Perry Mason 140: The DA Holds a Candle

Note: The Thirties. After the Crash. Streets full of men with empty pockets and eyes like busted windows. Gardner’s lawyers - Mason, Selby - grinding through the gears of a system built on hustle and hope. Dog-eat-dog law, chiseling as survival, free enterprise chewing its own tail while the headlines scream and the ink runs. We Americans used to read everything – books, magazines, comics, almanacs – even newspapers. 

The DA Holds a Candle – Erle Stanley Gardner

This 1938 mystery is the second of nine Doug Selby mysteries Gardner published between 1937 and 1949. Like its siblings, it first ran in The Country Gentleman, a rural magazine with 2.5 million subscribers - a fact that tells you plenty about Gardner’s intended audience and about his deliberate turn from big-city Perry Mason theatrics to the moral politics of small-town justice.

The setup is classic Gardner: Selby, the idealistic young D.A., and his loyal sidekick Sheriff Max Brandon jawing about a roadhouse that smells of trouble. Big-city gamblers run poker games involving local rich kids with more allowance than sense. One of those kids is heir to a sugar-beet empire, and Daddy Beet isn’t shy about throwing his weight around at city hall. Brandon is a straight-shooter out of pulp tradition. Sylvia Martin - Selby’s girlfriend and crusading reporter, a sassier cousin to Della Street - would love nothing better than to see the beet magnate taken down a peg.

Unlike The D.A. Calls It Murder, the first Selby outing, Gardner keeps his plot lines separate until the right moment. It starts small: a poor kid in hot water over a bad check - an offense that exposes how casually the town’s well-off can endanger the children of mechanics and secretaries. Then the screws tighten. A hitchhiker turns up dead in an auto camp, carbon dioxide the killer. Two buckos rented the cabin, but five other suspects lurk in the wings. Gardner spins the web with his usual skill, pulling threads until everything knots in a neat, satisfying finish.

No courtroom pyrotechnics here. Gardner is less interested in legal showmanship than in the everyday bargaining of a pastoral county where everybody knows everybody - and expects favors. Sylvia wants scoops in exchange for endorsements. The beet baron wants slaps on the wrist for his DWI-charged son and sneers that Selby can’t “hold a candle” to big-city D.A.s, branding Brandon a “comic-opera sheriff.”

Gardner makes it clear that reformers like Selby fight uphill battles against cronyism and corruption, and must match the toughness of the crooks they pursue. Social justice matters to Gardner, but so does individual grit. Selby believes reason and logic can untangle the nutty behavior of ordinary folks and curb abuses of authority such as nepotism, cronyism and favoritism. That faith drives him, even when the change-hating system - and incurable human nature - push back hard.

Gardner also touches a hot Thirties theme: generational friction. The old guard clings to Victorian proprieties; the young toss them aside for ‘free love,’ mistaking license for freedom and charm for character. Gardner doesn’t preach, but the warning is there.

Readable? Absolutely - especially for the plot mechanics, which are first-rate. Mystery expert Mike Grost calls the 1938–1942 stretch one of Gardner’s peaks, and this book backs him up. No fireworks, no Perry Mason theatrics - but a clear sense of why Gardner kept setting stories in towns like the ones where he grew up, where power operates not formally, but through position, money, and reputation.

Perry Mason 139: Perry Mason in the Forties

Note: On TV, Perry Mason sailed into WWII and came back with a wounded arm. In Gardner’s books? Mason never enlisted - though Donald Lam did, serving in Naval Intelligence. I get teary-eyed reading the scene in which Elsie Brand expresses her pride when he enlists. Honoring loyalty, one day I’m going name a Weimaraner after Elsie Brand.

Perry Mason in the Forties: The Ultimate Trio

The Case of the Baited Hook (1940)
Topped FictionDB’s list with a perfect 5/5 rating, marking it as the highest-rated Mason mystery of the decade. Celebrated for its intricate gripping plot.

The curtain rises on Perry Mason’s office at midnight, stale with smoke. A wealthy architect arrives with a masked woman. He warns Mason to watch the newspapers; ruin looms for them both. No questions, no answers. Mason accepts half of a $10,000 bill - a staggering sum in the early Forties.

