including a flirty boozy landlady, an unctuous funeral director, and a wiseacre morgue attendant. In one odd scene Romero, sandwiched between two blondes (Jan Kayne and Joi Lansing) on the couch, has to suffer watching on TV the unfunny frolics of Peter Marshall (Hollywood Squares) and Tommy Noonan (sad sack Charlie Hatch in TCOT Crying Comedian).

The story races ahead, leaving key moments undercooked. The interrogation of the poker-obsessed squirt lacks bite, and the assassin’s hospital ledge scene never induces the vertigo it promises. The climax is the usual mix of car chase, helicopter, Audrey Totter wearing a wire, dark headlights, speeding motorboats and Tommy guns. The music is sometimes intrusive. The only lighting and shadow that look interesting is due to the noir standby of venetian blinds. The actors are skillful, of course, given their years of experience but not given a good script to work with.

Unusually for a B-noir, the script toys with ethics: FBI agents debate using a civilian (Audrey Totter, superb) as bait, while Brother Carl wrestles with selling out ideals for Burr’s Faustian bargain. Brother Carl (Tom Drake) feels like a shit because he is a lobbyist, just subverting integrity in government and taking the money, in contrast to his father who fought for angelic causes and died broke. Bro Carl is ripe pickings for satanic Burr’s inveigling him to just focus on externals like career, work duties, and a future happy life with smart sexy tough Audrey Totter.

As for the connection with the classic Perry Mason series, Tom Drake was a downtrodden writer in TCOT Jaded Joker and downtrodden son in TCOT Crying Cherub. Audrey Totter was great as an independent mine owner in noirish TCOT Reckless Rockhound. Morgue attendant Byron Foulger was in TCOT Polka Dot Pony and TCOT Mischievous Doll. Funeral Director O.Z. Whitehead was in TCOT Cowardly Lion.

The Kalends of Gail Patrick: Reno

Note: Gail Patrick was an American actress in the 1930s and 1940s and television producer from 1957 to 1966. She is best known for her movies roles as the mean sister My Man Godfrey and the other woman in My Favorite Wife. She was one of the few women in a powerful position when she was producing the popular television series Perry Mason.

 Reno
1939 / 73 minutes
Tagline: “He gambled on love as he gambled on life---and lost!”
[internet archive]

Gail Patrick plays a nice gal, though a bit headlong when she hustles Richard Dix to the altar in early 1900s Nevada. Dix is one of those granite-faced fellows - think Gary Cooper without the light touch - slow to catch on when it comes to other people’s feelings. So, our smart country woman grabs the reins. 

Dix and Patrick convince me they love each other and their toddler. But, as men do, he buries himself in work and forgets the family needs him in the flesh. His job? He’s the lawyer who made Reno the divorce capital for well-heeled women tired of their husbands. Nevada’s lenient laws were a gold mine for him. Hollywood’s Production Code, however, insists divorce is shameful, so the film ladles on moral disapproval like gravy at Thanksgiving.

Is it melodrama? Sure, but not the kind that makes me roll my eyes. I’m a sucker for earnest hokum if it’s not slathered on with a trowel. Dix can do that soulful stare that says, “If the moon’s right, I might feel something.” Patrick suggests depth without drowning in sentiment. Dialogue? Serviceable. No purple prose here.

The script, alas, skimps on motivation. Why does Patrick fall for Dix after five minutes, other than that’s how they roll in Hollywood? He’s no dynamo in brains or ambition. And when she leaves him - why? Yes, he dines with rich, flighty clients who puff up his ego, but he never strays. If he wobbled near Astrid Allwyn, I’d understand whole-heartedly. He doesn’t.

Meanwhile, the movie moonlights as a Reno history lesson: boomtown, bust, rebirth as divorce mecca. Treat it as gospel and you’re a ninny, but I didn’t mind the flashbacks. The hokey saga stuff is offset by Anita Louise as the loyal daughter and Hobart Cavanaugh as the faithful sidekick mourning Dix’s lost soul.

