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.

Perry Mason 152: TCOT Vagabond Virgin

Note: How could anyone not finish a novel whose first chapter poses this immortal question: “Can you put a virgin in jail as a vagrant?” That’s not just a hook - it’s a literary speed bump that makes you slam the brakes and say, “Wait…what?” You know you’re in for a ride when Chapter One sounds like a cross between a law textbook and a bad pickup line.

The Case of the Vagabond Virgin - Erle Stanley Gardner

John Racer Addison had everything: wealth, power, and a name that blew open doors in the world of big retail. But success breeds enemies, and Addison was about to learn that the price of privilege could be murder.

It began innocently enough. Returning from a business trip, Addison gave a ride to Veronica Dale - a girl with platinum hair, wide blue eyes, and a story that tugged at his conscience. She had traveled far, had no money, and looked heartbreakingly vulnerable. Addison arranged a hotel room for her, alone, and slipped her some cash. It was an act of kindness. Or so he thought.

Hours later, Veronica was arrested for vagrancy - the arresting officer figured she would be safer in jail than the mean streets of L.A. Addison panicked. A scandal could destroy him. He called Perry Mason - the man who could turn disaster into triumph. Mason sprung the girl, and soon Veronica was working in Addison’s department store (remember those?), selling hosiery and flashing that innocent smile. 

Then came Eric Hansell. Red-haired, smooth-talking, and rotten to the core. He threatened Addison with a headline that could ruin him: “Department Store Tycoon Sets Up Blonde in Love Nest.” Addison saw his empire crumbling. He turned to Mason, and together they plotted to outwit the blackmailer.

But before the plan could unfold, Addison’s partner - Edgar Z. Ferrell - was found dead. Murdered. And Addison was the prime suspect.

The courtroom became a battlefield. Hamilton Burger, pompous and preening, thought he had Mason cornered. He didn’t. Mason played his cards with icy precision, dismantling the prosecution piece by piece. The climax was pure Gardner - a twist so audacious it left the jury gasping and Burger fuming.

This 1948 novel isn’t just a whodunit. It’s a study in greed, lust, and the fragile veneer of respectability. Addison, impulsive and irritable, is vivid in his desperation. Veronica, the girl who could topple empires with a smile, is a reminder that beauty has unintended consequences in this wacky world. Even Sergeant Holcomb, arrogant and ominous, adds a note of menace to the mix.

Gardner doesn’t waste time on psychology - his characters live in the moment, driven by fear, anger and desire. But in this story, they leap off the page - unusual for Gardner characters to be so life-like. Yes, the ending may feel rushed, but the journey is pure thrill - a glittering cocktail of sex, money, and murder.

Matinee Musings: Among the Missing

Note: In City Limits (1934) two homeless guys teach a tycoon to enjoy life. In Hitchhike Lady (1935) two women meet on the road and form a heart-warming bond. Midnight Mary (1933) is a fast, economical crime melodrama with a tough shell but a tender center – the heroine’s longing for a better life and real connection gives the film its emotional weight. This is another little movie of the time, forgotten, with a big soul.

Among the Missing
1934 / 1:06
Tagline: “His life was a crooked path until he crossed the path of romance!”
[youtube]

This wonderful little tale is the kind of modest studio picture that slips past you if you’re looking only for Pre-Code naughtiness. But it rewards attention with an intelligence determined not to be limited by technical hassles. At a time when early sound films were still hugging the safety of their padded, echo-proof interiors, Columbia’s programmers were not expected to take risks.

Yet here is a film that ventures out into Los Angeles at night - into its streets, its shadows, its semi-smoggy air - and comes back with something like authenticity. The city is an authentic space. The dim pools of streetlight, the casual movement of passersby, the clutter of exterior life all lend the film a kind of immediacy that studio-bound contemporaries rarely achieve. There is less theatrical posing, more observation; less contrivance, more texture. The result is a tone that feels unexpectedly modern - grittier, yes, but also more genuine.

But also humane. That humanity is most striking in the film’s curious marriage of hardboiled criminality and domestic melodrama. Jewel thieves, in the 1930s imagination, belong to a Raffles world of speed, elan, and hard edges. Yet Among the Missing deposits them in a space that insists on pots on the stove, on swept floors, on bowls of home-made doughnuts. The antique store is not merely a front for fencing stolen jewelry; it becomes, under the influence of an old lady on the run from exploitation, a home. The transformation is effected by Aunt Martha (Henrietta Crosman), and here the film’s real originality asserts itself. Not a victim, she is, rather, a moral force - quiet, observant, busy and full of practical wisdom.

