Perry Mason 109: TCOT Counterfeit Eye

🚨 STOP SCROLLING, SHEEPLE! 🚨 You think Perry Mason is just courtroom drama? WRONG. It’s a coded message. Let me break it down for you: Early novels? Mason’s legal aide = Karl Jackson. Fast-forward to Season 4? Mason’s aide = law student David Gideon, played by Karl Held. Two Karls. TWO. KARLS. Coincidence? Wake up, NPCs! This isn’t random casting - it’s SUS. Gardner knew. Producer Gail Patrick Jackson knew. Burr knew. They’re signaling something BIG. Karl is the KEY. You think it’s about legal aides? LOL. No. It’s about CONTROL. It’s about the hidden network of Karls pulling strings behind the scenes. Ever heard of Karl Malone? Karl Urban? Karl Popper? Karl Marx? CONNECT THE DOTS, PEOPLE. This is a Karl Kabal. A Karlspiracy.  If you’re not asking WHY there are so many Karls, you’re already lost. Smash that like button if you’re ready to EXPOSE THE TRUTH. #Karlspiracy #WakeUpSheeple #PerryMasonDecoded

The Case of the Counterfeit Eye – Erle Stanley Gardner

This one kicks off with Perry Mason getting a client whose problem is so odd it sounds like a setup for a “what’s gross” joke from the Sixties. A man named Brunold storms in, claiming someone swiped one of his glass eyes and subbed it with a cheap counterfeit. He’s convinced the real eye will be planted at a crime scene because, obviously, in 1935 rare glass eyes are the new fingerprints.

Before Perry can finish his morning coffee, in come a young woman and her brother. The snotty brother worked for Hartley Bassett, a businessman with all the charm of a wet sock, and the kind of party pooper that demands employees caught embezzling pay it back. Bassett wants his money back yesterday, but the self-involved brother blew it. The sister begs Mason to negotiate payback on the installment plan. Mason agrees, because he thinks erring youth, even if conceited, ought not to take a fall that might wreck a life that can still be salvaged.

When Mason visits Bassett, the man is about as flexible as an old back in yoga class. No deal, no way. But as Mason heads out, Bassett’s wife corners him with a question in the mode of “Can you put a virgin in jail as a vagrant.”* To whit: is it possible to run off with another man without committing bigamy? Mason’s day is now officially one of those “one damn thing after another” days. And then Bassett turns up dead, clutching - you guessed it - a glass eye.

Sounds familiar? In the 1960 TV version of this novel, victim Bassett ended up clutching a piece of the toupee of the accused. Americans were made of sterner stuff in the 1930s compared to the 1960s, I guess. I recall in the late Seventies glass eyes were still regarded with a bit of cringe, with the reputation that they were so ill-fitting they would pop out if the wearer was jammed into a Japanese commuter train. I daresay the tech is much better now.

Like the other Mason novels of the Thirties and Forties, the energy never languishes. Gardner keeps tossing Mason into conflicts, and Mason keeps bending the law. Not yet on the Mason bus with the destination Pythagorean Fork, Della Street observes, “You do the darndest things! You’re half saint and half devil! There isn’t any middle ground  - you go to both extremes!”

The other notable point of only the sixth Mason novel (of 80) is meeting nemesis District Attorney Hamilton Burger, who’ll become a series regular. He’s introduced as Mason’s courtroom foil, but not a cartoon villain. Fairly civil at this early, Burger knows Mason’s goal is truth - even if his methods involve razzle-dazzle.

The finale? A courtroom showdown packed with flamboyance. Mason’s gambits seem reckless, but the post-game explanation makes you admire the nerve and the logic. If you want psychological depth, complex social issues, diverse and flawed characters, and blending with other genres like thrillers, look elsewhere. If you want your Thirties as tough as taxes and full of legal acrobatics, this mystery delivers.

* TCOT Vagabond Virgin

The Nones of Anna May Wong: Dangerous to Know

Note: Happy Belated Birthday (1/3/1905) to Anna May Wong. She was about perfect in the stylish Shanghai Express but as the moral center she’s very good in this one too. As for Akim Tamiroff's gangster, quirky villains can be memorable and engaging, especially in Thirties crime movies where generic bad guys and dumbo coppers are the norm. Gail Patrick pops up in this one – society to her fingertips, as usual, like her most famous part as Cordelia in My Man Godfrey.