Bottom line: It’s glossy soap with a dash of social commentary and a whiff of historical pretension. I bought the romance, shrugged at the logic, and enjoyed the ride. 

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
 

European Reading Challenge #1

I read this for the European Reading Challenge 2026.

Eastern Approaches - Fitzroy Maclean

To read Eastern Approaches is to be swept into the vortex of the 20th century’s most turbulent theatres - Moscow, the Western Desert, and the mountains of Bosnia - by a narrator who combines the composure of a diplomat with the audacity of a commando.

Fitzroy Maclean, a young British envoy with a taste for the forbidden, begins his odyssey in Stalin’s Moscow, where in the spring of 1937, the air is thick with suspicion and the streets cower in silent terror of Stalin’s bloody purges. Assigned to the embassy, he slips the leash of officialdom and in the autumn ventures into Soviet Central Asia, a land of minarets and mirages, where commissars frown and peasants whisper. His accounts from Samarkand are not those of a tourist, but of a witness - one who sees through the Potemkin facades to the machinery of repression beneath.

Maclean’s reportage of the 1937 Moscow show trials is chilling in its clarity. Here, the Old Bolsheviks - Bukharin among them - confess to crimes they did not commit, in a masquerade of the absurd that Orwell and Koestler would later echo. It is a portrait of gangsters devouring democratic socialists, and Maclean captures it with the precision of a man who knows he is watching history as nightmare.

From the snows of Russia, the narrative shifts to the sands of North Africa at the end of 1942. As a soldier in the Special Air Service, Maclean trades his diplomatic briefcase for explosives, executing raids behind enemy lines with a flair almost stereotypical of English and Scots doggedness. His account of the Benghazi raid is a narrative of controlled chaos, and his capture of a pro-Nazi Iranian general reads like a scene from a John Buchan novel.

But it is in Yugoslavia – Bosnia - that Maclean’s story reaches its crescendo in the late summer of 1943. Parachuted into the mountains by Churchill’s command, he becomes Britain’s man with Tito - a liaison, a strategist, and, at times, a partisan himself. The Yugoslav resistance, fierce and fractious, is rendered with nuance and admiration. Maclean’s mission was to assess and assist, but he also observed, with the eye of a writer and the conscience of a believer in democracy.

Eastern Approaches is not merely a memoir; it is a testament to the strange glamour of peril and the enduring value of bearing witness. For hardcore readers drawn to the shadows of totalitarianism, the dust of desert warfare, and the fire of resistance, this is essential reading.

Perry Mason 115: TCOT Cautious Coquette

Note: Break out the thinking caps, kids - Gardner cranks complexity up to DefCon 5. You’ll either love the brain-bending or throw the book across the room.

The Case of the Cautious Coquette – Erle Stanley Gardner

Mike Grost, tireless cataloger of detective fiction, observes that Gardner possessed “seemingly inexhaustible ability to generate complex plots.” TCOT Cautious Coquette, Mason’s thirty-fourth outing from 1949, is a case in point. Gardner’s ingenuity here is not merely technical; it reflects a worldview in which contingency rules so your practical wisdom - your mother-wit - had better be sharp.

Perry Mason, personal injury lawyer. Sounds not only wrong but like you got a hair in your mouth, doesn’t it? Eee-yew. Like Celine Dion singing Gimme a Pigfoot and a Bottle of Beer.  But here he is, chasing a hit-and-run for a college kid with a busted hip and a mother who’s got nothing but grief and a mortgage. Mason’s usual gig is saving the innocent from the criminal justice meat grinder, so why not take on Big Insurance?

The plan is simple: find the driver, squeeze the insurer, collect the check. Mason runs an ad, and simplicity is trumped by contingency. Two drivers show up, two cars, two settlements. Then a chauffeur named Hartwell L. Pitkin turns up dead in a garage, and the garage belongs to Lucille Barton - a woman who wants Mason for an alimony case. He said no. He doesn’t do family law - too much bad behavior bad actors can't help. He does criminal defense.

