Perry Mason 164: The Mean Girl Rewrites the Script

Note: Gail Patrick left law school to become a movie actress. Often cast as the bad girl or the other woman, she appeared in more than 60 feature films between 1932 and 1948, notably Stage Door and My Favorite Wife. Retirement bored her so she created her job as executive producer for the hit TV show Perry Mason from 1957 to 1966.

The Mean Girl Rewrites the Script (and Wins the Case)

It is hardly a contradiction, though it can appear that way at first glance. Gail Patrick, cool, lacquered, bored, amused, built an acting career on surfaces that concealed intent. She played the socialite, the interloper, the mean girl, the woman lingering just beyond the boundaries of propriety and therefore exercising influence over them. In My Man Godfrey among others, she embodied something subtler than chaos. She was an arrangement of tone, posture, and advantage. Of self-knowledge as well: social butterfly Cornelia understood perfectly that she was squandering her time, energy, and talent; super-thief Myra possessed the icy confidence required to match wits with the cunning George Sanders in Quiet Please: Murder.

Then came television. Executive producer of Perry Mason. Less performance than stewardship of performance. Something carries across. As producer, Patrick favored scripts and characterizations that rewarded intelligence, discipline, and competence, particularly in the portrayal of Della Street.

The look of the series, its restraint, polish, and almost chilly cleanliness, feels more like an insistence than an aesthetic preference. Nothing extraneous. Every gesture purposeful. One can hear the echo of those earlier roles: the woman who knew exactly when to speak, when to hold back, how to allow silence to accomplish its work.

Many of Patrick's screen roles centered on social performance and concealed motives. As producer, she showed a similar sensitivity to credibility, helping maintain Perry Mason's disciplined tone and avoiding the melodramatic excess common in contemporary television.

And the women, often relegated to the margins in comparable series, are altered here, quietly but decisively. Della Street neither flutters nor waits. She anticipates, investigates, and verifies. Her work functions less as secretarial support than as a parallel enterprise. She is competent without fanfare, and because the series treats that competence as routine rather than remarkable, it becomes all the more convincing.

This matters, if only because the period so reliably preferred the opposite. The endangered woman, the nosy neighbor, the childlike witness, the decorative secretary still appear in Perry Mason, yet they are displaced, or more accurately, balanced by another possibility. Della, and often other women* moving through the show's tight architecture, possess a self-command that resists easy categorizing. Rescue never enters the equation; they are already in motion, solving, adjusting, correcting.

Whether this emphasis originated directly with Patrick or emerged from a broader creative collaboration is difficult to determine. Nevertheless, the show's treatment of Della Street reflects qualities associated with Patrick's best screen performances: intelligence, composure, and self-possession.

So the irony, villainess turned arbiter of truth, dissolves somewhat. Villainy was never the essence of those performances. What mattered was expertise in appearances: understanding how deception settles into the body, how it sounds when it speaks. Repurposed, that knowledge becomes vigilance. The architect of duplicity becomes, quite plausibly, its most efficient detector.

The skills that made Patrick effective as an actress - discipline, observation, and control - appear in a different form in the series she helped produce. Patrick spent much of her acting career portraying women whose intelligence carried a hint of menace. On Perry Mason, that intelligence loses its threatening quality and becomes professional competence. Della Street and many of the series' female characters are neither ornaments nor victims. They are people with work to do, and the show takes that work seriously. If Patrick helped shape that perspective, her most lasting role may have taken place behind the camera rather than in front of it.

Links to Gail Patrick movies and my reviews can be found here.

* Amazing actresses such as Constance Ford, Audrey Totter, Frances Reid, Joyce Meadows, Marie Windsor, Katherine Squire, Geraldine Wall, Lurene Tuttle, Sheila Bromley, Louise Latham, and Jeanne Cooper, to name only a few. They all played women with souls – and elbows.

Matinee Musings: Ned Sparks

Note: Ned Sparks (1883 -1957) was born in Guelph, Ontario and raised in St. Thomas. As a teenager prospecting in the Klondike, he ran out of money and took to performing. After some turns to a seminary and the railways, he got chosen for his first New York show in 1912.

Ned Sparks: Canadian, Comedian, Curmudgeon

Pull out my fingernails and the nuclear codes die with me. Make me carry a box of glazed donuts, though, and after ten minutes of sticky fingers I’ll sing like a canary about what makes Ned Sparks so goddamn funny. Everybody has a breaking point. Mine is sticky fingers.

Most comedians of the early sound era attack a scene. Sparks endures it. Hal Skelly and Jack Oakie would get a laugh being a clownish type. Sparks would just perch a sour face atop that neck, a neck so tom-cotton thick for such a slight man that it looked like it had been borrowed from sumo wrestler Chiyonofuji.

Trixie Lorraine: Isn't there going to be any comedy in the show?
Ned: Oh, plenty! The gay side, the hard-boiled side, the cynical and funny side of the Depression! I'll make 'em laugh at you starving to death, honey. It'll be the funniest thing you ever did. - Gold Diggers of 1933

The typical comic performer of the Thirties is all motion, all enthusiasm, all noise. Wheeler does the innocent, Woolsey plays the sharper, Eddie Collins makes mouth noises. Sparks reacts as though he has just been informed of a yet another damn thing comin’ down the pike. His face conveys the nagging suspicion that he is always the last to find out. Always.

What makes this work is that he never appears to know he's being funny. The run of comic actors want the laugh. Sparks seems to regard the laugh as yet another glitch in the works. He delivers every line in that famous gravel-dump monotone, as though the effort of speaking exceeds the value of communication.

Ned: Without my wife, I'm comparatively alone in the world. Even with my wife, I'm comparatively alone in the world. - The Bride Walks Out

And yet, somehow, he is usually the funniest person on screen.

The secret, I think, is contrast. Put Sparks next to romantic lead Joel McCrea delivering a heartfelt declaration and he becomes hilarious as the humorless puritan (Kept Husbands). Put him next to put-upon heroine Mae Clarke and he becomes even funnier as not the least of her trials (The Fall Guy). The greater the emotional temperature around him, the more amusing his glacial indifference becomes. He is a one-man corrective to excessive enthusiasm.

T. Fenny Sylvester: You know, dat song gives you somethin' to work to. Sort of a prod to do big things. In the hustle and bustle of daily life, a guy's liable to forget his mudder. But that song brung me back me babyhood. Ain't them words swell? "Who calmed your baby fears, and brushed away your tears? Your mudda." Boy, nuttin' can take the place of your mudda, can it?
Ned: You can't prove it by me - I was an incubator baby. - Sing and Like It

There is also something surprisingly modern about him. Many silent and early talking-picture funny guys can feel trapped in their own period. Sparks does not. The deadpan one who refuses to play along with the emotional assumptions of the room is now a staple of American comedy. You can draw a line from Sparks to Jack Benny, from Benny to Bill Murray, and from Murray to every sitcom character whose principal personality trait is being tired of everybody else's nonsense.

Mae Clark: And get cleaned up!
Ned: I already took a bath. I'm so clean I'm uncomfortable. - The Fall Guy

The strange thing is that many Ned Sparks jokes are not especially remarkable on paper. Read them and you may smile politely. Watch Sparks deliver them and they become funny through sheer force of personality. The line is rarely the joke. Ned Sparks is the joke. His exhausted gaze, his world-weary voice, his absolute certainty that mankind cannot be helped: that is the schtick.

Ned: Yeah, what's caviar to the few is applesauce to the gander. – Kept Husbands

He perfected a comic character so thoroughly that he turned pessimism into a performing art. The perpetual irritation of Sparks’ supporting character stole scenes for years, much in the stock character of fluttery fragile ZaSu Pitts whom audiences also loved. W.C. Fields cultivated a larger-than-life persona: a blustery, self-serving schemer with verbal flair and physical comedy. In contrast, though Ned used his stiff movements to great comic effect – talk about man in crying need of yoga time on the mat - Sparks embodied sardonic restraint.

Nobody ever looked less delighted to be in a motion picture. Nobody ever got more laughs from it.

Dave the Dude: If we have to dig up a husband for Annie, let's to it and get over it.
Ned: Now you got to dig up a husband for...
[shouting]
Ned: Where you gonna get a husband just like that?
Dave the Dude: How about you, Happy?
Ned: Me?
Missouri Martin: Oh, that's a swell idea. I think you'd be just precious.
Ned: That's a wonderful idea but there's one thing that stands on the way. I got a wife that is very fussy. She don't like me to go around and marrying people! - Lady for a Day

Perry Mason 162: TCOT Duplicate Daughter

Note: I’m not a reader that pays much attention to titles. The thing is, titles of Perry Mason books always promise meaning, but often in the same way horoscopes do: vaguely, and only after you’ve shrugged off confirmation bias. In this 1960 production, the title is practically the only clue we get - until the courtroom explodes like a Fourth of July firecracker. Is it fair that the next real clue arrives when the novel is 96% over? Of course not. But fairness is for afternoons in May and virtue ethicists, not Perry Mason plots. Gardner knows his readers will wait patiently for that last-minute twist, because nothing tastes sweeter than watching Mason pull a rabbit out of a hat while Burger is still deciding between the homburg or the fedora.