Driven from her nephew’s household by petty ingratitude, Martha wanders around Los Angeles and, by narrative coincidence that doesn’t feel forced, into the orbit of two thieves running an antique shop as a front. If the setup sounds like boilerplate, the execution is anything but. The crooks – Tommy (Richard Cromwell), all callow entitlement and impulsive resentment; the English cutter of jewels (Ivan Simpson), perpetually dissatisfied; and the older Gordon (Arthur Hohl), wily and watchful - are sharply drawn types. They expect to use Martha as camouflage, a harmless old housekeeper to deflect suspicion. Instead, they find themselves subject to her steady gaze.

Martha cooks. She cleans. She makes pancakes. These gestures, simple and unadorned, begin to erode Tommy’s carefully cultivated hardness. She recognizes more than he intends to reveal, and he senses it. Tommy bristles under her scrutiny, interpreting her concern as interference, her double-edged remarks about living in a “big house” as baleful prediction.

Yet it is precisely in these exchanges - half domestic nagging, half moral instruction - that the film finds its tension. Martha does not sermonize; she assumes Tommy has a conscience somewhere and speaks to it. She turns the police away when necessary, protecting Tommy even as she reminds him Judy (Billie Seward) is too nice a girl to be allied with a thief who is prison bound, creating a space in which gratitude, guilt, and the possibility of change can coexist.

The hideout, then, becomes something more than a backdrop for crime. It is a moral arena, like anyplace can be should a movie-goer want to frame it that way.* Martha’s belief in Tommy - her insistence that he can imagine a life beyond grand theft and incarceration - introduces an emotional counterpoint that reminds us everybody counts and everything they do counts too. The film never lets Tommy entirely off the hook; he remains petulant, self-justifying, and only intermittently responsive until he sees the cold hard facts about his partners in crime.

In lesser hands, this blend of grit and gentility might dissolve into syrup. Here, it’s persuasive. The Los Angeles nights give the film its edge; Aunt Martha gives it its conscience. Between them, Among the Missing becomes something unexpectedly resonant: a small film with a big heart, in keeping with Oscar Wilde’s radical notion that “Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.”

* I thus give away my entire philosophy of movie reviewing in a phrase.

The Nones of Robert Florey: Registered Nurse

Note: A moralist like me must object that this movie blurs standards of sexual propriety and professional ethics. Its plot involves prostitution, venereal disease, and undercover deception, portraying a nurse entangled with criminals. Such themes, handled sensationally for melodrama, could be seen as undermining respectability, chastity, and trust in medical professionals generally. But .. Bebe Daniels! She’s so likable she could over-charge me for a second melodrama sandwich and I’d thank her for the privilege. Bebe Daniels! Bebe Daniels!

Registered Nurse
1934 / 1:03
Tagline: “A blazing closeup of nurses in love - and the men who take their kisses!”
[internet archive]

This Pre-Code melodrama is set in a hospital with a focus on the nursing staff. The head nurse and the Mama of a brothel compare notes on recruitment and retention of “good girls” for staff. The Mama complains “Ya know, your best girls are always leaving ya, setting up in business for themselves. Sometimes right across the street.”

“It's one of those businesses that just runs itself,” the Mama says. “You know, it just rolls on and on and on.” Contrast the placid uneventfulness of a sporting house with the hospital’s churning soap opera. In a moment of indiscretion, the Mama lets on that she recognizes an intern as a patron of her “establishment,” to a nurse’s suspicious surprise. 

Not just sex, but death too. A little boy dies before he can bring his dog to visit his favorite nurse. A mother dies, survived by four small children. A young hoodlum shoots dead a policeman who was going to marry one of the nurses as soon as they had enough money.

Using this fatal shooting in support of his argument not to postpone anything in this cycle of suffering and rebirth, Dr. Lyle Talbot seduces Nurse Bebe Daniels with the tried and true line “Life is short and uncertain.” Poor Bebe is in a bad way because New York family law prohibits her from divorcing an incurably insane spouse.

“Whoever figures out these things,” observes the head nurse, “makes a hash of it,” which seems to me to be a swipe at both New York politicians and the author of all things. But cynicism and nihilism, we movie-goers know well, come with the territory in a Pre-Code picture.