From this cryptic start, Gardner spins a web of law, finance, and identity. Mrs. Tump, a shrewd advocate for a young woman scarred by an illegal adoption, adds depth as one of Gardner’s tributes to forthright womanhood. Action unfolds in dialogue: Mason fencing with men whose words conceal more than they reveal. 

The stakes? A stock swindle, a trust fund in peril, and a lucid exposition of agency law. Russian émigrés, a baby farm, and a fraudulent share deal complicate the maze. Mason’s first challenge: discover who his client is. 

No courtroom fireworks this time - only hearings and maneuvers on arcane legal points. Della Street stands as partner in peril and strategy. TCOT Baited Hook is Gardner at his most intricate: a drama of masks and motives, completed only on the final page.

The Case of the Careless Kitten (1942)
Also earned a 5/5 FictionDB score. Heralded for its clever twist and tight legal drama within its serialized Saturday Evening Post run.

Published during WWII, this Perry Mason novel carries the wartime undertone of fear and suspicion. Japanese families were being sent to internment camps, and though the book never names it, that shadow lingers. Komo, a character who calls himself Korean but is seen as Japanese, embodies the era’s prejudice. Gardner uses him as a mirror for judgment and misunderstanding.

The mystery begins with Franklin Shore, a banker missing for ten years. His sudden message summons Mason to a meeting, but Mason finds a corpse instead. From that moment, the story races through eighteen sleepless hours of danger and deception. Della Street, Mason’s loyal secretary, is arrested; Tragg gloats, Burger smirks, and Perry plays chess with the law.

Threads of greed and jealousy tighten as Shore’s reappearance threatens family fortunes. A kitten named Amber Eyes sparks the plot, proving even small things turn big wheels.

Gardner writes lean and vivid, blending human drama with legal maneuvering. Beneath the intrigue hums a question of belonging - what kind of American are you? Komo doesn’t answer. His silence and presence speak for the times.

The Case of the Lonely Heiress (1948)
Another 5/5 FictionDB favorite, widely praised by readers and critics for its emotional depth and suspenseful pacing. Frequently cited for character-driven storytelling.

In early 1948, Perry Mason faced one of his most unusual cases. It began with Robert Caddo, a dubious publisher of Lonely Hearts Are Calling, a magazine mixing plaintive ads and lurid confessions. Among its columns appeared an ad from Marilyn Marlow, a young heiress seeking a suitor “untainted by avarice.” Police suspected fraud, claiming Marilyn was a fiction to boost circulation. Caddo begged Mason to prove her real.

Mason doubted the story - until he learned Marilyn’s mother had inherited a fortune from eccentric George Endicott and planned to pass it to her daughter. This prospect enraged Endicott’s relatives. Soon, the nurse lay murdered, the weapon found in Marilyn’s car. Circumstantial evidence tightened around the girl as the law moved to indict her.

From lonely hearts to lethal passions, Mason unravels a skein of greed and deception.

Honorable Mention: TCOT Silent Partner (1940) and TCOTVagabond Virgin (1948)

The Ides of Dick Powell: Susan Slept Here

Note: This 1954 comedy has a plot that would not fly today. A middle-aged man and a minor six months short of legal fall for each other and get married. Back then lots of people probably said “peeyew” at May/December romances but at the same time just as many folks just shrugged at teenaged girls getting married. The early Fifties saw the peak of teen marriage in the US.  In 1954, approximately 6.1% of women who were 16 years old got married. This translates to about 6,361,000 women who got married at the age of 16.

Susan Slept Here
1954 / 1:38
Tagline: “WHAT GOES ON? When a girl almost 18 latches on to a man-about-town?”

In the early 1950s, millions of American girls under 18 were marrying, yet this comedy cheerfully ignores that reality and plunges into pure fantasy. Dick Powell plays a weary Hollywood screenwriter desperate to escape the fluff factory. Like Sullivan in Sullivan’s Travels, he yearns for grit and truth, so he asks his police pals to find him a genuine juvenile delinquent for research.