The Case of the Duplicate Daughter – Erle Stanley Gardner

The story begins with a game of deception so subtle that the reader, if reading too fast, will be left bewildered by its sudden reversals. Carter Gilman, investment wizard and pillar of respectability, vanishes one morning while his twenty-year-old daughter Muriel (talk about a name that screams dutiful daughter) is preparing the kind of Anglo breakfast that has sent generations of men to early graves - bacon, eggs, buttered toast.

When she returns, her father is gone. In his workshop, she discovers a broken chair, a pool of crimson liquid, and ten thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills scattered like confetti. Convinced she has stumbled upon a murder scene, Muriel obeys the instructions in her father’s briefcase: “If anything happens, call Perry Mason.”

Mason arrives to find the “blood” is paint, but the money is real - worth over a hundred thousand in today’s currency. He dispatches Paul Drake to probe the Gilman household: Carter, his daughter Muriel, his second wife Nancy, and Nancy’s daughter Glamis. Before the detective can report, Gilman materializes in Mason’s office, delivers cryptic instructions, and disappears again - this time for good.

Enter Vera Martel, a private investigator with ethics as flexible as a rubber band. She telephones Mason, warning him to abandon Gilman’s cause and to tell the man his troubles are worse than imagined. Mason, intrigued, consults Drake, who brands Martel a blackmailer - a woman who turns sensitive information into cash. Soon after, Martel is found dead, and Carter Gilman is indicted for her murder.

The courtroom becomes a theater of psychological warfare. Hamilton Burger, savoring the prospect of humbling Mason, subpoenas him as a witness for the prosecution. But Mason, master of timing, unmasks the killer before taking the stand. The solution, resting on an ancient fictional device, is not fair play - but it is dazzling.

Beneath the legal fireworks lies a motive steeped in the mores of mid-century America. Nancy’s youthful Bohemianism - she was an artist, which in the 1950s was shorthand for the moral laxity of beatniks - becomes a weapon in the hands of the prosecution. Gardner exploits this cultural hypocrisy with relish, reminding us that blackmail thrives where society clings to its taboos. Today, when scandal has lost its sting, such plots seem quaint.

This late-career Mason novel is a study in contrasts: the glitter of money against the shadow of murder, the brittle façade of respectability against the raw nerve of desire. It is a story of greed, fear, and the perilous games people play when secrets become currency.

Perry Mason 162: Goodbye, Tragg; Hello, Procedure

Note: By the time Ray Collins was cast as Perry Mason’s nemesis, he was a seasoned actor on the stage, screen and radio. Collins had one of those movie careers that wandered cheerfully from Citizen Kane to Ma & Pa Kettle.

Goodbye, Tragg: Hello, Procedure (Or, How the Fun Got Filed Away)

Ray Collins played Lieutenant Arthur Tragg, the gruff homicide detective on Perry Mason. He did it with the kind of lived-in authority as though he’d been on the scene for every murder in Los Angeles since Prohibition. He remained a comforting fixture on Perry Mason until emphysema forced him to retire in 1963 - an exit that felt less like a casting change and more like a frail uncle quietly leaving the family party early so that no one who liked him would worry he’d overdone it.

As a kid, I just accepted Tragg as a kind of prehistoric lawman - at least a generation older than Perry Mason, possibly older than the courthouse itself. He had that “I remember when the uniform’s finishing touch was a rubber hose” vibe.  So imagine my adolescent shock - eager to take umbrage as teenagers are - when the novels reveal that Tragg and Mason are roughly the same age. Suddenly Tragg isn’t a veteran but a contemporary who seems to have aged an extra twenty-five years from presiding at crime scenes that would make EMTs blanch.

Ray Collins’ played Lieutenant Tragg in the spirit of the novels. Though adversaries, Tragg and Mason feel grudging admiration for the detective skills of the other. They respect each other, though Tragg would mockingly call Mason “Counselor ” and Mason would say tightly, “I feel I spend all my time introducing you…,” when Tragg would pop in unannounced during an office conference with the hapless scared client.

Tragg circled Mason like a seasoned chess adversary, occasionally smiling as if to say, “Well played – till next time.” In the first three seasons, the show breathed the smoky pulp air of radio suspense and film noir. Tragg’s authority rested in experience and force of personality, not in paperwork or protocols. He intuited, from seeing it scores of times before - how the pieces of evidence probably fit - not usually correctly, but with enough good faith that his thinking errors felt human, never lazy or malicious or stupid.

Enter Lieutenants Andy Anderson and Steve Drumm, played with a clean, almost antiseptic efficiency by Wesley Lau and Richard Anderson respectively. Suddenly the temperature drops. These dour dudes are not there to play; they are there to get the Freedom Deprivation Logistics humming. If Tragg embodied the instincts of the beat cop elevated by experience but eschewing the rough methods of yore, Andy and Drumm are the modern bureaucrats shaped by college degrees and workshops on Carceral Workflow Optimization.

Andy and Drumm do not wink. They never seem bemused. Della is not granted their courtly attention. One suspects they file reports in triplicate and torture subordinates over trifles. Where Tragg sparred with Mason, Andy and Drumm simply stand in opposition, bitterly assuming Mason is just a showboat trying to get the obviously guilty off for who knows what nefarious reasons.

The tonal shift is unmistakable, if understated. Without Tragg, the cases still unfold and Mason still prevails - but the journey ticks like an administrative metronome. The law, once personalized through Burger and Tragg’s relatable fallibility, becomes impersonal - an apparatus staffed by professionals who don’t have time to add respect to an adversarial relationship.

In replacing Tragg, the show traded passion for efficiency. The stories become cleaner, yes, but also colder. And in that chill, we glimpse Sixties television’s own evolution: from storytelling that invites audiences to play along to storytelling that expects them simply to watch - and to endure hearing, yet again, “You’ve got 24 hours to wrap this up.”

Perry Mason 161: The Count of Nine

Note: I use AI as an editorial tool so that my writing weaknesses won't annoy you or waste your time. AI helps identify excess wording, repetition, plot-heavy passages, unsupported claims, and places where my fondness for silly metaphors or wooly-headed abstractions obscures the point. I review its suggestions critically and use them to make the writing clearer, more concise, and more focused on analysis rather than summary.

The Count of Nine – Erle Stanley Gardner writing as A. A. Fair

Donald Lam has finally made partner in the private detective agency run by Bertha Cool - an achievement long overdue. Ex-lawyer Lam has always done most of the legwork while Bertha lines up the cases, spends the fees, and keeps expenses tight enough to squeak. Partnership doesn’t change the balance of power much, but it does give Lam a little leverage, which proves useful when Bertha lands what looks like an easy job: guarding a high-society party from gatecrashers.

The client is Dean Crockett, a wealthy eccentric obsessed with privacy and security. Three weeks earlier, one of his lavish parties ended with the theft of a valuable carved jade Buddha. This time, Crockett wants absolute control. He lives alone on the twentieth floor of an apartment building with a special elevator that runs only to his penthouse. Guests must be cleared at the front desk, approved again by Crockett himself, and possess a verified invitation before they’re allowed upstairs. Bertha is there to check names and keep out gatecrashers. Simple enough.

Naturally, the security arrangements fail. Despite Crockett's elaborate precautions, another theft occurs, pushing Cool and Lam from security guards to investigators and drawing them into a case that soon turns deadly.

Gardner's great strength is efficiency. Scenes arrive late, end early, and rarely waste a sentence. The result is a novel that moves at a brisk pace while giving Lam plenty of opportunities to demonstrate his understated intelligence. Unlike the hard-boiled detectives who dominate much mid-century crime fiction, Lam wins through observation and persistence rather than toughness. His small stature and unassuming manner encourage others to underestimate him, usually to their regret.

Gardner is known for his plotting, not characterization but in this outing amusing is the comic friction between Lam and the people he meets along the way. A lecherous photographer prides himself on manipulating women, prompting a sharp, funny exchange where Lam pretends admiration for the lady’s man while despising every word the crumb says. The reader catches the contempt immediately; the photographer, blinded by ego, misses it entirely.

The Count of Nine is the eighteenth book in Gardner’s long-running Cool and Lam series, written under the pen name A.A. Fair. Bertha is her usual loud, greedy, tightfisted self, eternally convinced she can handle things alone. Lam - slight, brainy, and chronically underestimated - ends up doing the real detective work, taking a few beatings, attracting unwanted romantic attention, and finally putting the pieces together. Gardner's portrayal of the police is decidedly unsympathetic; they are as fallible, stubborn, and self-interested as anyone else in the story.

