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.