The Ides of Perry Mason 65

Note: I post something concerning the mystery fiction of Erle Stanley Gardner on the 15th of every month. Recently I was talking to a 30-something - a masters in Library Science - who did not know who Erle Stanley Gardner was, though she did know Perry Mason. No reflection on her knowledge, I think, since culture moves on. There's no reason the past's mega-stars should be remembered. Transience, even for authors who've sold a half a billion novels.

Spill the Jackpot – ESG writing as A.A. Fair

Under one of his many pen-names, Gardner wrote 30 mysteries starring the PI team of Bertha Cool and Donald Lam. This 1941 entry, the fourth, opens with Bertha checking out of a sanitarium in Nevada. For six months she had been recovering from a combined form of flu and pneumonia. On her journey back to health, she has taken off about 100 pounds. Down to 150 pounds, her new look has attracted, for the first time in years, male attention.

On a plane to LA on a layover in Las Vegas, ad man Arthur Whitewell subjects Bertha to the male stare. Getting into conversation, he finds that his fellow passengers Cool and Lam are private eyes. He hires them to find a young woman, Corla Burke.  She disappeared a day before she was to be married to Whitewell’s son Phillip who’s desperate to find Corla. Whitewell’s family problem does not stop him from chatting up Bertha, exerting the fluent charm of a marketing guy.

As the investigation unfolds in the first hundred pages, as usual, Donald Lam faces a lot of challenges. Short and slim, he packs a punch that Bertha claims wouldn’t shoo flies from a jug of maple syrup. In a casino he is socked into next week by an attendant of slot machines. Accused of tampering with the one-armed bandits, Lam is then roughed up by the cops. Getting a line on Helen Framley, who may help with finding Corla, Lam is thrashed by Helen’s semi-psycho BF, an ex-prizefighter named Pug. Though self-absorbed in being attractive again, even Bertha notices Lam’s clothes are dusty and his face is out of alignment.

Then, after being yanked off a train back to the City of Angels, Lam is suspected of murder by menacing police officials. Mind, all this in just the first hundred pages. It’s non-stop action in Lam’s investigations, like when Patrick O’Brian puts our heroes through battle, failed regime change, flight on mules, pox, blizzard, ice fields, hard sailing in a mere cutter, and a lightning strike all in the one novel The Wine-Dark Sea.

When Gardner wrote as Fair, he gave himself permission to loosen up. He actually develops characters in this novel. Ad agency sharper Arthur Whitewell doffs and dons personas at will. Gardner gives a psychological acuity to Whitewell that is persuasive. Ex-prize fighter Louie Hazen is in fact deeper than his image as slap-happy. And Helen Framley is a persuasive examination of the Gardnerian Heroine: young, urban, independent, strong, active, down-right, and only human. Gardner inserts travel writing by having Lam, Louie and Helen hide in the desert for a time; Gardner loved to describe the feelings desert beauty evokes and the soul-satisfying chuck you eat when camping. On the desert sojourn, Louie proves he is not punch drunk by becoming an excellent camp cook and boxing trainer for Lam.

Gardner deploys quips and comic relief in the Mason novels, but in the Cool and Lam novels Gardner gives his keen sense of comedy more play.  Bertha is a marvelous comic creation, a blend of the canny and smarmy, cynical and hard-boiled, greedy and miserly. In this novel, the interplay between Bertha and Lam is hilarious, especially when Lam tells Bertha he’s quitting the detective business because he has fallen in love. Desperate to retain his smarts for her own selfish ends, Bertha pulls out of her hat practical, financial, and misogynist arguments against playing the fool blind to the wiles of women.

Lam however is inarguably Gardner’s best creation. In the Mason novels, Gardner never tried a first-person narration from Perry, Della, or Paul’s point of view. But here and in other novels, Lam tells the story, though he will withhold information from the cops, suspects, Bertha, their office manager Elsie Brand, and the reader. Lam is never overtly upright or high-minded. Yet the people he interacts with, from hard-bitten prizefighters to tough city girls, can tell he is clean and decent for all his tight-lipped and undemonstrative ways. An ex-lawyer, Lam is no fool about the ways of the world and how human beings are likely to respond to internal and external pressures. He uses his well-hidden moral compass to manipulate Bertha, clients and cops so that the innocent are vindicated, underdogs are rewarded, and the unjust and cowardly are punished. Without prating about ethics, Lam would agree with Jewish mothers who say, “You don’t need a brass band to do a mitzvah (good deed).”