Structurally, this is Gardner’s version of a locked-room mystery. Most of the action takes place over a only a day or two, with little emphasis on gunplay or brawls. It showcases Gardner's strengths: airtight construction, memorable eccentrics, and a detective whose intelligence consistently proves more effective than force. For readers who enjoy classic puzzle mysteries with a hard-boiled edge, it's an easy recommendation – no wonder Hard Case Crime re-released it in 2018.

The Ides of Ann Harding: Condemned

Note: Ann Harding was to the play the gallant lady many times in the first half of the Thirties. By 1935, soured by the Depression that had no end in sight, stoked by a press that didn’t like her not talking to reporters, a cynical America was sick of the self-sacrificing roles of brave Ann Harding. A movie-goer also wonders if what happened to Harding was what happened to Anne Hathaway: one gloomy day America decided they disliked Ann/Anne because she was too smart, too beautiful, too famous, too rich, too talented, over-staying her welcome among us homely fickle mortals. Perhaps due to feeling over-exposed by a nasty press corps and coupled with a rancorous custody battle, Harding went on a break in 1936 and didn’t return to movies until 1942 with Eyes in the Night, in which she was scolded by cruel Donna Reed for being so noble.

Condemned
1929 / 1:26
Tagline: “Ronald COLMAN As A Rough, Tough Convict Who'd Kill For A Kiss”
[internet archive]

Devil's island was a French penal colony in the Salvation Islands of French Guiana, demonstrating the diabolical talent of The Man to turn a tropical paradise into a hellhole. Set in the late 1920s, the warden Vidal (Dudley Digges) scolds his wife Mme. Vidal (Ann Harding) for having no sense of her high position as the wife of an important man in the colony.

Disrespecting her feelings and opinions as usual, he brings in the incarcerated individual Michel Oman (Ronald Colman) as a houseman. Michel is Parisian thief who took the fall for a bank robbery gone bad. But like Charles Boyer trapped in the Casbah in Algiers, Michel is debonaire and a dandy given the chance.  How Vidal justifies to himself having such a good-looking man spend days with his comely wife is left unexplained. Maybe he figures his peasant wife is so cowed by his blustering, that marriage vows are so sacred to her, and the power of gossip so over-powering among the expatriate women that the obvious and cynical predictions will never come to be.

Mme. Vidal warns her husband he’ll be sorry for bringing an incarcerated individual into the house. But in the end, as we would expect of a country woman who grew up with 13 brothers and sisters in a village in Alsace in the early 20^th century – now there are some onerous intersectionalities -  she is submissive to her sadistic buffoon of a husband with the caterpillar mustache and revolting soul patches. As Michel points out when they talk while shopping in the outside market, they are both prisoners.

Movie-goer, Mme. Vidal and Michel fall in love. Michel buys her a capuchin monkey on which she needs to lavish her love  and concern. This gesture pisses off the warden who is a pet-hater on top of being conceited. His tossing the simian out a window precipitates a crisis with a climactic chase after two escapees through a jungle swamp at night.

A movie-goer has to be patient when watching an early talkie. They tend to be stagey, with the actors motionless and intoning theatrical lines in front of a camera. But the experimentation with camera movement in this picture is cinematic and interesting. Many scenes are outdoors. The tossing ship at the opening, with water water everywhere, was totally unexpected  A fast tracking shot pictures the warden as he snarls his welcome address to a new batch of unlucky wretches, “Prison is a poor place to be proud.” The camera pans as we movie-goers take in silhouettes of the prisoners, some of whom we can guess are cognitively disabled, others acting out anger and hatred. Within and without solitary confinement is filmed like a nightmare of a French existentialist.

The light and camera make 27-year-old Ann Harding look about five years younger. She wears strange Romany makeup in the heart-to-heart conversation scene but this is balanced in another scene in which she lets down her ash blonde hair. Be still, O beating heart. This sight is almost as affecting as her looking into space with a worried look in which you can see her anxious thoughts racing each other. In the scene where she finally shucks the upbringing to keep your (female) opinions to yourself and tells the warden where to get off, she’s dynamite. I believed her when she said she would die for Michel. At the end, Harding stands on the ship as it pulls out and the light on the water does that bobbing thing light on water does and Harding gradually leaves the frame, holding back her tears. It’s emblematic of her intensity and her restraint in the entire picture.

Another point about early talkies, the veteran movie-goer expects the sound to be so-so unless it is a monster movie where they really get into tolling bells, creaking doors, and screams in the night. However, in the movie the soundtrack is excellent. In the opening there is a swirl of sound as the wind blows, water splashes, the ship creaks and the inmates jeer at each other and the guards. The inmates sing a mournful song as they march back from hard labor. The maniac boy screams when solitary drives him around the bend. The motor on the boat pursuing our heroes sounds like technology gone ape.

Anyway, this movie should also be seen for Ronald Colman. Besides that great voice, he puts in a fine reserved performance, one that got him a Best Actor nomination that year. Harding and Colman make an attractive couple. Dudley Digges’ warden was sometimes over the top, but he was pretty effective as the character that richly deserves his ultimate fate at the hands of Louis Wolheim as Colman's convict friend – he’s got a dotted line tattooed on this neck “cut here.”

Perry Mason 160: Murder Most Furry

Note: Erle Stanley Gardner was very much an outdoorsman. He wasn't just a courtroom author - he was a hunter, camper, archer, sportsman, and prolific travel photographer. Gardner documented extensive hunting trips, camping expeditions, bow‑hunting competitions, fishing trips, and yachting adventures across the Western U.S., Baja California, and even Alaska, Mexico and the Philippines. He was an animal lover.

Murder Most Furry: Three Perry Mason Tales with Animals

The Case of the Grinning Gorilla (1952)
Perry Mason buys a dead woman’s diaries for five bucks and, naturally, all hell breaks loose. Helen Cadmus is missing, drowned, or just being difficult. Enter Nathan Fallon, a cousin with the ethics of a pickpocket, and Benjamin Addicks, a millionaire who dabbles in gorilla neurology - because why not? Addicks waves money; Mason waves him off. Mason hates lies more than unsound logic.

Paul Drake snoops, finds gorillas, and a mansion fortified like Fort Knox. Cue murder. Addicks ends up dead, stabbed with something sharp enough to make Freud blush. The housekeeper is accused, and she’s as talkative as a clam. Mason nearly dies twice, which is twice more than usual.

The case? Weird, wild, and worth every page.

The Case of the Careless Kitten (1942)   
Published during WWII, this Perry Mason novel hums with wartime tension even though it never says so outright. The story pivots on identity: Komo insists he’s Korean, but everyone else calls him Japanese. In those days, truth didn’t matter - perception did. Gardner uses Komo as a quiet indictment of snap judgments.

The mystery begins with Franklin Shore, a banker who vanished a decade ago. Now he resurfaces - sort of. Mason arrives for a meeting and finds a corpse instead. What follows is eighteen hours of relentless motion: no trial theatrics, just Mason maneuvering while Della Street takes the fall and Burger grins like a cat in cream. There’s a kitten too - Amber Eyes -whose soft fur hides sharp claws and sharper consequences.

Gardner keeps it taut, brisk, and oddly poignant. Beneath the puzzle lies a hum of fear and suspicion, a reminder of what America looked like when trust was rationed.

The Case of the Fan Dancer's Horse (1947)
This Mason romp is pure Gardner in overdrive: two fan-dancers, one horse, and a murder in which the overbearing rancher is skewered with a samurai sword. It starts with a car wreck and a wardrobe that looks like it escaped from a burlesque revue. Mason runs an ad to return the goods, and suddenly the plot is juggling mistaken identities, borrowed names, and a timetable that eats half a page. There’s a victim, an ostrich burr on the blade, and a client who buries evidence like it’s a garden chore.

The courtroom scenes? Fireworks. Gardner doesn’t do character studies - he does detonations. Perry blows up a witness like a pinwheel on the Fourth of July. Sure, you can guess the killer, but who cares? The ride is the thing. If you want plausibility, read a tax manual. If you want fan-dancers, a horse, and a murder with style - step right up.

Matinee Musings: Lady of Burlesque

Lady of Burlesque
1943 / 1:31
Tagline: “Mirth! Murder! Melody! Mystery! and Girls! Girls! Girls!”
[internet archive]

Barbara Stanwyck slips into Dixie Daisy’s sequined skin with a verve that feels like liberation. Forget the noir siren or the ruthless schemer - here, Stanwyck is earthy, commonsensical, and unpretentious. Dixie is  shimmying her way to the top, armed with a grin and a gag. She sings, she dances, she cracks wise, and suddenly an opera house turned burlesque palace hums with her electricity.