Lucille didn’t call the cops like Mason told her. A neighbor saw her, maybe saw Mason, and now the cops want answers. Mason gives them attorney-client privilege instead. It’s legal, it’s clever, and it’s the reason he’s stuck with a client he doesn’t trust. Lucille’s beautiful, cunning, and about as reliable as sarcasm.

Enter Lt. Tragg, homicide detective, smart enough to know Sgt. Holcomb - his rival - is a bull in a china shop. Holcomb wants headlines, Mason wants daylight, and Tragg wants to keep his job. So Mason and Tragg team up, sort of. Mason feeds Tragg a tip, then makes Holcomb look like a fool in court. There’s even a car chase. Yes, a car chase in a Perry Mason story. Gardner must’ve been feeling frolics were in order.

The plot’s a pretzel. Gardner builds it with his usual tricks - false leads, courtroom fireworks, and names that sound like they came from a Dickens fan club. Willard Allison Barton? Roscoe R. Hansom? Really?

Language? Well, let’s just say “well-upholstered woman” isn’t aging like fine wine. But the bones of the thing hold up. For the faithful, it’s Gardner in full convoluted mode. For newcomers, it’s a crash course in a world where motives collide, ethics bend and gaaaw-lee those clients sure are economical with the truth.

Perry Mason 114: Novels versus TeeVee

Note: From Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, "The Combine" is a term Chief Bromden uses in his "delusions" to represent a vast, oppressive, and mechanical force that controls society, with the psychiatric hospital acting as a "factory" to "fix" people into conformist, machine-like workers. Chief Bromden, a tall Native American patient who pretends to be deaf and mute, sees Nurse Ratched and the orderlies as agents of The Combine.

Perry Mason: Novels versus TeeVee

Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason novels are precision machines, engineered to deliver models of legal suspense with the efficiency of a pulp assembly line. Each begins with a client in extremis - bewildered, imperiled, and anxious - wandering into Mason’s office like a refugee from a film noir backlot. What follows is a procedural ballet: murder, investigation, confrontation, and the inevitable courtroom climax, where Mason’s logic pins the culprit and the innocent walks free. Gardner, a lawyer turned pulp impresario, revels in evidentiary reversals and clipped dialogue, trusting readers to navigate a maze of legal minutiae and fill in exposition and business as they like. These are not whodunits but howdunits, their pleasures rooted in the mechanics of fraud and the thrill of watching The Combine outfoxed.

Television, from 1957 adapting the novels, streamlines this intricate machinery for the small screen. The hour-long format demands compression: subplots vanish, pacing accelerates, and the narrative arc - client, killing, investigation, trial - becomes a metronome. Gardner’s labyrinthine plotting gives way to clarity; crimes are staged early, investigations truncated, and courtroom theatrics foregrounded, with the mute defendant wedged between Perry and Della like a prop. The result is sleek reassurance, calibrated for mid-century living rooms. Accessibility triumphs over complexity. Where Gardner traffics in nuance, the series offers closure - a world where truth emerges on cue. No wonder Neil Postman and every smart-aleck sophomore in the Seventies (like me!) called teevee The Boob Tube.

Characterization undergoes similar sanding-down. Gardner’s Mason is a trickster in pinstripes, a gambler who thrives in gray zones. His moral compass points toward justice, but the route is circuitous, and the novels occasionally wink at his appetite for risky misdemeanors. Della Street, far from a stenographic ornament, is Mason’s co-conspirator - breaking and entering, impersonating gold diggers, and piloting getaway cars with pulp élan. Paul Drake, amiable and perpetually harried, rounds out a trio that calls to mind Nervous Overheated Ron, Brainy Cool Hermoine, and Wise Mind Harry.