Dangerous to Know
1938 / 1:10
Tagline: “No woman ever survived his love!”
[internet archive]

This one isn’t about gangsters so much as it is about the delusion that money can buy class. Steve Recka is a Prohibition relic who thinks a bankroll and a pipe organ will get him into the silk-hat set. He’s wrong, of course, but watching him try is half the fun. His notion of refinement is like a guy who thinks being soft-spoken will make his death threats sound cultured. Spoiler: they don’t.

The movie’s moral compass is Anna May Wong, and thank heaven for her. She’s the only character with a functioning ethical sense, and even the cops - who treat defenestration like a joke - call her “Empress” out of grudging respect. Wong plays it with poise and restraint, her close-ups radiating intelligence in a room full of men who think “class” means pushing people out of windows. Even to a fashion ignoramus like me, her gowns are jaw-dropping, too - silk that looks like it cost more than Recka’s soul.

Akim Tamiroff is fascinating because his eyes, like Raymond Burr’s, do all the heavy lifting. He plays Recka as a man who believes he can keep his violent instincts intact and just add polish - too bad a hood in a tuxedo still looks grubby and ridiculous. His ambition to marry into old money (Gail Patrick) is pathetic and oddly poignant - he wants the trappings of culture without the substance, and Wong knows it’s a pipe dream. Rich people, she reminds us by implication, are just as petty and venal as the rest of us, only better dressed.

The cops? Utterly amoral. They joke about suicides, frame innocents, and call it a day’s work. The film’s hostility toward law enforcement is bracing, as a cussed attitude that slipped past the Hays Office. But don’t get your hopes up - the ending is pure Hollywood slush: the rich get richer, the gangster gets his comeuppance, and the moral center pays the price.

Director Robert Florey, a noir pioneer, gives us some elegant touches - shadows creeping across doors, subjective camera shots that make you complicit in murder - but never lets the visuals upstage the story. And what a story: a cautionary tale about status hunger, told with enough Thirties bitterness to sting.

Perry Mason 108: TCOT Empty Tin

Note: Serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, this novel carries the echo of weekly installments, with bits of recap tucked into the dialogue like breadcrumbs for new readers. We post-modern types can skim those, but they’re part of the charm, like cigarette ads in old paperbacks.

The Case of the Empty Tin – Erle Stanley Gardner

Ah yes, that Perry Mason mystery from 1941 - now there’s a tale that takes you back. Not to the courtroom, not to the bustling lawyer’s office with its clacking typewriters and Della Street’s crisp efficiency and canny instincts, but to the Gentrie household, where the scent of canned peaches and linoleum wax hangs in the air like a “female Rockwell” Frances Tipton Hunter illustration come to life.

The Gentries - salt-of-the-earth folks - run a modest hardware store, the kind with creaky floorboards and bins of nails that smell faintly of sawdust. Every penny counts, so they take in a roomer, a quiet soul who pays his rent on time and doesn’t make demands. They preserve fruits in Mason jars, not for the foreshadowing, mind you, but because it’s cheaper. There’s a spinster sister who knows her way around a pressure cooker, and a hired woman who can whip up a meatloaf that could win prizes at the county fair. Three kids tumble through the house like marbles on a hardwood floor, and though the seams of the family fabric are stretched, they hold.

Now, some Mason fans - those who like their mysteries served hot with a side of courtroom drama and a dash of the old ultra-violence - might find this beginning a tad slow. But for those of us who’ve read a couple dozen of Gardner’s works and know the rhythm of his prose like the back of a well-worn paperback, this domestic start is a breath of fresh air. It’s Hitchcockian, really - the suspense nestled in the folds of the everyday, the mystery blooming in the garden of the mundane.

And Perry? He’s in rare form. He double-talks the cops with the ease of a man ordering coffee. He breaks into houses like he’s checking the mail. He speeds through traffic with Della riding shotgun, her hair tousled and her wits sharp. She’s no mere secretary here - she’s a co-conspirator, a thinker, a woman who knows things men don’t, and isn’t afraid to say so.

And no courtroom scene? Some hardcore readers might pout, others might cheer. But me? I say this one’s a gem. If you’re a Mason fan, make it your next read.

The Kalends of Anna May Wong: Shanghai Express

Note: To take a break from Perry Mason, this Happy New Year season we look over a couple of movies with Anna May Wong. In this one, Wong, a woman named Hui Fei, shares a train compartment with fellow fancy woman Marlene Dietrich. The keeper of a Shanghai boarding house Mrs. Haggarty (Louise Closer Hale), remarks pointedly to Hui Fei “I’m sure you’re very respectable, madam?” Hui Fei answers, “I must confess I don’t know the standard of respectability that you demand in your boarding house, Mrs. Haggarty.” Nor, implies her tone as remote as Mount Tai, does she care.