On Christmas Eve, two vice cops deliver Debbie Reynolds to his apartment. She’s been arrested for brawling - specifically, breaking a bottle over a drunken sailor’s head because he was acting like, well, a drunken sailor. Rather than jail her for the holidays, they beg Powell to babysit until she’s shipped to detention.

Convincing audiences that Reynolds – the impossibly adorable singer of Tammy - could be a JD takes effort. At first, she’s a wildcat, rattling Powell’s underemployed household of secretary and houseman. Then she discovers she’s read one of his novels and softens. The Christmas morning phone call from Powell’s fiancée Izabella (Anne Francis) is a comic gem: Reynolds innocently makes Powell sound depraved, chirping that they stayed up all night “playing games… card games.”

Soon Powell learns Reynolds faces six months in reform school unless she shows “visible means of support.” His solution? Marry her. Cue a neon-lit Vegas spree, dancing till dawn, then snoozing in a cab back to L.A. - a $1,500 fare in today’s money.

Powell flees Hollywood to write his magnum opus, aided by Glenda Farrell’s world-weary secretary (still funny, though the old-school man-hungry shtick hasn’t aged well). Les Tremayne supplies comic surprises as Powell’s frazzled lawyer, and Alvy Moore shines as the street-smart houseman. Red Skelton pops in for a cameo - mercifully silent, though his trademark mugging sneaks through.

Meanwhile, Reynolds tries to “grow up” with mixology, horseback riding, and golf - Izabella’s turf. Her mimicry of Francis in home movies is priceless, as is her ambush of Powell lip-syncing to one of his own dreadful scripts on the late show.

Technicolor is the film’s secret weapon. Anne Francis, with eyes like animated sapphires, looks alternately divine and deranged thanks to genius costuming. And Reynolds’ dream sequence? A riot of color and surreal comedy that actually advances the plot.

This is a looney holiday fantasy - half screwball, half satire - wrapped in eye-popping hues. It’s not reality by longshot - Powell’s Oscar statue sometimes narrates from its own point of view - but it’s a fascinating artifact of mid-century Hollywood.

Perry Mason 138: Not So Innocent

Note: A handful of Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason novels keep tripping over the same joke on humanity: proving you didn’t commit murder doesn’t mean you behaved like a blameless lamb. Mason’s clients are innocent, sure, but also economical with the truth and spectacularly bad at making sensible choices.

Not So Innocent

Across these Perry Mason novels, Erle Stanley Gardner returns to a paradox that the courtroom can resolve officially but human life cannot: legal innocence does not cancel moral fault. Mason’s clients, in these novels, did not commit the murder. Yet they behaved in ways that made murder plausible, attractive, even efficient for someone else. They lie, delay, conceal, improvise, and negotiate privately when, as tedious and dumb as it is, law would have been safer. 

In The Case of the Curious Bride (1934), Rhoda Montaine responds to the reappearance of her first husband, Gregory Moxley, not with disclosure but with evasion. Rather than clarifying her marital status through legal channels, she lets the situation hover in a gray zone of fear, bargaining, and silence. The threat Moxley poses - to her social position, her second marriage, her respectability - is real, but her response to that threat is to suppress the truth rather than neutralize it. In doing so, she turns Moxley into a walking liability: a blackmail risk and a financial irritant whose continued existence inconveniences too many people. When Mason finally goes to confront Moxley, he finds him already dead. Rhoda did not kill him, she merely creates the conditions under which someone else decides it would be cleaner if nobody ever saw Moxley again.

The Case of the Sulky Girl (1933) sharpens this pattern by adding temperament to concealment. Fran Celane is secretly married and pregnant, facts she hides while aggressively pressuring her uncle, Edward Norton, to release her trust. Her duplicity poisons every interaction. Norton feels manipulated; Fran’s husband feels cornered. Poster girl for flaming youth, Fran’s volatility - her loud scenes, her storming out of rooms, her fierce unpredictability - completes the picture. She looks capable of anything, which means that when violence occurs, it reads as the emotional climax everyone has been bracing for. By forcing the situation to a breaking point while refusing transparency, Fran endangers not only herself but those around her. The murder does not arise from malice so much as from panic generated by her refusal to choose clarity over drama.