But success breeds venom. Enter Lolita La Verne, a redhead with a temper - how unusual -  and Princess Nirvena, a White Russian with hauteur to spare. Both rivals wind up strangled, and Dixie - our accidental femme fatale - must pivot from pirouettes to peril, sleuthing her way out of a noose of suspicion.

William Wellman directs with his trademark robustness, giving the backstage chaos a pulse that’s equal parts grit and glitter. Edith Head’s costumes - feathers, sequins, and audacity stitched into every hem - are practically characters themselves. Arthur Lange’s score, Oscar-nominated, swells and swoons like a knowing wink to the absurdity of it all. Yes, Michael O’Shea’s Biff Brannigan can grate - his wisecracks clang like cracked cymbals in 2026 - but maybe that’s the point: burlesque thrives on noise, on excess, on the gaudy collision of artifice and appetite.

The film’s pleasures are tactile: the authentic seediness of the setting, the backstage antics that teeter between silly and sly, the one-liners that land like water balloons. And those costumes - outlandish, unapologetic, a parade of fantasy. Really, what more could you want, even if you're a fashion ignoramus like me?

Perry Mason 159: Rear Window

Note: It is impossible to examine Raymond Burr’s Pre-Mason Oeuvre without a look at his most memorable movie part among the general public. By 1954, Burr had played an evil goon (I Love Trouble, Abandoned, M)  or sadistic gangster (Raw Deal, Red Light, Borderline, His Kind of Woman) or corrupt professional fixer (Unmasked, FBI Girl, Mara Maru) but he was also persuasively gruesome as a psycho private eye (Pitfall), commie spy (Walk a Crooked Mile, The Whip Hand), and serial date rapist (The Blue Gardenia). So Alfred Hitchcock figured Burr would be a natural as the heavy in this suspense movie.

 Rear Window
1954 / 1:52
Tagline: “YOU won't be able to tear your eyes away from this window!”
[internet archive]

In this movie Raymond Burr plays Lars Thorwald, a salesman of wholesale costume jewelry in the Big Apple. His wife is chronically ill. She is not patient in her suffering but seems ever demanding and never satisfied. Lars is a bad neighbor in that he tells people in the shared court to shut up and leave him alone. Nor is he a good husband because he apparently telephones his girlfriend, for which his wife mocks him. Mr. and Mrs. Thorwald bicker all the time because the “in sickness and in health” clause that they slip in when people are too young and dumb to know the serious implications of “in sickness” does not mean anything to Lars though with his curly grey hair you’d think he’d be old enough to know what an ageing couple have to deal with.

On one rainy night Lars is observed leaving his apartment three times, carrying something away in his sample case. He is also observed wrapping a butcher knife and small saw in newspapers. And his wife with the health challenges is nowhere to be seen in the apartment. Lars is also spotted wearing the look a man has when he's afraid he's being watched.

The observer of The Bickersons and this curious activity is a photo-journalist Jeff (James Stewart) who is laid up with a broken leg due to an on-the-job accident. His insurance nurse (Thelma Ritter) warns him not to be so curious about and observant of the people in the various apartment buildings around the court, because her trouble detector is flashing yellow.

But Jeff is rather a dumb guy so he ignores the nurse’s sensible advice. We movie-goers can safely conclude Jeff is dumb because he refuses to marry Lisa (Grace Kelly) who is smart, sympathetic, considerate, funny, steely, and looks movie-star bodacious in anything she wears. Lisa wants Jeff to move from photo-journalism to fashion and portrait photography because she loves him so much she doesn’t want to see him hurt again and wants him in the Big Apple where she works in the fashion industry. Jeff calls her vision of their future “nonsense,” which hurts her deeply but he doesn’t seem to notice. He is also unsympathetic to the loneliness of a middle-aged woman neighbor and the artistic frustrations of young composer. Jeff is also merely amused when he observes a ballet dancer doing what Lisa calls a woman’s hardest job, “juggling wolves.” Jeff has no respect for people, no feeling for the crosses other people have to bear.

Because of his observations of Lars’ odd nocturnal activities, Jeff comes to think Lars knocked off his poor afflicted wife. Jeff persuades Lisa and his nurse that he’s on to something, like murder. Jeff is not so successful convincing his war buddy Doyle (Wendell Corey) who is a police detective. At least until the climax.

It’s really daring of Hitchcock to make a huge indoor set of apartment buildings around a court, but make us movie-goers feel we are watching a tiny little claustrophobic world consisting of Jeff’s apartment and Lars’ apartment. We see most of the action across the court but sigh with relief when we can see action a bit closer through Jeff’s telephone lens, called a “portable keyhole” by the nurse.

It is also daring to trust the audience that they will understand in mime a cranky disabled person (Irene Winston) making demands and needing constant care. As the couple mimes incessant quarrels, we can see Burr’s body language express impatience, frustration, and the contempt the hale and hearty feel for the weak and fragile. Burr of the heavyset stature has the physical bulk that’s communicative but his facial expressions tell volumes too. We agree with the nurse when she says that he gave “an expression such that he'd never get a loan at the bank.” We can also see Lars thinking, calculating, trying to control his anxiety about being caught and brought to account. And when he confronts Jeff, he croaks in a tight desperate voice, “You want money? I don’t have any money! Tell me what you want.”

Reviewers have said many times how great the acting is so I don’t need to do that again here since the focus here is on Brother Ray. It’s not illogical that this non-Mason part is the for which Raymond Burr is best remembered since Rear Window was probably the most popular picture he appeared in as the heavy. That he worked with other famous directors – Anthony Mann, Fritz Lang, Andre De Toth, Jacques Tourneur – is known nowadays only to buffs of film noir like us. One wonders if nowadays Burr would be remembered only by we happy few if William Hopper had won the part of Perry Mason or Fred MacMurray, who was offered the part of Our Favorite Lawyer, decided he didn’t want to deal with the grind of a TV series making 30 episodes a year.

As for the connection with the Perry Mason TV series, Wendell Corey appeared as the victim, an obnoxious oil man, in TCOT Unwelcome Well, one of the better episodes in the last season, which did not have many good outings.

Pre-Mason Raymond Burr
Please Murder Me (1956) [internet archive] [my review]
I Love Trouble (1948) [internet archive] [my review]
Sleep My Love (1948) [internet archive] [my review]
Ruthless (1948) [internet archive] [my review]
Pitfall (1948) [internet archive] [my review]
Walk a Crooked Mile (1948) [internet archive] [my review]
Raw Deal (1948) [internet archive] [my review]
Station West (1948) [my review]
Red Light (1949) [internet archive] [my review]
Abandoned (1949) [internet archive] [my review]
Borderline (1950) [internet archive] [my review]
Unmasked (1950) [internet archive] [my review]
The Whip Hand (1951) [internet archive] [my review]
Bride of the Gorilla (1951) [internet archive] [my review]
M (1951) [internet archive] [my review]
His Kind of Woman (1951) [internet archive] [my review]                
FBI Girl (Nov 1951) [internet archive] [my review]
Mara Maru (April 1952) [internet archive] [my review]
Horizons West (1952) [internet archive] [my review]
Blue Gardenia (1953) [internet archive] [my review]
Gorilla at Large (1954) [internet archive] [my review]
Rear Window (1954) [internet archive] [my review]

The Nones of Ann Harding: Her Private Affair

Note: Mary Astor said nice things about Ann Harding in her autobiography, calling her a “vital woman” and a “fighter.” Joan Crawford said “I cherish Ann's companionship more than any other person I have ever known," raving about Ann's "radiance," "beautiful soul", and "lack of pretense." Barbara Stanwyck said in 1934, “I have always hoped that my own work showed the same degree of sincerity.”

Her Private Affair
1929 / 1:15
Tagline: “Her guilt will either destroy her or set her free”
[internet archive]

This early talkie opens with Ann Harding’s restless hands and her melancholy distressed look as she talks on the phone. Got me hypnotized?

Totally. Tell me anything. I can believe anything Ann Harding for an hour and change.

Vera is on the telephone with a former love interest Arnold (Lawford Davidson). Arnold is a womanizer that wants money from Vera for a bundle of indiscreet letters. Tonight. Vera goes to her husband (Harry Bannister) for the money but doesn’t tell him why she wants it. He can’t come up with it at such short notice so Vera decides to see Arnold in person to tell him he’s going to have to wait until the next day. When Vera skips out of Carmen between acts and finally meets Arnold, a terrible accident happens, proving once again that just keeping a handgun in the house is bad medicine.

Ann Harding plays a decent person who is so refined that she is too good but the unhelpful guilt over the terrible accident puts her under strain. Not telling her husband, not coming clean, and not clearing up the legalities from the get-go put her under more strain. With no music in this early talkie, Ann Harding conveys with her voice Vera’s marital, ethical and legal anguish and the subsequent changes, good and bad, to her character and behavior. Life being the funny, funny riddle it is, after the terrible accident, she becomes a kinder, more humane person.