The movie does not try to look like a documentary but succeeds in appearing “slice of life,” a look and feel that Warner Brothers went for in the early Thirties. Violent drunks in the emergency room. Gangsters and madams beating each other up. In the cafeteria, doctors make non-medical staff turn green with descriptions of “dirty” operations of infected organs. Nurses constantly smoking in no-smoking areas is a running joke. Nurse Bebe smacks out of control patients to enculturate American values. “Hey! Dames don’t slap me where I come from!” immigrant crook Sidney Toler gripes in an unidentifiable accent. And Bebe answers, “If you don’t behave yourself, I’ll slap you so hard you’ll forget where you came from.”

Granting the picture looks gritty enough, we still have questions about its tenuous relationship with what we laughingly refer to as reality. Did nurses really wear shoes with high heels at work? Why does gangster Sidney Toler stay in the hospital when he has only a broken leg? Was beacon of civilization New York really a state that disallowed mental incompetence or insanity as grounds for divorce?* Given that the first lobotomy in the USA was not performed until 1936, what surgery was going to cure certain psychoses in 1934? Did medical staff really don their formal wear for a party for a couple getting married? Did doctors really talk about “how far” they’ve gotten (“Have you got to first base?” “I’m still on the bench with her.”)? Was there really a cocktail called the bosom caresser “because it warms you all the way down?”

Bebe Daniels of the gorgeous voice has forlorn facial expressions that’re fetching. She has the ability to be still and yet give off energy that grabs the attention – maybe she transferred that knack from dance or the silents. Kind, clever, unstoppable - sigh. 

Sidney Toler is a gangster that the madam (Irene Franklin) calls a “big begonia.” He’s more sinister than flowering and the movie-goer can assume for him violence is the first resort. Directed by a film noir pioneer, Robert Florey, the movie is often visually striking, with odd camera angles, intense close-ups, night scenes and great use of light.

As an example of another Pre-Code element about this movie, a suicide is treated as the ghost in the machine that makes everything turn out hunky-dory. The most Pre-Code thing is that all the characters are OK with suicide tying everything up with a nice little bouquet. So the amoral atmosphere is not exactly for the kiddish at heart.

* In fact, yes, adultery was the only grounds allowed for a very long time in not only the great state of New York.

Perry Mason 151: Gorilla at Large

Note: In a newspaper interview Raymond Burr described his school years as “not particularly happy ones.” “When you’re a little fat boy in a public school, or any kind of school, he said, “you’re just persecuted something awful.” He learned to control himself probably because he realized he’d be fighting all the time if he didn’t. He developed preternatural powers of concentration, which in his acting life made him study scenes to the point where he seemed comatose: “He’s not looking at you, you’re just there,” said fellow actor Barbara Hale. “I was just a fat heavy,” Burr told journalist James Bawden in 1993. “I split the heavy parts with Bill Conrad. We were both in our twenties playing much older men. I never got the girl but I once got the gorilla in a 3-D picture called Gorilla at Large.”

Gorilla at Large
1954 / 1:23
Tagline: “The hate-beast who lives to kill is loose!”
[internet archive]     

Raymond Burr gets top billing as Cyrus Miller, the proprietor of the delightfully named Garden of Evil amusement park, and he attacks the role with considerably more gusto than the script probably deserves. Burr was one of those actors who never seemed capable of giving less than a professional performance, and here he lends Miller a mixture of authority, resentment, and wounded pride that keeps the character interesting even when the plot threatens to wander off and trash all its commitments.

There are moments when one suspects Brother Ray took the assignment partly to cash a check and partly to remind Hollywood that he could do more than glower ominously from the sidelines. If so, the gamble pays off. He finds several shades to play: the calculating showman, the suspicious husband, and ultimately a man whose certainty gives way to disappointment and despair. Burr was always better than many of the projects he appeared in, and this is one of those occasions.

He is helped enormously by the supporting cast. Anne Bancroft, as the trapeze artist Mlle. Laverne, radiates danger in a remarkably compact package. She has the kind of presence that can make a room full of men forget their better judgment. Lee J. Cobb, meanwhile, stomps through the picture as a detective who delivers dialogue with such conviction that even the most improbable lines sound like pearls of wisdom. When he growls, “We’ve got two gorillas around here and one of them is a murderer,” resistance is futile.

Burr's performance works because he never tips his hand too early. Miller begins as a chilly, manipulative operator, but Burr gradually reveals the insecurity beneath the bravado. His jealousy and hurt feel genuine. Particularly effective is the sequence in the police office where he struggles with the window; it is a small moment, but Burr's frustration and helplessness tell us more about the man than pages of dialogue could.