Television domesticates this trio. Raymond Burr’s Mason radiates gravitas and ethical rectitude, a figure of calm authority in a universe of moral certainties. Della becomes a note-taker; Paul morphs into comic relief. Hamilton Burger, Gardner’s snarling prosecutor, is softened into genial foil, his vendetta ritualized into courtroom banter. The novels’ simmering antagonisms – graceless Burger stamping off as cross as a frog in a sock - are replaced by post-verdict bonhomie. Gardner approved the scripts, but one suspects he muttered “like hell” under his breath.

Tone is the final transmutation. Gardner writes in a brisk, not-quite-hard-boiled register, his dialogue clipped, his atmosphere tense with disquiet. Wartime shadows and cultural tremors haunt the margins, and the novels inhabit a world where the policeman is not your friend.

The TV series bathes Mason in the glow of Eisenhower-era optimism. Courtrooms gleam with California sheen; decorum reigns; law becomes sanctuary. Gardner’s recurring cautionary motif - never talk to the authorities without your lawyer - vanishes, along with his warnings about improper police procedures, misidentifications by witnesses and misconstrued circumstantial evidence. The show offers reassurance; the books, a lingering unease that instead of presuming innocence, The Combine thinks "horses" when it hears hooves, given circumstantial evidence, a plausible motive, and a lack of an airtight alibi.

In short: Gardner’s Mason prowls a morally ambiguous landscape, improvising justice in a flawed system. The televised Mason presides over a universe of order, where truth is punctual and the good guys always win. One is pulp with a purpose; the other, prime-time anesthesia.

Perry Mason 113: TCOT Silent Partner

Note: I grew up with Raymond Burr’s Perry Mason lodged in my brain like a battleship in dry dock - piercing stare, commanding voice, and enough bulk to block out the sun. So imagine my adolescent shock when I cracked open the original novels and discovered that Mason was not, in fact, Raymond Burr in a snappy suit, but a tall, lanky fellow who often moonlighted as a hard-boiled private eye. The written Mason speeds through traffic, slugs bad guys, outfoxes cops, and even scolds his own clients. Meanwhile, Burr’s courtroom stoicism sat in my head like bedrock. Naturally, I prefer the books (of course I do; I’m that sort of person), but every so often Burr’s unflappable Mason and Gardner’s fedora-wearing Mason square off in my psyche like two heavyweight champs. Half Burr, half Mason, all Gardner.

Perryism to Live by RE Empathy: You don't need to see a man, look in his face, shake his hand, and hear him talk, in order to know him. You can watch the things he does. You can see him through the eyes of others. You make allowances for [ ] prejudice when you know the others. You can then judge the extent of their distortion. That's the only way you can solve cases, Della. You must learn to know the characters involved. You must learn to see things through their eyes, and that means you must have sympathy and tolerance for crime.

The Case of the Silent Partner – Erle Stanley Gardner

Seventeenth Mason novel, 1940. TCOT Silent Partner. You want it straight? This one matters. Tragg walks in for the first time - cool, sharp, same age as Mason. Forget Ray Collins on TV; Gardner envisioned Tragg about the same age as Mason and educated enough to be embarrassed about the wielders of rubber hoses.

The story starts with a flower shop, a woman tough enough to run it and still play nurse to a disabled patient. She’s got grit, but grit doesn’t stop trouble. Trouble comes fast, out of nowhere. A partner with sticky fingers, a deal that smells wrong, and then murder. The cops want her for it. They’ve got motive, means, everything but the truth.

Tragg works the angles. He’s no Holcomb - he knows psychology. Gets a suspect talking with a word-association trick while Mason’s out of the room. That’s new. Usually Perry’s in every scene, pulling strings. Not here. Gardner lets Tragg steal the spotlight.

Paul Drake? Late entrance about half down the road, small part. Della Street? She’s in deep, moving pieces, not just answering phones. That’s why the books beat the TV show cold - Della’s a player, not a prop.

