Perry Mason 118: The Meh Sixties

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

Bottom‑Shelf Perry Mason: The Meh 1960s

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Perry Mason 117: The Fiction Factory

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

The Fiction Factory That Ate Its Maker

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

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

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

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

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

The Nones of Gail Patrick: Quiet Please: Murder

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perry Mason 116: FBI Girl

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Kalends of Gail Patrick: Reno

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

European Reading Challenge #1

I read this for the European Reading Challenge 2026.

Eastern Approaches - Fitzroy Maclean

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perry Mason 115: TCOT Cautious Coquette

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

The Case of the Cautious Coquette – Erle Stanley Gardner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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