Nor can the film be dismissed merely as bargain-bin entertainment. The Technicolor is magnificent. The circus setting positively explodes with gaudy reds, blues, and yellows. Cameron Mitchell sports hair of such an enthusiastic copper-red hue that it deserves its own screen credit. Having slimmed down considerably, Burr cuts an impressively sharp figure in a succession of well-tailored blue suits.

And then there is Bancroft. Born Anna Maria Luisa Italiano, she possesses a smoldering presence that the camera clearly adores. When she sizes up Cameron Mitchell, her expression suggests she has just discovered another willing volunteer for a lifetime membership in the sucker club. John Tannen contributes a memorably slippery turn as a publicity man whose instincts for blackmail are almost as finely developed as his instincts for self-preservation.

Taken together, the performances, the color photography, and Burr's unexpectedly layered work elevate the picture above its lurid premise. One arrives expecting a curiosity. One leaves remembering Raymond Burr.

As for the Perry Mason connection, ape-keeper Peter Whitney played an ill-tempered farmer in TCOT Pathetic Patient, an irascible gangster in TCOT Stand-In Sister and a venerable sea captain in TCOT Wrongful Writ. He was one of those big guys that sadly don't last too long: he died of a heart attack in 1972 at the young age of 55. 

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]

The Kalends of Robert Florey: A Study in Scarlet

Note: As a young French boy, Robert Florey became obsessed with Hollywood movies in the silent era. He came to the US and became the King of B-Movies at Paramount, proud that he should bring craft to a studio system that churned out movies like sausage.

A Study in Scarlet
1933 / 1:11
Tagline: “SHERLOCK HOLMES Playing his Part in the Drama of Life-love and Dangerous Living!”
[internet archive]

The movie opens with a Robert Florey-type touch: we see a guy who’s been strangled through the broken glass of a railway carriage window. The death of Robert Murphy is ruled a suicide, though how exactly one strangles one’s self is left obscure. Sherlock Holmes is consulted by the widow Murphy, who is miffed at being left penniless by her husband’s executor.

Murphy was a member of a secret society. The Scarlet Ring is headed by lawyer Thaddeus Merrydew. The terms of membership in the society are that the assets of any of its deceased members will be divided among the remaining members (widows are left in the cold).

Who in their right mind, the movie-goer wonders again, would belong to such a society given that it is unsurprising when members start exiting this vale of tears before their time, helped along by gunshots? When Captain Pyke is shot, Sherlock Holmes focuses on his mysterious Chinese widow (Anna May Wong) as well as the nasty Merrydew. Other members are put in a dying way: Malcom Dearing first, then Mr. Baker. There is also an attempt on the life of young Eileen Forrester, who became a reluctant society member upon the death of her father. She engaged to a guy so dumb that she gets kidnapped when he is tricked.

Reginald Owen is a 20th century Sherlock Holmes. He has the manner of a successful business executive, which does not comport with my image of a believable Holmes. I mean, Holmes ought to have a slight whiff of eccentricity and instability whereas Owen always has his feet on the ground. Dr. Watson takes a minimal part and he's stuck in the Victorian era. The English actors have that offhand manner of being offensive that makes American rudeness seem merely out of ignorance. I mean, the English can act like cold bloody monsters with no effort at all (in movies; in real life, they’re always ever so nice).

Gleefully wicked, Anna May Wong is smiling that inimitable “I’m gonna chop you up into little pieces” smile.  She’s well-dressed too, as usual. She could wear a poncho and look poised and elegant. She’s in the movie for 10 minutes, tops, and she’s her compelling self for every second.

The plot is nothing like the original novel. In another Robert Florey touch, the subjective camera is used when Marrydew is consulting a hit man. The secret passage is pretty cool as is the fog here and there. But the utter lack of music – didn’t the silence ring in 1935 like it rings in 2026? - seems strange.

European Reading Challenge #6

I read this for the European Reading Challenge 2026.

Death and the Dutch Uncle – Patricia Moyes

Released in 1968, this is the eighth mystery starring Henry and Emmy Tibbett. Having recently been promoted from Inspector to Superintendent, Henry is getting used to his new duties and his office in New Scotland Yard bit by bit.

A petty hood who worked in hotel kitchens between temping on individual heists gets himself shot dead in the restroom of a private bar. Henry is assigned to the investigation.