The climax? Not your usual Mason blowout in criminal court. It’s civil. No fireworks, but Perry still makes the other lawyer look like a sap. Gardner keeps it tight, no fat, no frills. Just moves and counter-moves.

And under it all, Gardner’s old tune: respect for women who fight their way through a man’s world. He doesn’t make saints, but he doesn’t make fools either. Maybe he was playing to female readers. Maybe he just liked women who drove fast and ate like fieldhands. Doesn’t matter. It works.

TCOT Silent Partner isn’t just a case. It’s a turning point. Tragg’s here to stay. And Mason? He’s still the guy who walks into court when the evidence screams, ‘Start polishing the gas chamber seat for Mason’s client,’ and somehow walks out with the jury asking for his autograph.

Perry Mason 112: Crows Can't Count

Note: I’m not fond of comparisons, but here goes: Cool and Lam versus Perry Mason. The A.A. Fair novels are shorter, faster-paced, and full of funny situations between Donald Lam - a former lawyer with a knack for trouble - and Bertha Cool, a brassy, no-nonsense detective. Their contrasting styles make them entertaining: he’s quiet and insightful; she’s as sensitive as a fire hydrant. These stories lean into the seedier side of life, focusing on family problems and the vagaries of human behavior rather than courtroom drama. 

Crows Can’t Count – Erle Stanley Gardner writing as A. A. Fair

This 1946 outing is Gardner in his “let’s see how many plot threads I can tangle before the snarl weighs as much as a bowling ball” mode. We’ve got emerald mines in Colombia, a trust fund with middle-aged trustees who can’t keep their male gazes off the young heiress, a crow with kleptomania, and at least one corpus. If you came here for the usual mix of comedy from Bertha Cool and deduction by Donald Lam, disappointment awaits. The first-person narration is by Donald Lam: pure deduction, minimal action, and dialogue that often lacks Gardner’s typical snap, crackle, and fizz.

The setup: fifty-ish Harry Sharples hires Cool and Lam to trace an emerald necklace that shouldn’t be in a local dealer’s hands. Sharples and Robert Cameron co-manage the estate of Cora Hendricks, late owner of a Colombian gold mine. The heirs? Shirley Bruce, a knockout who kisses like a teenage boy’s dreamboat, and Robert Hockley, a gambler with issues like unstable emotions and impulsivity. Before Lam can get a line on the players, Cameron turns up dead, his crow missing, and a necklace minus emeralds sitting on the table. Cue the parade of suspects: young Shirley, a mysterious Juanita Grafton, her artist daughter Dona (currently crow-sitting), and assorted main-chancers.

What follows is a marathon of meetings, phone calls, and enigmatic conversations that make you nostalgic for the days when detective fiction maybe didn’t involve so much talk talk talk. Eventually, everyone decamps to Colombia for an “exotic idyll,” which Gardner renders with the genuine sympathy and respect he brought to Mexico - though Bertha Cool’s culture shock is milked for humor that feels past its expiration date by about 50 years. The crow subplot? Cute and welcome, but not enough of a diversion.

The mystery itself is a ball of yarn untangled by Lam in a multi-multi-page monologue that reads like the reveal in a whodunnit from the Twenties. The solution makes sense – when the hard-core reader squints - but getting there is like jogging with shoes on the wrong feet. Gardner’s usual sparkle? We fans gaze the horizon in vain, from our crow’s nest. Bertha, once a comically profane bulldozer, is reduced to a cartoon homebody out of her element. Lam fares better because we fans are used to his never being forthcoming but his deductions feel like the physics theory that depends on the step “Then a Miracle Happens.”

Bottom line: Crows Can’t Count isn’t terrible, but it’s Gardner seemingly distracted which is weird in a year when he was not his usual hyper-productive self, publishing only TCOT Borrowed Brunette and The D.A. Breaks a Seal, a D.A. Doug Selby novel. Maybe he finally gave himself some well-deserved vacations.