In The Case of the Howling Dog (1934), Gardner explores a quieter but equally corrosive form of culpability: prolonged passivity. Bessie Foley is the lawful wife of Clinton Foley, yet allows another woman to occupy that role publicly for years. She does not assert her identity, does not demand legal recognition, does not intervene. This abdication enables a sprawling deception that infects wills, property, and domestic arrangements. A neighbor, Arthur Cartwright, becomes entangled in the question of who Foley’s “real” wife is and begins redirecting his estate accordingly. What should have been a simple legal clarification metastasizes into accusations of insanity, staged threats, and elaborate ruses. By remaining invisible, Bessie allows others to treat her as expendable. When she finally appears and asserts herself, the architecture of lies collapses. Foley attempts to weaponize the good-hearted dog and murder erupts at the precise moment her long‑delayed claim to identity forces a reckoning.

The Case of the Dangerous Dowager (1942) replaces secrecy about identity with secrecy about addiction. Poker degenerate Sylvia Oxman accumulates gambling debts whose danger lies not in the expense but in the evidentiary power of IOUs: they can be used to label her an unfit mother and strip her of custody of her child. Rather than confronting this through counsel immediately, she attempts to retrieve the IOUs privately, placing herself alone in negotiation with a crook whose incentives align perfectly with exploitation and intimidation. The conflict slides from law into blackmail. In desperation, Sylvia brings the family gun to the confrontation. She does not fire it - but by introducing a weapon, she ensures that any later violence will point back to her. Guns are bad medicine in the hands of the desperate.

Finally, The Case of the Careless Kitten (1942) dramatizes the dangers of misplaced trust. Helen Kendal receives a late‑night call from a man claiming to be her uncle Franklin Shore, long presumed dead. She does not verify, does not alert authorities, does not buttonhole Perry and Della in a restaurant. Instead, she acts. Recklessly. She keeps the matter informal, familial, ambiguous - exactly the conditions under which funny business thrives. By agreeing to arrange a clandestine meeting, she turns a dormant inheritance dispute into a physical rendezvous fraught with peril. When Mason arrives, they find not Uncle Franklin but a corpse.

Perry Mason’s genius is not moral absolution. He rescues clients from the law while quietly permitting readers to recognize a harsher truth: innocence is not the same as blamelessness. These clients are spared conviction and Q's smokehouse, not consequence. Gardner’s world insists that violence rarely arrives out of nowhere. It is sometimes invited - indirectly, inadvertently, through silence, fear, and the belief that postponing clarity is safer than facing it.

The Nones of Dick Powell: You Never Can Tell

You Never Can Tell
1951 / 1:18
Tagline: “A Picture for People who Think they've Seen Everything!”

In this quiet comic fantasy, the German Shepherd King is living large. He has the run of a millionaire’s mansion, eats tasty morsels daily, hangs out with doggie buds, and is spoiled rotten by Peggy Dow, the millionaire’s smart, kind and comely secretary. But the millionaire dies of ornery old age. His misanthropic bequest of his estate is to the canine. If and when the canine dies, millions go to the secretary.

Unfortunately, poor King does die. The cops bring in the secretary for questioning and the state freezes the probating of the will. The secretary is released for lack of evidence but her reputation is besmirched. In animal heaven, loyal and devoted King requests that he be allowed to return to earth in order to find his killer and clear the name of kindly Peggy. The request is granted. He is sent back with the companion Golden Harvest, who in life though a filly was a moderately successful race horse.

King in the human guise of Rex Shepherd, PI, is played by Dick Powell. This is rather a take-off, because Powell on screen and radio played hard-boiled private investigators as in Murder My Sweet. Golden Harvest, or Goldie, is played by athletic 21-year-old Joyce Holden. What’s funny is that they both retain preferences and behaviors from their former incarnations. Powell likes munching down Kibble and playing with a ball with a bell inside it. He has a phobia about the dog catcher. Speaking in a charming Kentucky accent, Goldie can run like the wind. She has an encyclopedic knowledge of turf matters and keeps a proud eye on her grandchildren’s career progress. Her purse is a feed bag.