It happens, however, that Henry and Emmy host a dinner with the brother of the victim in Death on the Agenda. Gordon Trapp is suspicious over the sudden deaths of two judges on an international board which adjudicates border disputes between countries. He tells Henry the two judges were to vote on a case between two newly independent African countries. I’m giving nothing away because the veteran reader of mysteries already knows the two sudden deaths turn out to be murders.

Because Henry and Emmy find themselves immersed in an international conflict, this feels more to me like an out-and-out thriller than a detective story. Though stable middle-class people, the Tibbets didn’t mind getting into breathless action. So this thriller reminded me of Margery Allingham in Traitor’s Purse or Nicholas Blake in Smiler with a Knife or Victor Canning in The Python Project.

Moyes was a traveler so sometimes her mysteries are set in England touristy areas or foreign climes. For instance, Down Among the Dead Men had the backdrop of sailing on England’s East Coast and  Dead Men Don’t Ski was set in the Italian Alps. This one is set in rural Holland with scenery and houses rendered vividly. Moyes’ second husband was a linguist, so the character of the interpreter Gordan Trapp is persuasive. 

There's a diverse variety of people and places in Moyes’ books that makes them different from many mysteries. She still retains the deft characterization, plot twists, exciting climaxes and surprising reveals that we like in traditional police procedurals, before whodunnits got socially conscious, regional, lengthy and dark in the Seventies.

Perry Mason 150: The Fifties’ Finest

Note: Critics generally view the Perry Mason novels from the 1950s as emblematic of Gardner’s efficient, formula-driven storytelling - with noticeable strengths and predictable weaknesses.

The Fifties’ Finest: Three Perry Mason Must-Reads

The Case of the Moth-Eaten Mink (1952)
The only 1950s Mason novel to receive a perfect 5/5 rating on FictionDB. Widely celebrated for its clever plot twists, engaging courtroom scenes, and memorable characters.

Several Perry Mason mysteries begin in restaurants, where Mason is trying to make up to Della Street for the fact that he's once again forced her to work punishing hours. They are unwinding over martinis when trouble strikes. Waitress Dixie Dayton vanishes mid-shift, leaving a paycheck and a shabby mink coat.

Soon, someone tries to run her down, then shoots at her. After a hospital stay, she disappears again. Her anxious boss hires Mason to find out why. A pawn ticket in the mink leads Mason to Seattle, where Dixie pawned a diamond ring - and a gun tied to a cop’s murder. Her boyfriend becomes suspect number one, and the body count rises with another killing.

Gardner packs in oddities: lipstick messages, Mason as both defense counsel and witness, a shady Paul Drake operative, mob ties, and a finale where Lt. Tragg shows grit. Gardner’s style - fast tempo, dialogue-driven, twists - eschews lush description but delivers ingenuity within its narrow frame.

The Case of the One-Eyed Witness (1950)
Earned a 4.5/5 rating on FictionDB, marking it as one of the most highly-praised entries of the decade. Praised for its riveting mystery centered on an accidental eyewitness and Gardner’s trademark legal maneuvering.

What makes TCOT One-Eyed Witness stand out among Gardner’s 80 Perry Mason novels? This entry brims with period Americana: crowded movie theaters, soda fountains, pay phones, and nightclubs with orchestras, hat-check girls, and cigarette girls. Characters sport names like Medford and Myrtle and toss off vintage slang - “in a blue funk,” “hell’s half acre,” “You’ve got a lot of crust.” In a rare product placement, we find out Mason smokes Raleighs.

But nostalgia isn’t the whole story. Beneath the retro gloss lies a plot tackling issues that still resonate: human trafficking, scams exploiting racial prejudice, and systemic flaws in criminal justice - overreaching cops, shaky identifications, and misuse of circumstantial evidence.

Though famous for puzzles over atmosphere, Gardner here adds touches of mood and humor. A highlight: Mason and Paul Drake hiding in a Turkish bath from Lt. Tragg, who barges in fully clothed, demanding answers while they protest they’ll “catch their death” if they step into the cold. Fast-paced, dialogue-driven, and slyly topical, this novel offers more than nostalgia - it’s Gardner at his most inventive.

The Case of the Angry Mourner (1951)
Also rated 4.5/5 on FictionDB. Noted for its emotionally charged narrative, intricate legal tactics and the protagonist’s compelling inner turmoil.

Belle Adrian never imagined breaking into a house, but fear for her daughter Carlotta drove her there. Carlotta had been skiing with Arthur Cushing, a playboy in tweed now stuck in a wheelchair. Dinner at Arthur’s ended badly - he got fresh, Carlotta slapped him, and left.