Harding’s voice - trained for the stage - was an attraction to an industry that suddenly needed gorgeous actresses that could deliver a line properly. Harding’s precise diction is a tad old-fashioned and theatrical in our 2026. Good actresses salvage iffy lines and so she persuasively manages histrionic lines like “I can't make you happy. I must go away. I must leave you.” She’s faltering and afraid but not making a scene. Her voice gets across Vera’s unquiet heart and sheer bewilderment this whole incident has happened to her, who’s never done anybody any harm ever. At the New Year’s Eve party, perfect is her voice with its quaver of agitation, haunted by guilt.

For me, a beguiled movie-goer with enthralled tolerance for Ann Harding’s thespian decisions, Harding seldom overacts in this picture. And when she does overdo it, it’s not showing off. Ann Harding is never false. Your milage of course will vary. The call depends on the degree to which a movie-goer is hypnotized by Ann Harding. For me, the answer is “Totally.” I can do anything Ann Harding for an hour and change.

This movie was based on a Broadway play that flopped. Nevertheless, Hollywood was hoovering up talky dramas with sophisticated people in ritzy surroundings. This movie was shot in a stagey, staid way so actors could stay close to microphones. I thought the courtroom scene and the New Year’s Eve Party were shot with some vague sense that they were making a movie, and so was the opening shot, which features only Harding’s hands. But the intention of giving The Folks the illusion this is how the people who go see Carmen live and love is more important here than cinematic values.

This movie, Harding’s second film, was a success with the audiences and served as a foundation of her stardom. Maybe in the early talkie days, one strong performance in a picture was enough to satisfy audiences.

Perry Mason 158: TCOT Demure Defendant

Note: From 1956 in the 50^th Perry Mason novel receptionist Gertie finally gets described in Chapter Seven. She looks like Connie Cezon! Stand-in for Bette Davis! Meanwhile, the big clue shows up fashionably late, so readers have zero chance of beating Mason to the punch. He barely gets it himself before springing the solution like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat.

The Case of the Demure Defendant – Erle Stanley Gardner

Nadine Farr is beautiful, but beauty doesn’t stop the nightmares. The dread. The guilt that coils in her gut like a live wire. For professional help, she goes to Dr. Logbert Denair - a name that sounds like it belongs in the year I was born. He prescribes talk therapy under sodium pentothal. Truth serum. Nadine talks. Too much. She says she poisoned her uncle. She says she tossed the cyanide bottle into a lake. Denair records every word on reel-to-reel tape.

Now he’s sitting on a confession that could ruin lives. He doesn’t want to hand it to the cops. He doesn’t want to bury it either. So he calls Perry Mason. Mason listens, calm as a surgeon. He tells Denair patient statements are privileged - but evidence of a crime? That’s another story. Mason warns him: truth serum can twist reality. Delusion isn’t admissible. Before anyone runs to the police, someone needs to dig deeper. Denair hires Mason to do the digging.

From there, the ground shifts. This 1956 case is a maze of secrets and sharp turns. Mason ends up accused of fabricating evidence - Hamilton Burger grinning like a wolf while he says it. Mason gives advice to hapless fools unwary enough to consider selective spilling:

Get this straight. You’re dealing with a murder case. No matter how awkward the truth is, you can’t fabricate a situation that will meet all of the requirements. You can’t get a falsehood that will dovetail with all of the facts. Sooner or later all of the other facts will be known. If your story doesn’t dovetail you’ll have to change it. If you change it under pressure the truth will then be ten times more awkward.

For a few chapters, it looks bad. Real bad. Gardner pushes Mason to the edge before pulling him back in the final pages.

TCOT Demure Defendant isn’t cozy. It’s clinical, almost surgical, in how it dissects fear and guilt. Gardner plays with the ethics of psychiatry, the fragility of memory, and the law’s hunger for certainty.

Fans of Perry, Della, and Paul will love the ride. New readers? Maybe not. Gardner’s tricks with evidence can feel glib and pat, like sleight of hand. But if you want a Mason novel that flirts with psychological suspense, this one delivers.

The Kalends of Ann Harding: Paris Bound

Note: This 1929 movie asks the question whether married couples can have a relationship with other people outside the marriage but remain committed to the marriage. Apparently in our culture every generation for the last century has to hash this issue out, given we still see on Reddit stories like “I proposed an open marriage, but I regret it.” Maybe antique movies with enduring themes will still have relevance for us post-moderns: literature is news that stays news, said Ezra Pound.

Paris Bound
1929 / 1:16
Tagline: “Is Love Crushed by Marriage?”
[internet archive]

This is the film version of the 1927 play by Philip Barry. He was known for exploring the intersectionality of love, marriage, and sex among the young, healthy, and wealthy. This seems to be one of Barry’s lesser-known plays and Hollywood never re-made this film version like they re-made Holiday, The Animal Kingdom, and The Philadelphia Story.

The wedding ceremony of Mary (Ann Harding) and James (Fredric March) seems to be an event that no one wants to attend. The guests look dubious, as if they were wishing they were someplace else. James’ former GF Noel is so obviously repining that the other guests tell Jim to give her a talking to, to snap her out of her decline. Jim is always restrained with her but Noel tells Jim that she is his heart and soul. Theatrical Noel also tells Mary that Mary has the wisest eyes Noel has ever seen.

As I said, the guests look stricken, like they were digesting a frightening diagnosis. This is strange because in the opening scene, her first scene ever in a motion picture, in a wedding dress, Ann Harding looks stunning. Breath-taking. The headpiece and veil make her look like she has descended from the Empyrean to show us funny-looking mortals something … wonderful. After almost one hundred years, in a brutalized monochrome print Ann Harding’s oval face radiates timeless elegance, with luminous eyes, refined features, and a serene expression. Her classic beauty blends intelligence, warmth, grace, and quiet strength, leaving a memorable impression today. The only other entrance that made me gape and gabble like this was that shot of Grace Kelly alighting from a cloud before broken-legged Stewart in her first scene in Rear Window.

Anyway, enough babbling. Jim and Mary promise never to quit each other though they grant “sex attraction” for third parties will happen. This kind of open-mindedness is often expressed by Barry’s characters until the fat is in the fire and characters conclude keeping more traditional attitudes leads to less mess in personal relations. Barry’s claims, I think, are that monogamy means fewer hurt feelings and thus in the long run exclusivity is more conducive to peace of mind.

To continue, they have a child and Mary plays her piano looking soulful and thoughtful (and few actresses do sad and pensive better than Ann Harding). Every now and then Jim has to take the big boat to Europe for six weeks at a time. He works for a publisher who has a stable of expatriate American writers so he needs to visit the Riviera to confer with them.

Mary is decidedly not a soldier about these lengthy separations but stays home for the sake of their toddler son. Thunderheads appear when Mary gets inadvertent word from Jim’s sister that circumstantial evidence suggests Jim and Noel met on the Rivera for discreet adult play. Mary wretchedly works with composer Richard Parrish on their ballet. Without conviction, she lamely argues that married people need vacations from each other once in a while. Richard however falls in love with Mary and declares his love for Mary. Poor Mary - when it rains, it pours.

This is an early talkie, so the sound in the IA print sounds muddy in places, has drop-outs and random noise, and an annoying echo of various words and phrases. Also the staging is static, not cinematic at all. The acting is sometimes histrionic – emphatic, earnest, with diction to ensure that theatre-goers in the back rows will catch every word. I think Fredric March and Ann Harding, both stage-trained, are natural in this early all-talking movie - they both know how to deliver a line.

European Reading Challenge #7

 I read this for the European Reading Challenge 2026.

The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia - Orlando Figes

This monumental study of Stalin’s Russia is more than a chronicle of the Soviet era; it is a social history of the entire twentieth century in Russia. Orlando Figes reconstructs decades of deprivation, hunger, fear, and state terror through archival documents and the voices of ordinary people. His narrative captures how politics and economics penetrated private life, shaping families and identities under relentless pressure.

The book’s title refers to those who learned to “whisper” in order to survive - a metaphor for lives lived in secrecy and fear. Figes animates these lives with vivid detail, showing how repression seeped into kitchens, bedrooms, and even thoughts. Communal apartments, for example, were not merely a solution to housing shortages but instruments of surveillance. In shared kitchens, “even the tea kettles have ears.” A careless joke could lead to denunciation, interrogation, torture, and exile to the Gulag - or worse. Under such conditions, silence became a survival strategy, and public declarations of loyalty masked private despair.

My own understanding of these stories is sharpened by time spent in Riga in the early 1990s, where I met survivors of deportation and exile. They spoke of friends thrown from trains into the Siberian wilderness; of years spent forgetting their native tongue; of relatives killed in ways too brutal to repeat. These encounters echo Figes’s portraits of resilience and resignation.