Granted, Louie’s tutorial for Lam on the inner workings of slot machines was out of date by 1945. And I wonder about the retro advice on the road work and massage that goes into becoming a practitioner of the sweet science. The reveal turns on an implausible choice of a character. And Bertha acts uncharacteristically in a scene near the end.

But any concerns I have are trivial. Plot and incident are not really the thing to catch a king or a reader. I highly recommend this vintage mystery for its characterization, especially of the series characters. How often can you say that of a Gardner story?

Today is Sports Day

スポーツの日 Supōtsu no Hi.  This Japanese national holiday was established in 1966 as 体育の日 Taiiku no hi (literally Phys Ed Day). I’m pretty sure it was still called that when I was in Japan (1986-92). The Japanese associate the coming of autumn with reading books and enjoying sports. Anyway, it became Sports Day in 2000 as a new Monday holiday. Let’s celebrate by reading a non-fiction book about Japan.

Night Work: Sexuality, Pleasure and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club – Anne Allison

In the 1980s, Allison, now a professor of cultural anthropology at Duke, conducted field research by working as a hostess in a Tokyo nightclub. Her role involved entertaining Japanese business executives with karaoke, drinks, and flattery. Her 1994 book explores why large Japanese companies fund such entertainment for their male employees.

Allison argues that hostess clubs help white-collar men bond, foster company loyalty, and boost their egos. She claims that the interplay of work and play enhances job performance. The clubs offer short-term excitement without disrupting work commitments, as the interactions are non-sexual, maintaining a “respectable” image and preventing jealousy among colleagues.

Allison’s fieldwork included interviews and background reading. She found the hostess role manageable due to her teaching and language skills, though enduring crude remarks was challenging. She notes that not all business executives enjoy these outings, and their wives tolerate the extra hours as necessary for career advancement. 

Overall, the book is recommended for those interested in gender relations, women’s studies, or Japanese nightlife, despite some academic jargon.

Reading Those Classics #17

Classic Plague Narrative. The author released this popular history in 1949. Though it avoided footnotes and read as easily as a novel for non-expert readers, historians and epidemiologists regarded it as a model examination of a season of yellow fever in Philadelphia, the capital city of the USA in the days of Our Early Republic.

Bring Out Your Dead: The Great Plague of Yellow Fever in Philadelphia in 1793 - J. H. Powell

In 1793, Philadelphia was the busiest port in the USA. As such, it was the natural center of the banking, finance, and insurance industries. It was a major center for learning in the natural and medical sciences.

The winter of 1792-93 had been mild. The summer of 1793 brought a drought. Because the city had no water system, people caught and stored rainwater in rain barrels. Perhaps the mosquitos that carried yellow fever bred in those barrels of standing water. Or, perhaps the mosquitos were brought on ships that carried Francophone refugees away from an uprising of enslaved people that had started in 1791 in Haiti.

Per what was surely an undercount, Yellow Jack killed 5,000 people from August through November. Its symptoms start suddenly with fever, chills, headache, backache, nausea, and vomiting. It gets its name because jaundice makes the skin and eyes look yellow. There is no specific treatment beyond supportive care and attentive nursing, neither of which were available due to labor shortages caused by people fleeing the city in fear for their health and lives.

At the time a tiny number of observers wrote to the papers with the theory that mosquitoes transmitted the disease among humans, but doctors did not pay any mind because they were so embroiled in their own controversy as to the origin and treatment. Dr. Benjamin Rush and his supporters thought that the disease was caused by foul miasmas that in turn brought about imbalances among the four bodily fluids (blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile). So patients with yellow fever were to be treated with purges, such as bloodletting, vomiting, and pooping. French physicians, who fought the virus in the Caribbean and theorized it was contagious, used gentler palliative treatments. The public prints saw diatribes and screeds between the two points of view, so many that lay readers complained they were tired of reading about the controversy.