Moments later, a gunshot shattered the night. Belle slipped into Arthur’s place and found him dead. Panicked, she cleaned up, fearing Carlotta had pulled the trigger.

But resort towns thrive on gossip, and neighbors saw Belle sneaking in. Carlotta, meanwhile, thought Belle had done the deed. Family loyalty changed into suspicion, and the sheriff stirred the pot.

Enter Perry Mason, vacationing nearby. Belle calls him but hides the truth - typical Mason client behavior. He listens, spots holes big enough for an ATV, and digs in. Gardner’s world moves fast: bold characters, sharp dialogue, and courtroom maneuvers slick as ice.

Evidence plays musical chairs between mother and daughter in a drama worthy of Debbie and Carrie. In this small town, secrets travel faster than a puppy jumps on cheese, and Mason’s skill is the only check on an innocent ending up in Q's smokehouse.

Perry Mason 149: Some Slips Don’t Show

Note: The Cool and Lam books – especially the later ones, like this 17^th one, from 1957 -  never got the shake they deserved. Twenty‑eight short novels, all sharp as a tack and as riotous as fun could be, and these days you’d be hard‑pressed to find many of them in e‑format. And very few reviews, even by bloggers hardcore enough to still be writing reviews of more than 100 words.

Some Slips Don’t Show – A. A. Fair (Erle Stanley Gardner)

Erle Stanley Gardner - moonlighting as A.A. Fair when he wasn’t busy with Perry Mason - built the series around two detectives with different values and styles. Bertha Cool is big, blunt, and manages money the way a mother bear guards her cubs. Donald Lam is small, quick, and feels loyalty to clients he doesn’t even like. Somehow, the partnership works. Usually.

The trouble this time starts with Barclay Fisher, who has the uneasy sense he might’ve made a fool of himself in San Francisco. He’d been there for a convention, had a few drinks - well, more than a few - and woke up on the couch of a blonde party girl named Lois Marlow. Barclay can’t remember if he crossed any of the lines that matter in marriage, but he’s sure his wife Minerva won’t appreciate the nuances. One poison pen letter hinting at infidelity and he’s toast.

Someone plans to send exactly that letter. Barclay comes to Cool & Lam with $500 - more than good money in 1957, $5800 nowadays - and the desperation of a man who knows his not broad-minded wife.

Bertha takes the case because five hundred dollars is five hundred dollars. Donald takes a plane to San Francisco because somebody has to do the legwork, and Bertha’s not built for travel. He meets Lois, who’s lovely, cooperative, and just mysterious enough to set off the little alarms Donald keeps tucked in the back of his mind. It turns out the blackmail is only the top layer of something knottier, and before long there’s a dead body, a few bad actors circling, and Donald catching heat from the police for his usual looking too sincere to be telling the truth.

All the elements that make the series hum are here: Bertha throwing her weight around, Donald tampering with evidence, and Gardner keeping the pace brisk. The setup echoes Nero Wolfe - big boss at the office, smaller assistant in the field - but Cool and Lam have their own rhythm, less refined but more combustible. Donald tells Lois, for example, “Bertha hates me.”

And in the middle of trying to keep a guilty husband from the ire of his humorless wife, Donald somehow inspires a modern artist to produce a masterpiece. It’s that kind of case: crooked, lively, and unmistakably Cool and Lam.

Perry Mason 148: TCOT Screaming Woman

Note: Maybe AAA got to Gardner about traffic safety but in this 1957 novel Mason - usually a menace behind the wheel, a busy man who treats speed limits as quaint suggestions - suffers a sudden conversion. To Paul Drake’s astonishment, Perry begins operating the vehicle like a Sunday-school teacher driving a car held together by paper clips. No screeching tires, no hairpin theatrics. Just calm, law-abiding motoring. Drake, who has spent years bracing for impact every time Mason shifted gears, is delighted he can finally uncoil his white knuckles.

The Case of the Screaming Woman - Erle Stanley Gardner

Super-lawyer Perry Mason carefully avoids disputes between spouses. But in this 1957 mystery he acquires a client because the client’s wife – probably due to bitter experience - doesn't believe for a minute her husband's tale. He says he just wanted to help a stranded damsel in the middle of the night and dropping her off at the Beauty Rest Motel. Well, dear, registering as husband and wife seemed like a good idea at the time. The unamused wife asks Perry Mason to cross-examine the confident hubby in order to prove his tale is full of holes.