One of the book’s most unsettling themes is complicity. Terror made nearly every citizen feel like both victim and accomplice. Denunciation could eliminate a rival or secure a coveted apartment. Ideological zeal - fueled by class hatred and fear - turned neighbors into informants. Yet, paradoxically, many victims continued to venerate Stalin, writing poems of devotion even after losing loved ones to his bloody regime. Figes probes this contradiction but admits its mystery: why do people cling to the author of their suffering? One survivor offers a grim rationale: “We would have fought the same way anyway… because it’s easier to tolerate violence from our own people than from foreigners.”

The book’s first half - covering collectivization, the liquidation of kulaks, and the Great Terror - feels deeper and more cohesive than the postwar chapters. Still, Figes’s attempt to frame the war as a dividing line is compelling. Postwar society, he argues, remembered not the suffering but the unity forged against Hitler, even as repression persisted in subtler forms.

The final chapters examine reactions to Stalin’s death: hope tempered by dread, as no one knew what would follow. Survivors had adapted to fear so thoroughly that its absence was disorienting. This is perhaps the book’s most chilling insight - that human beings can grow accustomed to any cruelty. State terror, given time, becomes ordinary.

The Whisperers is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand Russian society and the psychology of survival under totalitarianism. Its absence in Russian translation - and Figes’s status as an “un-person” there - speaks volumes about its power. Like his earlier Natasha’s Dance, this work combines scholarly rigor with narrative grace, but here the tone is darker, the questions more haunting. How does a society endure decades of violence and still whisper words of love to its oppressor? Figes does not offer easy answers.

Perry Mason 157: Cool & Lam and Connoisseurs

Note: As a child of the Sixties, I’ve always believed that what’s neglected or off the beaten path is cool. If something becomes wildly popular, I suspect it must have lost some of its edge - though I admit there are exceptions, like The Name of the Rose, a work of philosophy that somehow managed to be a best-selling novel.

Cool & Lam and Us Connoisseurs

Erle Stanley Gardner’s Cool and Lam books? They’re the B-side of his career, the deep cut we hardcore readers brag about knowing while everyone else hums the Perry Mason theme. Mason was Gardner’s platinum-selling run of singles: courtroom pyrotechnics, nice clothes, and a TV franchise that ran longer than many marriages. Radio, comic strips, articles in TV Guide - Mason was the brand, the icon, the guy who made courtroom pyrotechnics look like a well-tailored suit. America ate it up because America loves a hero who wins on logic and showbiz and never sweats saving the innocent from The Combine.

Cool and Lam? Forget it. No TV blitz, no radio soap, no Hollywood movies however bad. Just two oddballs in print: Bertha Cool, a bulldozer dripping in diamonds, and Donald Lam, a bantamweight disbarred lawyer who solves cases by seeing the legalities sideways. Try dumping that into mid-century American living rooms on Sunday night versus Bonanza. In the late Fifties and early Sixties America wanted its morality without nuance and its courtroom drama reassuring. Cool and Lam were built for laughs, for folks who grokked Catch-22 and One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Cool and Lam lived where ethics fray and human folly struts buck naked. That’s not prime-time material; that’s cult territory.

Branding killed them, too. Mason was marketed as the lawyer-detective supreme, a beacon of brilliance and virtue. Cool and Lam? They were the cool older cousins who unexpectedly show up at the family Christmas party and show signs of having an anarchic sense of humor fueled by psychedelics. Publishers and studios pumped Mason like he was the cure for polio, leaving Cool and Lam to hustle on their own dime. Result: Mason becomes a household deity; Cool and Lam roam the shadows.

And yet - here’s the kicker - the cognoscenti know better. We dig Cool and Lam because they punk the hard-boiled formula. Lam’s wiry intellect jousts with Cool’s blunt-force pragmatism. These books don’t have a narrative arc like Mason novels; they riff on ambiguity, nothing stays still for long. Writer Scott Bradfield brilliantly nails it:

Mason bends the law (within limits that the law allows), but he doesn’t break it. Cool and Lam, on the other hand, treat the law with almost brutal disregard: they lie to the cops and their clients and disturb crime scenes by removing (sometimes destroying) significant evidence and planting fake evidence and alibis. They seem to assume that the law  -  like the many grifters and con games they encounter, from salted gold mines to rigged slot machines, automobile insurance fraudsters, and insider trading - is just a game. And that whatever laws they don’t break were probably broken to begin with.

Families implode, business ethics wobble, and Gardner implies "A free mind, my friend, doesn’t get tangled up in nonsense not in its power. Be the Lam: see clearly, act kindly, and don’t let prejudice or anger drive the bus. Pack four virtues in your pocket and don a calm expression that says, ‘I’ve seen worse.’" If Mason is unpredictable but trustworthy Brubeck, Cool and Lam are bebop - fast, crooked, and sly while being kinda dumb. 

Bottom line: if you crave complexity, irony, and a worldview that doesn’t come shrink-wrapped in excellence, Cool and Lam are your jam. Mason may own the marquee, but Cool and Lam own the underground. And that’s where the real music plays, for we happy few anyway.

Perry Mason 156: TCOT Postponed Murder

Note: The manuscripts for two full-length Perry Mason novels were discovered in Erle Stanley Gardner's papers after his death in 1970:  The Case of the Fenced-In Woman and the story reviewed below. It’s hard to date when he wrote this, since Gardner carefully avoided topical references, but he does mention a yacht auto-pilot system which was probably available to the filthy rich after WWII, in the 1950s.

Perryisms to Live by: When I start unraveling a mystery, I can’t seem to find a brake. Every time I put my foot down, it hits the throttle.

The Case of the Postponed Murder – Erle Stanley Gardner

Mae Farr walks into Perry Mason’s office with a story as thin as a dime. She says she’s her sister, a candy-shop girl in a Northern California burg. Mason knows she’s fibbing. But she’s in a jam, and Mason likes jams - especially when they come with good eggs who’ve made bad choices. Her plea? Stop Penn Wentworth, a wealthy playboy with a yacht and a hobby of stalking “her sister” (herself).

Paul Drake, Mason’s gumshoe, digs up the dirt: Mae’s wanted for forging a fat check. The check bore Penn’s signature. Penn, a bookie with champagne tastes, throws parties on his yacht. Did Mae forge his name - or did someone forge hers? Mason files that under “Things to Ponder.”

Penn barges in, full of indignation and cologne, claiming Mae forged his name. Enter Harold Anders, a rancher with muck on his boots and love in his heart, ready to shake Penn’s tree for pestering Mae.

Soon Mason is summoned to Della Street’s apartment, where Mae and Harold are holed up. Mae spins a yarn: aboard Penn’s yacht, she fought off his advances when - blam! - Penn was shot through the skylight. Harold, conveniently on the dock with a gun, slipped and took a swim. Mason ferries Mae back to the yacht, only to find it missing.

Harold tossed his gun near a hot-dog stand in the rain. Mason and Della hunt for it, fail. The police hunt for it, fail harder. Meanwhile, the yacht resurfaces, cruising on auto-pilot. Penn, once in his underwear, now fully dressed and very dead, sports a bullet hole and a fatal case of inter-cranial bleeding. How did he get there? Add his soon-to-be ex-wife Juanita -temperamental as a teapot - and her rich beau Sid Eversel, a pilot with a camera and a country mansion. Stir well.

The legal fireworks? A preliminary hearing before Justice Scanlon, a Justice of the Peace who never finished high school and thinks “due process” is a plumbing term. He hates long cross-examinations and technical twaddle. The case doesn’t hit a courtroom until the last ten pages, where Scanlon steals the show with his homespun rulings. Watching Mason steer him without Scanlon noticing is like watching a cat teach a dog to climb trees. Scanlon may be the most colorful judge Gardner ever minted.

Now, about Gardner: his descriptions are perfunctory, his character sketches thinner than a weasel. Nearly every word outside quotation marks could vanish without harm. Editing? It’s unknown if Gardner did his usual final checking and polishing on this late manuscript. But I doubt it. “Swell” pops up like dandelions and so does the antique Americanism “It suits me down to the ground.” Chapter breaks are as awkward as a drunk at a wedding: 40-page Chapter 11 and Chapter 12 with its weird break should’ve been sliced into four chapters. And strong-minded Mae’s sudden lifestyle switch at the end? Explained by the traditional notion that women are prone to change their minds for purely emotional reasons. Quaint, if you like your gender stereotypes smelling of trunks stored under basement steps.

Yet - yet! – Gardner’s novels race like a greyhound at Derby Lane: breakneck plots, courtroom pyrotechnics, two women that want to do it their way, dialogue that jabs and feints like prizefighters. Gardner’s magic lies not in polish but in pace. And that, dear reader, is swell.

Perry Mason 155: You Can Die Laughing

Note: We fans read Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason novels for his intricate plots and his magic at moving a story along. In contrast, we read the Cool and Lam novels for the energetic and engaging characters of Bertha Cool and Donald Lam. This outing, the 17^th in a body of work that can be read in any order, was released in 1957.