Powell judiciously tells about people who left the city and people who heroically stayed to do what they could. Leavers included the Governor of Pennsylvania, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington. And, unsurprisingly, the entire U.S. Congress left the stricken city, thus demonstrating the courage we have come to expect from politicians.

The Mayor of Philadelphia, Matthew Clarkson, stayed to cope with the crisis despite a lack of governmental institutions. At the Mayor's request, volunteers from various walks of life came forward to work in their Assembly. From scratch, they arranged care for the sick, the old, the poor and the orphaned.  Powell also relates the heroic work of Black Philadelphians and Francophone refugees. Much to his credit, Powell does not express elation over heroism or wax indignant over people acting - shall we say - less than human.

In conclusion, this is a great read, especially in light of the clear social, economic and psychological parallels to our own pandemical experience. I’ve been a long-time plague buff, reading In the Wake of Plague in 2014 and Defoe long before this blog. But our pandemic only sharpened my interest, given my – our – first-hand experience: see The Great Influenza (John M. Barry); Flu (Gina Kolata); The American Plague (Molly Caldwell Crosby); The White Castle (Orhan Pamuk);  The Forgotten Plague (Frank Ryan); Year of Wonders (Geraldine Brooks); and Pandemic (Sonia Shah).

Reading Those Classics #16

Classic Short Stories set in The Middle Ground. A collection of 42 stories, it won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1951. The stories were first published in weekly magazines such as The American Mercury, Forum, Harper’s Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, Scribner’s Magazine, and The Sewanee Review. Faulkner came up with the themed section headings, such The Country, The Village, the Wilderness, The Wasteland, etc.

The Collected Stories of William Faulkner

The reviews below cover the first half of the fifth section, The Middle Ground. These stories star characters managing the liminal spaces, dealing with life’s transitions, adapting or not. Mostly not.

Wash. The title character is a poor white handy-man that feels connection with the cavaliers who “set the order and the rule of living” and went to war in the North to preserve their way of life. Not going to the war himself because he felt he had to take care of his own family, Wash put up with derision and mockery even from the enslaved. Wash had accepted as given that his white superiors really were gallant, proud, and brave. But Wash discovers that "the chosen best among them" were just evil braggarts who saw Wash and his kind – and Wash’s own family - as less than human. So disabused of his old meanings Wash decides that life makes no sense and does the old ultra-violence for which Faulkner is notorious. A powerful story of loss.

Honor. In this ironically titled tale, the WWI pilot that we met in Ad Astra, Buck Monaghan, is having a rocky post-war career, never holding a job for more than three weeks. He has ended up in the silly entertainment job of barnstorming. You would also think that the simple rule of honor says, “Don’t take up with anybody else’s wife” would be easy enough to follow. But, no. You would also think that a wing-walker would not take up with the wife of his pilot since the pilot could easily fix the wing-walker’s wagon but good. But, no. I mean, where would literature be if everybody acted sensibly, honorably? We’d have a literature of uplifting stories. Yuck.

Dr. Martino. A widow and her daughter meet an ailing doctor every summer at a spa in northern Mississippi. The doctor takes an interest in the fatherless girl and wants to get across to her the idea, "When you are afraid to do something you know that you are alive. But when you are afraid to do what you are afraid of you are dead." To beat fear, she does things like swim in snake-infested rivers, which of course scares her mom brickless. The story is narrated by a young man still too conceited to be sensible that even an alluring girl may have plans for herself that don’t revolve around oil-rich Yale men. He wants to marry the girl so he forms an alliance with the fearful mother to pull the reins in on the girl. Another story about the trapped female, like the shuttlecock girl in The Good Soldier, powerless to escape other people who are oblivious as to what the trapped female might want for herself.