The husband is a sales manager and trainer who has excessive confidence in his ability to overcome sales resistance and make people relish anything he wants them to swallow. During the interrogation, Mason finds the client is so up to his keister in suspicious circumstances that his lame story won’t wash.

Soon enough the relentless tentacles of the police tighten around the sales guy. Mason too finds himself in legal quicksand. Though he protests legal mires and more challenging and interesting, even his loyal confidential secretary Della Street wonders aloud if he can avoid being disbarred this time.

 Follow Mason as he blazes a trail to uncover black market adoptions, narcotics abuse and blackmail until he plays one last gambit in the climactic court-room scene.

Perry Mason 147: TCOT Musical Cow

Note: “Stand‑alone” is a slippery label with Erle Stanley Gardner – most of his so‑called one‑offs are really pulp‑era story collections in disguise. The only one of those I’ve tackled is Dead Men's Letters (1990), a posthumous batch of Ed “Phantom Crook” Jenkins tales. As for actual stand‑alone crime novels, I’ve read This Is Murder (1948). Another is the 1950 title reviewed below.

The Case of the Musical Cow – Erle Staley Gardner

Rob Trenton is innocent - naturally. But he’s also the sort of guy who accumulates incriminating circumstances the way some kids got “Kick Me” signs taped on them in school. He returns from Europe on a ship with a suspected dope smuggler. He drives the very car where the illicit goods are stashed. He happens to be at the murder scene, gets off two shots for good measure, and - oh yes - the cops recover his gun with two shells missing, the slugs in the deceased matching up as easily as colorful socks from the dryer. Add a sworn eyewitness pointing straight at him, and you’ve got yourself the sort of evidentiary dogpile that would make Perry Mason say, “Sorry, son, include me out.”

Gardner’s blurb writers bill this 1950 outing one as a new twist on the classic courtroom thriller, and for once the copy writers aren’t completely blowing bushwah. The trial sequence introduces a fresh hero model and enough procedural zigzags to keep even seasoned Perry-maniacs awake. And despite the author’s fondness of the far‑fetched - Gardner trusted his readers to just enjoy the ride - it all goes down surprisingly smooth. I, for one, enjoyed it enough to postpone sleep, which should count as an endorsement or a medical warning.

Is it a perfect stand-alone? Hardly. The first forty percent sways like a jet‑lagged tourist stepping off their first trans‑Pacific flight; only when Rob is hauled in does the plot finally decide to sprint. By the time the forensic specialist Dr. Dixon unspools his lecture on bullet mysteries, most hardcore mystery readers will already have pieced together the essentials. The characters themselves barely register, and some resolutions take place offstage with all the drama of this scribe re-writing an informed consent form.

But the courtroom scene - baby, that’s the payoff. Gardner brings the hammer down with precision and confidence, reminding you why millions of readers like us kept coming back. Flaws and all, it’s a brisk, fun ride - classic Gardner, complete with thin characters and his relentless use of full names.

Perry Mason 146: Stoic in a Snazzy Suit

Note: To us post-moderns ridden by teams and Teams at work, Erle Stanley Gardner’s stories drip with rugged individualism. His heroes - Perry Mason, Donald Lam, Doug Selby - are lone operators who bend rules to serve justice. Gardner’s world distrusts bureaucracy and prizes personal grit. 

Perry Mason: The Stoic in a Snazzy Suit

Perry Mason doesn’t quote Epictetus, but he lives by the Discourses and the Handbook. Strip away the quick wit, keen logic and courtroom theatrics and you find a man carved from Stoic granite: reason over protocol, duty over fame, and disdain for fees and the best tables in restaurants. His clients panic, the press howls, the prosecution breathes fire - and Mason remains unshaken. He knows what Marcus Aurelius advised: focus on what is up to you, don’t get caught up in what is not up to you. We have no power over what other people are going to do. But we do have domain over our thoughts, words, and actions.

Whoever got anything in life by being careful? Every time you stop to figure what the other fellow's going to do, you unconsciously figure what you'd do in his place. The result is that you're not fighting him, but yourself. You always come to a stalemate. Every time you think of a move, you think of a perfect defense. The best fighters don't worry about what the other man may do. And if they keep things moving fast enough, the other man is too busy to do much thinking. (TCOT Baited Hook)

Analysis of evidence, risk-taking, argument, timing, tolerance of frustration and distress - these are within his grasp. Public opinion? Police enmity? Flight of witnesses? Hot flirtatious persons of interest? Irrelevant noise.