You Can Die Laughing – Erle Stanley Gardner writing as A. A. Fair

The PI team of Cool & Lam do their tango in this not quite hard-boiled kaleidoscope of L.A. Though the city does not quite become a character like Ross Macdonald’s Southern California, happily, all the usual elements are shoved back onstage wearing a louder neckties and sillier shoes: redheads that glow like neon beer signs, clients with the moral steadiness of politicians, property beefs, and the old standby, fear of scandal. But in this one, which feels more tightly packed than usual, the story is not so convoluted and the pace seems faster.

The book kicks off with Texan Lawton C. Corning: a raw‑boned pomade‑scented mogul with manure boots, latent motives, and a story that shifts faster than jukebox 45’s. He wants a woman found. Definitely no oil leases involved - pay no attention to that desolate parcel I want to buy. Lam buys none of it but takes the case anyway because the Cool & Lam business model is 1) get lied to, 2) get confused, 3) get in dutch with the cops, 4) get to the bottom of things, 5) get paid.

They find the woman before you can say “wait, what,” and she’s a comic‑strip bombshell straight from a teenage boy’s dingy backroom of a subconscious: red hair, blue eyes, a figure like Daisy Mae in Dogpatch. She speaks exclusively in Babe-speak. Suddenly her husband wants to sue Cool & Lam for defamation, the nosy neighbor forgets everything she claimed, and Lam smells something rotten.

Bertha Cool, owner-operator of a PI agency is not a feminist by ideology, politics, or inclination. She's not advocating equality and she’s certainly not mentoring other women. She’s too busy bulldozing through everyone - men, women, clients, cops, and her partner poor Donald Lam.

Bertha's temper visibly began to rise. "There are times when I could take this paper knife and cut your throat from ear to ear, Donald Lam! What the hell do you mean you rented her?"

One‑hundred‑sixty‑five pounds of managerial black hole, attracting trouble of all kinds inexorably toward her office. She’s insulted professionally and cosmically when clients assume B. Cool is a man, and she gets back by being tougher than any three Texan lunkheads. Meanwhile little Donald Lam, bantam sleuth and disbarred lawyer, skates on the edge of legality like a kid doing figure‑eights on late March ice. A real “brainy little bastard” - Bertha’s words - who irritates her into doing the right thing.

Granted this outing feels a little lightweight and more straightforward than we like, almost like an extended short story, but it is well worth reading for the interplay not only between Bertha and Donald but Donald and persons of interest.

Matinee Musings: The Devil's Holiday

Note: A good date movie if your sweetie has a demonstrated liking for Depression‑era morality plays.* It’s short, talky, and sincere. Nancy Carroll’s charm sparks conversation, and debating mercy and forgiveness afterward beats potentially explosive topics like who gets the dog if you break up.  “Do you think redemption should come from love, honesty … or just admitting everything before Act Three?”

The Devil's Holiday
1930 / 1:18
Tagline: “A fast and furious modern merry-go-round of falsehood and frame-ups romance and realism”
[youtube]

Directed by Edmund Goulding, this Pre-Code curio begins like yet another cynical take on The Way We Live Now circa the slough of the Depression. Nancy Carroll’s Hallie Hobart is a professional “nice girl,” a city-wise operator who parades as a respectable manicurist while at night sweet-talking prospects into the arms of salesmen hawking high-priced goods and services. She takes her tidy three percent, thank you, for social engineering with a smile. Under the gimlet eye of Ned Sparks’ middle-man Charlie - every line a staccato calculation - Hallie meets Phillips Holmes’ David Stone, a hayseed innocent with a backbone stiffened by a sanctimonious papa (Hobart Bosworth, who outdoes Raymond Massey in East of Eden for granite-faced and unyielding, yet vulnerable).

Carroll is the picture - full stop. There’s wit in her eyes and fatigue behind it, a practiced brightness giving way to something close to conscience. It’s that flicker - call it soul, call it wise mind - that keeps Hallie from becoming just another fast-talking moll in a coarse-talking picture. Holmes is earnest and serviceable, with Carroll in the first of three pairings (Stolen Heaven, Broken Lullaby). Bosworth brings the heavy furniture of morality - the kind that includes being tolerant but not too. And terrific Sparks, of course, clicks and clacks with stone-hearted efficiency, a business shark whose pulse can be read on the Dow.

What Goulding serves up, beneath the fancy duds and eternal hustling, is a moral melodrama that refuses to be priggish even as it inches toward repentance. Sin here isn’t a single slip; corner cutting becomes a habit. Hallie’s mistake isn’t merely the masquerade of manicurist for escort - it’s the gradual giving up of her own Iowa standards and how imperceptibly she’s learned to keep feeling and thinking severely apart. The film’s shrewder than its plot suggests. The movie understands that normalization of deviance - a.k.a. losing your ethical way - rarely arrives all at once; it creeps in through small compromises, each one nudging the next, until a single, grotesque transgression begins to look reasonable. Like love, self-deception and destructive habits have a way of stealing up on you.

Redemption, when it arrives, is coaxed out - painfully - through recognition of guilt. Hallie, ashamed, realizes she can’t leave David. But Goulding doesn’t kid us movie-goers. Reconciliation is messy, shame is paralyzing. The film gets across that atonement isn’t a solo act, it happens in a web of human connections - someone else has to listen, with an open heart, and forgive. 

So, it is worth seeing even though the wonderful ZaSu Pitts is only in the opening scene, playing her usual switchboard operator. Black actor Oscar Smith plays a bellhop in a brief scene but he is given no lines so his dysfluency isn’t used for outdated comic relief. The movie is worth seeing for Nancy Carrol’s Oscar-nominated performance, a quiet triumph. She lost the Best Actress award to Norma Shearer, who was phenomenal in The Divorcee.

________________________________________________________________________________

* What do you mean this population numbers about a dozen movie-goers? Picture me looking as dumb-founded as Philip Seymour Hoffman in Twister when hysterical Jamie Gertz was castigating the storm chasers, “You people are all crazy!”

Perry Mason 154: Happy Birthday Erle Stanley Gardner

Erle Stanley Gardner, July 17, 1889 – March 11, 1970

Let’s not pretend Erle Stanley Gardner was a stylist. He wasn’t, and - God bless him - he knew it. Gardner said the trick was to keep writing and learn from the lumps you take from the critics. That’s not artful, but it’s honest, and honesty is a fair beginning for a man who made his living by putting fictional clients in dutch with the law and getting them off.

Gardner is kin to the popular mystery writers who sell by the carload. He shares their thrift with words. His vocabulary sometimes looks like a pantry half-stocked: two trusty adverbs - “abruptly” and “evidently” - like salt and pepper, forever at hand. Faces turn into “masks,” eyes “twinkle” on cue, and the prose keeps time about as well as a drummer with mittens. If you’re waiting for rhythm or atmosphere, you’ll miss your train. Gardner isn’t painting Hawaiian moonlight like Biggers; he’s pouring clues and stuff like “law of agency,” one after another, and trusting hardcore readers will keep up.

Characterization? He pares it to the rind. Folks in these books are not so much people as types with mannerisms. Perry Mason, thinking hard, jams his thumbs into the armholes of his vest and paces. Paul Drake, taking ease, slings both legs over the chair arm like a man born in a furniture warehouse. And Los Angeles - though it’s nearly always the scene - is more Zoom background than character. It doesn’t sweat, menace, or sing the way Simenon’s Paris does, or push the plot like Ross Macdonald’s Southern California. It’s a set with a fine supply of doors for suspects to enter and exit.

The books have grown quaint, which is a polite way to say they creak. A modern reader bumps into the museum pieces: cuspidors, carbon paper, hat boxes, gladstone bags, and a hunt for telephones that would make a millennial wonder. The idioms (as right as a rivet) smell of attic trunks; the jobs and fashions arrive with a grin and a question mark. You can laugh; Gardner will not be offended. He didn’t come to win the Pulitzer. He came to keep the plot moving.

Even the names have dust on them. In The Case of the Daring Decoy the roll call sounds like a high-toned tea: Gifford, Rosalind, Mildred, Evangeline, Norton, Ruth. Call me a lumbering oaf of the old school, but I find it easier to make a Phyllis an aunt than a siren.

Why read Gardner, then? Because the man built something solid where it matters. Perry Mason is a lunch‑pail champion in a sharp suit. He is the lawyer as fighter, not functionary. He doesn’t let the chips fall; he kicks them back onto the table and argues the dealer into a new shuffle. Judges, district attorneys, cops - good, bad, and indifferent - stand between the client and daylight, and Mason shouldered through on behalf of folks without friends in high places. He’s a private man pitched against public machinery, and he keeps his elbows out.