Shanghai Express
1932 / 1:22
Tagline: “Grand Hotel on a Train”
[internet archive]

A surreal dream with train whistles – could a movie-goer like me who grew up three blocks from a train yard want anything more nostalgic? Director Josef Sternberg doesn’t care about plot or character - he’s chasing atmosphere like an artist who wants us knuckle-walkers to see the ultimate, intrinsic nature of reality as it truly is, beyond our judgments, concepts, or stories. Smoke, shadows, banners of Chinese characters, silhouettes that look carved out of fog. It’s all about the images beautiful dreamers half-remember after waking: aisleways, windows, shades sliding up and down, a machine gun spitting fire from a train carriage.

For buffs, there’s plenty to chew on. Train fetishists will swoon over the haunting shots of locomotives and carriages, while we tourists get a front-row seat to Peiping and Shanghai crowds, filmed with Sternberg’s obsessive eye for movement and texture. It’s a world where train wagons graze storefronts and humanity swirls in clouds of steam. Sternberg loved crowds.

Pre-Code fans will grin. Marlene Dietrich smolders as Shanghai Lily, a woman who ruins men out of sheer laziness, while Anna May Wong turns smoking into a sacrament. Their scenes together make tobacco look like the most sensual pastime on earth. Wong’s Hui Fei is pure steel - her “I’m Unbeatable Even if You Beat Me” look could stop a runaway train. When she murders a man and pockets twenty grand, the movie barely blinks. Moral ambiguity was never so hip.

Critics carp about thin characterization, but that’s missing the point. Sternberg isn’t telling a story; he’s staging a dream. The characters are pawns of chance, drifting through a world where everyone – those who wear pants included - is vulnerable. Dietrich’s praying hands, Wong’s icy poise, Eugene Pallette’s racist buffoonery - they’re fragments in a cinematic collage. Transience – soon it’s all dust, we’re all dust – the movie-goer can tell Sternberg read his Marcus Aurelius closely.

The film’s hostility toward missionaries and moralists is deliciously Pre-Code. The English surgeon gets scolded for being a “materialist,” which was morse for “atheist” back then. Meanwhile, the gamblers and fallen women seem more alive than the pious crowd.

In the end, it’s not about who gets the girl or whether the revolutionaries succeed. It’s about the look and feel: smoke curling like a question mark, shadows creeping like rumors, and two women who make convention look like something only squares worry about.

European Reading Challenge #12

Etruscan Places – D.H. Lawrence

The author of Twilight in Italy journeyed through Etruria in April 1927, though the resulting narrative - delayed by illness, distraction, and death - emerged only in 1932. The prose flows with the practiced ease of a seasoned novelist, yet beneath its surface lies a curious tension: admiration and disdain, insight and prejudice, often in the same breath. He calls peasants “rats,” yet lingers over their gestures with affection.

The book is part travelogue, part art history, and part metaphysical speculation. Lawrence’s worldview resists tidy classification. He is not rationalist, certainly not empiricist. Rather, he sees the world as alive, animated by forces older than logic. His soul, he suggests, is a spark - divine, transient - carried briefly in a mortal husk before returning to the cosmic fire. It is a vision both Stoic and poetic, and not without appeal to those of us hardcore readers weary of mechanistic modernity and algorithmic post-modernism.

Like Elliot Paul, Lawrence captures a Europe that now feels impossibly distant. The interwar years - so close to catastrophe, yet oddly serene - evoke a nostalgia for a world we post-moderns never knew. A time before carbon guilt for every jet boarding, before the commodification of every village square.

His fascination with the Etruscans is infectious, though not entirely objective. He dislikes the Romans, seeing in them the cold engineers of empire. The Etruscans, by contrast, are sensual, mysterious, and conveniently unknowable. Lawrence, having read a few books, writes as if he knows more than most. He probably does - but not more than the scholars he dismisses. Still, his confidence is charming, reminiscent of a young Robert Byron waving away academic consensus with a flourishes of bombast and wit.

In the end, it is not the accuracy of Lawrence’s claims that matters, but the vitality of his vision. He writes not to inform, but to awaken.