Fox Hunt. This 1931 story is not connected to the world of Yoknapatawpha and is a Post-Depression acerbic look at the Roaring 1920s. It’s an examination of the degenerate ways of rich people from the point of view of their minions and hangers-on. Nobody remains unsullied by money, power, property, flattery, attention, the best tables. Harrison Blair is an Oklahoma Osage, a member of the band who were in the 1920s the richest group of people per capita in the world. Oil that is, black gold. Made rich by Texas tea, he is so fallen, so without values of either culture he’s between, that he brutally dispatches a fox just because his redheaded wife (another trapped female) is attracting attention from another man.

Pennsylvania Station. What could be ground more central than the majestic railroad station in New York City? And what more ironic than two homeless men soon to be driven from a warm waiting room in the majestic symbol of the city of business? The two down and out men, one young and one old, talk about the older man’s nephew. The uncle is an unrelatable narrator in the sense that he seems not to have tumbled to the fact that his nephew (“not bad, just wild as young men are”) is an unfilial son to his trusting mother. The uncle covers for the thieving shit by saying he was “confused” by shady actions that are all too clear to the reader. Besides the cruelty of children, death skulks in the background of this bleak story. The uncle is the last of a big family, though he was not expected to live beyond 20 years of age. He says, “But sometimes it looks like a man can stand just about anything if he don't believe he can stand it.”

Today is Autumnal Equinox Day

秋分の日 Shūbun no Hi. This Japanese public holiday was established in 1948 as a day on which to honor one's ancestors and remember the dead. Before 1948, the autumnal equinox was an imperial ancestor worship festival called Shūki kōreisai (秋季皇霊祭). Let’s celebrate by reading a non-fiction book about Japan.

Underground in Japan - Ray Ventura

This 1992 memoir offers a unique perspective on the expatriate experience in Japan, focusing on workers from countries like Iran, Malaysia, Taiwan, and the Philippines, rather than the more common narratives from North American and Western European language teachers and Zen seekers.

Ray Ventura, a Filipino university student active in politics during Corazon Aquino’s rise to power, decided to study labor realities by moving to Japan on a student visa. After his visa expired, he went underground, working in harsh conditions in Yokohama’s labor center, Kotobuki. Ventura vividly describes the difficult lives of Filipino laborers, who live in poor conditions and work grueling jobs while constantly fearing police and immigration officials.

Despite the hardships, Ventura highlights how these workers find freedom from familial obligations and build community through shared social values like hiya (shame), amor-proprio (self-respect), utang na loob (reciprocity), and pakikisama (camaraderie). He also discusses the motivations behind Filipinos moving to Japan, challenging stereotypes about their economic backgrounds.

Ventura notes that Filipino underground in Japan carry family and religious images for emotional support and to elicit sympathy if stopped by authorities. Religion plays a significant role in their identity, despite their engagement in activities like drinking and gambling. 

Ventura’s sequel, Into the Country of Standing Men, published in 2007, received the Global Filipino Literary Award for Non-Fiction in 2008.

Expatriates in Trouble

Note: I am always up for a novel about expatriates in trouble (my favorite genre), especially set in China in the Twenties. See The Sand Pebbles and The Painted Veil.

Julia Paradise: A Novel - Rod Jones

This 1986 book was the first novel of this Australian writer, short at about 120 pages. It is set in Shanghai in the months running up to the massacres of Communists by the Kuomintang in 1927.

A Scottish doctor and Freudian psychotherapist Dr. Kenneth Ayers treats a woman who's an agitated insomniac and having hallucinations of pests and critters, and little girls jumping out of burning buildings. The patient, the title character, is the wife of a missionary and begins an adulterous Tuesday afternoon with the therapist. Describing disturbing scenes of incestuous rape, she tells him her case history as a victim of her father, a famous explorer and insatiable pervert.

The dry detached tone brings to mind Maugham and his stories of expatriates in trouble in Asia. Thematically it reminded me of The Year of Living Dangerously in the sense of centering on a complacent man who is tested by the pressures of social and political unrest in a foreign setting.  

Here the flabby hedonistic apathetic doctor has had it pretty easy in his life. He casually exploits local people and fellow expatriates, robotically breaking simple rules such as never with minors, never with force, don't treat people like objects. Through some twists and turns he sees the light and devotes the next 20 years to healing the sick in northern China. It is not a likely outcome but there is some fine prose in this even if the exploitation and harm of children and examples of sexual obsession get really hard to take.