There’s a nostalgia in it, and not only for hat closets. When I was little kid in the Sixties, Americans had a talent for Hell, No. They argued, they balked, they took a dim view of orders barked by any overbearing blowhard in a uniform. The fashion now is for agreeable virtues - tolerant, sensitive, flexible, mindful - which often read, in office life, as polite ways to be steamrolled by The Combine. Mason is tonic against that. He reminds you that somebody can still put up a fight without being all resilient about it.

Make no mistake: Gardner’s world is not polite society with the silver laid. But while the blackmail and murder are grimy and the motives are sharp - greed, jealousy, desire - the tone generally refuses the abyss. There’s less sadism than sweat. If the rooms reek with cigarette smoke, the moral air is still breathable. Gardner worked a long time in the real world - law offices, boxing gyms, vacationed in auto camps to keep in touch with the folks - and he knew how mines and banks operate. That knowledge gives the stories their ballast. The world is tough as taxes and, in some corners, gone to seed.

Where Gardner shines is the old practical magic: plotting. He hustles. He stacks incidents like plates in a diner rush, and somehow gets them all to the right table in time for the courtroom fireworks. If you’re after escape, he’s company to keep. Say what you will about Kipling, Maugham, Simenon, Ian Fleming - these are the writers you blushingly confess to enjoying, writing what Orwell called “good bad books.”

As to the grand judgment, Raymond Chandler, in his letters, tipped his hat to Gardner’s knack for building a case you had to turn the pages to resolve.

That intensity may be a matter of style, situation, character, emotional tone, or idea. ... It may also be a perfection of control over the movement of a story similar to the control a great pitcher has over the ball. That is to me what you have more than anything else and more than anyone else. ... Every page throws the hook for the next. I call this a kind of genius.

 

The Ides of Robert Florey: Meet Boston Blackie

Note: Chester Morris said the character Boston Blackie wrecked his career but it was also a comeback vehicle for him. Possessing an effortless urbanity, a sly wit, and the sort of raffish charm that no studio publicity department could manufacture, Morris transformed a dependable series of B-picture programmers into something far more enduring. His Blackie moved through the criminal underworld with the confidence of a man who knew all its angles, yet retained the likability that kept audiences firmly in his corner. 

Meet Boston Blackie
1941 / 1:00
Tagline: “SPIES STALK CONEY ISLAND!”
[internet archive]

Boston Blackie is one of those distinctly American creations who could only flourish in the movies: a gentleman crook who violates the law with enthusiasm while remaining, somehow, more trustworthy than many of the men charged with enforcing it. Safecracker, magician, improvisational escape artist, and amateur criminologist, Blackie occupies that narrow strip of moral real estate between outlaw and civic benefactor. He steals when necessary, lies when convenient, and yet remains possessed of a code that makes him more honorable than the respectable citizens forever trying to pin something on him.

Like all great pulp heroes, he survives less by brute force than by velocity of thought. Problems arise, policemen bluster, villains scheme, and Blackie simply moves faster than everyone else. He treats danger as an irritating interruption and authority as a puzzle to be solved. One gets the sense that if locked in a bank vault, handcuffed to a radiator, and guarded by a platoon of armed men, he would emerge ten minutes later carrying the guard captain's wallet and offering instructions on improving workplace efficiency.

Director Robert Florey, that French stylist who brought visual sophistication to even the most modest productions, attacks the material with energy bordering on mischief. The camera rarely sits still when it can climb, lean, peek, or swoop instead. It observes the action from improbable angles, transforming ordinary fairground attractions into looming structures of menace. The midway becomes a maze. The carnival rides become mechanical monsters. Even a simple walkway seems laden with threat when filtered through Florey's restless imagination.

The amusement park itself emerges as the film's true star. By daylight these places promise cotton candy, first romances, and indigestion from regrettable food choices. By night they become dreamscapes of blinking lights and distorted shadows. The Tunnel of Love, ordinarily the setting for awkward courtship, is repurposed into a stage for pursuit and violence. Murder lurks behind painted scenery. Romance and danger occupy neighboring compartments in the same little boat.

Naturally there are chases, because a crime picture without a chase is rather like a circus without elephants. Massive automobiles thunder across the screen with the invulnerability enjoyed only by vehicles in 1940s motion pictures. Fire hydrants explode into geysers. Tires squeal. Nobody ever seems concerned about insurance claims. The laws of physics are suspended in favor of spectacle, and the audience is all the happier for it.

The police fare less well. They are not corrupt so much as chronically exasperated. Their threats are colorful, their patience limited, and their investigative methods frequently eclipsed by Blackie's intuition. Once again the hero finds himself trapped in that familiar predicament of knowing more than the authorities while simultaneously being suspected by them. It is a formula as old as the series itself, but like a favorite tune, its familiarity is part of the pleasure.

Comic relief arrives in the form of The Runt, who functions somewhere between valet, sidekick, accomplice, and mobile source of confusion. Mercifully, the humor supports rather than derails the narrative. No one behaves like a refugee from a different movie. The jokes emerge naturally from character and situation, allowing the suspense to remain intact.

What ultimately makes the picture work is its breezy faith in intelligence, adaptability, and personal freedom. Blackie wins not because he possesses official authority but because he possesses ingenuity. In a world crowded with crooks, bureaucrats, and blunderers, he survives through wit, nerve, and optimism. The result is an entertaining little thriller that moves briskly, looks splendid, and offers a reminder that sometimes the fox is more admirable than either the hounds pursuing him or the wolves he is hunting.

Perry Mason 153: Trust the Process?

Note: People often want others to like what they like because it validates their own choices, fosters a sense of belonging, and allows them to share the enjoyment of experiences. While these impulses are deeply rooted in human nature, the motivations behind them vary from person to person. For my part, I would hate to see Erle Stanley Gardner's work fade into obscurity the way Mignon Eberhart's novels largely have. At the same time, I recognize that this is a natural process: yesterday's popular authors are often forgotten as tastes change and new generations of readers find different stories that speak to them. That said, my sense of identity is not tied to my reading preferences. If someone mocks or dismisses the books I enjoy, I do not take it as a personal affront. Readers are free to like what they like, and just as importantly, they are under no obligation to defend their tastes to anyone else.

Trust the Process? Tell That to TikTok: Perry Mason Meets Today’s Inveterate Institutional Skepticism

A modern reader can walk into a Perry Mason novel carrying a certain amount of suspicion. The police may be mistaken. The prosecutor may be overconfident. The legal system may be tilted in ways that produce bad outcomes. In many contemporary stories, that's the starting point.

Then along comes Perry Mason.

Mason lives in a world where the problem is not that objective reality is unknowable, but that those in authority repeatedly fail to recognize the truth. Witnesses lie or are just mistaken and think they are telling truth. Police jump to conclusions. Circumstantial evidence points in the wrong direction. The authorities become convinced of a theory and stop looking. Mason's job is to keep looking.

That distinction matters. Gardner's novels run on faith in process. Not blind faith, and certainly not faith in authority, but faith that careful investigation, logical reasoning, and relentless questioning can eventually force reality to reveal itself. Mason will occasionally bend a rule, but usually in the spirit of a mechanic tweaking an engine. He isn't trying to blow up the machine. He wants to make it work properly.

This helps explain why Mason remains such an appealing character. He's a virtuoso. He notices what everyone else misses. He asks the question nobody thought to ask. He walks into situations that appear hopelessly tangled and patiently begins pulling on the right threads. A large part of the pleasure of reading Gardner comes from watching smarts and expertise in action.

What Gardner is selling, however, is not cynicism. Mason spends an extraordinary amount of time exposing police mistakes, prosecutorial overreach, and official complacency. Yet the novels never suggest that justice is impossible or that the system is irredeemably corrupt. Their criticism is corrective rather than destructive.

The structure of the stories makes this clear. A case begins with appearances pointing firmly in one direction. The wrong suspect is arrested. The evidence seems overwhelming. The authorities congratulate themselves on a quick solution. Then Mason starts asking questions. More facts emerge. Assumptions fall apart. The picture changes.

The remedy is almost always the same: more investigation, more scrutiny, and better reasoning.

That is why the courtroom in a Gardner novel is not a sham or a theatrical backdrop. It is the place where error is tested. The drama comes from watching a flawed process gradually become a more accurate one.

A skeptical reader might reasonably object that Mason's victories are individual rather than systemic. He clears one innocent client at a time; he does not reform society. Fair enough. But that limitation is precisely what keeps the books from becoming cynical. They do not argue that the law is a fraud. They argue that the law is a human tool - imperfect, sometimes misused, but still capable of producing justice when placed in competent hands.

Gardner's underlying optimism can feel almost old-fashioned today. The enduring appeal of Perry Mason lies in that optimism. Gardner's novels insist that mistakes, biases, and institutional failures are real, but they also insist that truth remains discoverable and that determined individuals can compel authorities to recognize it. The books are not warnings about collapse; they are arguments for the power of reason, preparation, and persistence to make imperfect institutions work better.