Perry Mason 107: M

Note: The film under review is the 1951 remake of Fritz Lang’s 1931 classic. I first saw the original back in the Nixon era, and what stays in memory is Peter Lorre’s extraordinary performance. Beyond that, comparisons strike me as pointless - they rarely illuminate the intentions behind each work. So, I won’t dwell on them. My focus here is on the performances, especially those of Raymond Burr in his pre-Perry Mason days, when he reigned as the Duke of Noir.

M
1951 / 1:28
Tagline: “'M' ...has struck again!”
[internet archive]

The film opens with a disquieting image: a lone man stalking little girls in Los Angeles. Later, a mother calls for her daughter Elsie - but we see only a balloon and ball, no child to play with them. The desolate images of loss are underscored by chilling dialogue: “Well, the children were not violated or outraged,” answered with raw anger - “What’s the difference? He killed them anyway.”

Raymond Burr, rasping like Brando’s Corleone, plays a stout goombah with unexpected sensitivities - stung when jokingly accused of aiding “baby murders” staged by organized crime to deflect grand jury heat. Gangster logic? To score PR points, the underworld mobilizes its network to hunt a man with an awful interest in little girls. Soon, thieves and cutthroats are on the prowl.

The climax in the iconic Bradbury Building feels rushed, almost frantic. A drunken attorney parodies courtroom logic, arguing - like Socrates - that evil stems from ignorance. His reward? Vigilante justice, a grim echo of public opinion in a democracy crushing philosophy. The film dazzles visually - especially street scenes - but its ideas flash by too quickly to land with force.

Impressive camera work frames stairways, stunned parents, and the killer’s suffocating universe: shoelaces stretched for strangulation, a recorder played against a city panorama, toy trains circling endlessly like his intrusive urges. A montage of working-class faces taking psychological tests adds a surprising, almost documentary texture.

This picture features a large cast so it is natural that some actors were to appear later on the classic Perry Mason TV show. They are William Schallert and Walter Burke who was shot in such a way that a movie-goer would never know he was short in stature. Noir veteran Steve Brodie plays a hard case copper of the rubber hose school, bragging “Give me 10 minutes alone with him and he'll rat out his mother.” The Bradbury Building was featured in TCOT Double-Entry Mind.

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]

Perry Mason 106: TCOT Angry Mourner

Note: In the introduction to this 1951 production, Erle Stanley Gardner says that it deals with circumstantial evidence – which is “infallible if it is available.” 

The Case of the Angry Mourner – Erle Stanley Gardner

Belle Adrian wasn’t the type to break into houses, but fear makes you do things you’d never reveal on canasta night. Fear for Carlotta, her daughter - young, headstrong, and lately skiing with Arthur Cushing, a man whose playboy charm was as cheap as his cologne. Arthur had a reputation: a Casanova in tweed, now stuck in a wheelchair with a busted leg. Didn’t stop him from sniffing around the ladies.

Dinner at Arthur’s place ended badly. He got frisky, Carlotta smacked him, and left, humming The Snake and damning herself for not expecting a wolf to act like a wolf. That was the last Belle heard - until a shot cracked the night like, well, a gunshot. When Belle slipped into Arthur’s digs, she found him dead, slumped in his chair.  Panic set in. She pictured Carlotta pulling the trigger, so Belle did what any mother with a guilty imagination might: she cleaned up the mess.

Trouble is, resort villages breed two things – a taste for gossip and neighbors with binoculars. Sam Burris and his wife had both. They saw Belle sneaking in, and they’d talk. Carlotta, meanwhile, thought Belle had done the horrid deed. 

Enter Perry Mason, vacationing nearby, sun on his face and big on the outdoors like his creator. Belle calls on him, but she doesn’t spill the whole story. That’s the Mason curse: clients lie like rugs, then expect him to sweep up the dirt. He listens, asks questions, and senses holes big enough to drive an ATV through.

The hardcore reader doesn’t tarry in these novels; you hit the bumps and trust Gardner to steer. Characters aren’t shaded; they’re bold as bold as a cat knocking over your favorite knick-knack while looking you in the eye. Carlotta, fiery and proud. Belle, protective to a fault. Arthur, a handsy wolf with teeth. Fill in expositions as you please - Gardner trusts our imagination to fill in business and backgrounds.

The evidence plays musical chairs between a mother and daughter who could give Judy and Liza a run for drama. Meanwhile, Mason’s courtroom maneuvers are so slick the bailiff should put down plastic yellow warning A-frames. All of it unfolds in a small town where gossip travels faster than a puppy spotting a hunk of cheese.