Mason’s audacity is courage guided by his values. In adversity, he demonstrates the Stoic virtue of perseverance. His enjoyment of verbal sparring reflects the Stoic belief that there’s no learning or growth in easy victories, that conflict with a worthy opponent sharpens intellect and character. Yet he tempers his fighting spirit with magnanimity, showing respect even to prosecutors in their defeat - a reminder that virtue lies in conduct, fairness is treating both friend and foe with the dignity all human beings deserve.

Justice is his telos, the end toward which every stratagem aims. When the world tilts - when guilt looks inevitable - he doesn’t flinch. He adapts.  A Stoic doesn’t curse the rain; he uses his damn umbrella. Mason does the same, turning setbacks into leverage with a calm that says he practices radical acceptance. Courage will fuel optimism or help despondent clients steel themselves for the ordeal to come.

My experience has always been that these things look much worse than they actually are. In fact, I tell my clients that nine times out of ten they can say to themselves, 'Things are never as bad as they seem.' I admit things look black, but we're going to keep fighting, and don't you get discouraged. (TCOT Beautiful Beggar)

This ethos mirrors old ornery American values: simplicity, self-reliance, skepticism of authority, defiance of convention, rule-skirting and risk-taking and the unshakeable belief that one determined person can find the can-do to accomplish anything. Gardner’s plots celebrate brains, boldness and theatrics, making his characters embodiments of an American ideal - justice delivered not by committees or working groups or five men in a back room, but by a relentless individual who refuses to quit.

The Ides of Noir: Black Magic

Note: Probably taking on the part because it was not playing a heavy, Raymond Burr appears only in the opening scene. He’s his handsome self not only because of the trim beard but also he’s dressed to the nines as his “man about town” character has just gone to the opera in the Paris of 1848. He plays Dumas, Jr. who questions his father Dumas, Sr. about his latest writing project, a biography of the Italian adventurer Cagliostro in Paris during the run-up to the French Revolution.

Black Magic
1949 / 1:40
Tagline: “...It Will Hold You in its Spell!”
[internet archive]

The best thing going for the movie is its striking sets and film noir-influenced cinematography _ shadows, light, and mirrors everywhere. The traditional noir theme of doubling is cleverly used, with Karen Guild playing both Marie Antoinette and a young aristocrat caught in a treasonous plot. The costumes and opulent furnishings of the French courts are amazing, and Cagliostro’s palace is pretty cool. Even the seemingly hundreds of extras are superbly costumed.

The tone of the movie is out of control to the point of kooky. In this boiling cauldron of a film, many scenes have undeniable power - like the “I can afflict” moment, the live burial, and the swordfight. But there are also scenes that are hard to take seriously. Cagliostro falling victim to mesmerism in the royal trial sequence made me squirm in embarrassment for Orson Welles the hambone. Even I had to mutter, “What the hell!” - and I’m usually an easy-going movie-goer willing to go anywhere a director points.

Welles, in almost every scene as Cagliostro, is sometimes brilliant with that incomparable voice of his, but other times too earnest. He makes his eyes pop, which is funny instead of ardent. Though Welles isn’t the first actor you think of when it comes to wearing clothes well, he looks well-turned out in a few highly-worked outfits.

He convincingly plays a fearless main chancer who lets his power over mediocre people from all walks of life get out of hand. Like greed heads from Caligula to Musk, he starts to believe his own hype. He loses our sympathy due to his predictable megalomania and ruthless treatment of the young aristocrat. Akim Tamaroff plays his sidekick with dignity and plausibility. Margot Grahame does a creditable job as Mme. DuBarry, a figure that loomed large in the American pop imagination for reasons obscure to me.

See it. It’s worth viewing primarily for its look. While it’s a bit long and the tone overheated, it’s also moody, which has its appeal. The word seems to be that Welles had a hand in the direction, though nothing is written down. Shot in Rome, the movie was the most fun he’d ever had making a film, said Welles.

As for the connection with the original Perry Mason TV series, Berry Kroeger plays Dumas, Sr. in the opening scene. With a superb radio voice, Kroeger appeared in seven episodes, often as a crook, sometimes as the richly-deserving victim, sometimes as the culprit, never as the accused. My favorite was his performance in TCOT Lame Canary in which he plays a soft-spoken insurance broker steeped in fraud up to his elegantly tied full windsor knot.