If awards mean anything, this book won the fiction prize at the 1988 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature, was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and was runner-up for France's Femina Etranger prize in Paris. It could be one of those novels that reveals more complexity and artistic power on re-readings but I don't think re-reading is happening for me in this case.

The Ides of Perry Mason 64

Note: The 15^th of the month features a piece about Our Favorite Lawyer in the novels or on the tube. This novel was made into the second episode of the series, aired September 28, 1957. Darryl Hickman plays Steve Harris. He looks familiar because as a kid actor he was in The Grapes of Wrath, among others. His little brother Dwayne played Dobie Gillis on The Many Loves of ~, a show I liked when I was around ten for Bob Denver as Maynard Krebs (Work!! still sums up my attitude) and Sheila James as Zelda Gilroy (even as a boy I knew the best girls were the smart kind loyal girls).

The Case of the Sleepwalker’s Niece – Erle Stanley Gardner

Perry Mason’s would-be client, Peter B. Kent, has psychological, marital and commercial anxieties so severe that he is driven to walking in his sleep. The titular niece, Edna Hammer, tells a weird story as she seeks lawyer Mason's advice.

While sleepwalking, Uncle Pete took up a carving knife and wandered about his mansion. He was found by the police outside the bedroom door, which his alimony hound of a wife, Doris, had locked against his attack. Although Doris is making lovey-dovey noises about a reconciliation to support her disturbed husband, she wants big bucks. She might try to get Uncle Pete declared incompetent, warehouse him in a nursing home, and take charge of his sizeable estate and holdings. Edna Hammer wants Mason to facilitate Uncle Pete’s divorce so that he can marry his selfless nurse Lucille Mays.

As if the personal front didn’t provide enough anxiety to provoke midnight strolls, his iffy business partner Frank Maddox and Maddox’s niggling lawyer, John Duncan, are being difficult about contracts and settlements. Holed up in Uncle Pete’s mansion for negotiations, Mason makes no secret of his disgust quibbling about the verbiage of contracts instead of making a fool of DA Hamilton Burger in open court during a murder trial.

In an Agatha Christie move, Gardner has the characters spend the night in Uncle Pete’s old dark mansion. The next morning all hell breaks loose with a corpse found in the guest room and a bloodstained carving knife found under Uncle Pete’s pillow.

At the levers of the criminal justice mincing machine is Lt. Tragg’s brutish predecessor Sgt. Holcombe. He sensibly concludes that Uncle Pete is the culprit, in light of previous history of a sleep disorder, prolonged stress, and the carving knife incident. It’s up to Mason and his team to determine if Uncle Pete committed the murder at all and if he did, his culpability given he was sleepwalking during the commission of the crime.

The courtroom scene in the last third of the book is not too slow or too complicated.

In the early novels such as this 1936 mystery (the eighth of about 80), Mason is blunt and outspoken, not the gallant suave Mason of the Fifties. True to smirking, sarcastic pulp heroes, Mason is a hardboiled tough guy for the low-brows and a quick-witted professional for the high-brows. He smiles “fiendishly” and calls women “sister.” He expresses outrageous opinions, like advocating blackmail as a way for a woman to get her money back from a man who squeezed cash out of her by pretending to love her. A self-confident and bold Leo, Mason brusquely disbelieves Edna’s astrological analysis of Uncle Pete’s character.   

Typical of the style of pulp magazines, the writing is so concise as to be terse, with dialogue briskly moving the plot.  Gardner catered to the male readers of Black Mask with lots of action, surprises, wisecracks and banter, and good old American scorn for and resistance to authority. Joy in foiling The Man’s determination to put an innocent person in the gas chamber may be an expression of defiance sharpened by the Depression. Also pulpy is the rapidly sketched out parade of characters:  a hypochondriac, a gold digger, a crackpot inventor, and a New Age niece before woo-woo really took off during the Age of Aquarius.

It’s odd that though Gardner assumed readers craved action over characters, we loyal Mason fans like not only the page-turning narrative magic but also the interaction among Perry, Della, and Paul.