The movie is not a parody of noir private eye movies but has its share of cynical asides. Powell observes to Holden, “These are humans we're dealing with. You can't tell them the truth and expect them to believe it.” With a mix of compassion and cynicism, Holden remarks, “People can’t help being people.” When Powell is placed in a holding cell, the deviants and degenerates are enraged and beat him up when they think he is a dog poisoner. While it’s very human to go off violently on no evidence whatsoever, even misfits have their standards of behavior.

Perry Mason 137: TCOT Crooked Candle

Intro: This mystery from 1944 had been out of print for 25 years when in 2012 Arcturus published it as part of its Crime Classics series. Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor ranked this story as #6 in their collection of Fifty Classics of Crime Fiction, 1900-1950. It pops up on reading blogs when readers are listing their “Best Mason Stories.”

The Case of the Crooked Candle - Erle Stanley Gardner

Gardner takes us off dry land and onto a yacht for this one, and the tides aren’t the only thing running high. Perry Mason, in 1944 a hard-boiled legal tough, is hired by Carol Burbank to save her father, Roger, from a murder rap. The victim? Roger Milfield - a man who looked harmless enough but had a Christmas card list of enemies and secrets dirtier than bilge water. The case hinges on a candle  - a crooked candle, in fact - found beside the corpse, burned a bit and leaning at 17 degrees like a jaunty jacktar after a couple of belts. Sounds trivial, but that crooked candle is the Rosetta Stone of this mystery.

The plot moves like a speedboat. Gardner doesn’t waste time on character depth - he never does and we hardcore fans don’t want him to anyway - but he knows how to keep dialogue snapping like a mainsail in a stiff breeze. The book is under 200 pages, and I polished it off in two evening sittings. It’s mostly talk, talk, talk, but when the talk is courtroom fireworks, who’s complaining? Chapter 16 alone, the first day of the preliminary hearing, might be Gardner’s longest courtroom set piece, and it’s a beauty.

The mystery itself? Top shelf. Gardner juggles tides, rigor mortis, and that cockeyed candle with aplomb. The solution is ingenious, though you’ll need to brush up on your nautical jargon to follow every twist. Mason and Della even spend a night aboard the yacht to test tidal effects - because why not turn sleuthing into a sleepover? The reconstruction of the crime, factoring in the tilt of the craft and a bloody shoeprint, is classic Gardner: complicated but satisfying.

As always, book-Perry is tougher than his TV twin. His sparring with Tragg is more adversarial, though there’s grudging respect under the barbs. And yes, Perry rests his head in Della’s lap at one point - something CBS would never have aired. There’s even a subplot where Mason skewers an insurance company and wrings a fat settlement for a hard-luck kid. Cold-blooded? Maybe. Effective? Absolutely.

Would I hand this to a Mason newbie? Probably not. The nautical angle and tide tables might scare off the faint of heart. But for seasoned fans, this is Gardner in high gear: brisk, stripped-down prose, dialogue that sounds natural, and a puzzle that rewards close attention. The crooked candle burns bright in the Mason canon.

The Kalends of Dick Powell: Christmas in July

Christmas in July
1940 / 1:07
Tagline: “If you can't sleep at night, it isn't the coffee - it's the bunk!”
[internet archive]

This comedy is based in the reality of 1940. In its heyday, the radio broadcasting industry didn’t depend so much on selling time for commercials but teamed up with companies to host shows such as The Bing Crosby Show for Chesterfield. They also worked together to sponsor endless contests. The competitions would involve playing games, doing stunts, or writing essays and jingles. Suspense would be carefully built over weeks before the winner was declared. This picture opens satirizing this process and the phony radio gabbers that would stoke it. Franklin Pangborn is cast perfectly as one unctuous voice of the airwaves.

Our hero Jimmy MacDonald (Dick Powell) is a dreamer just like his late father. So Jimmy is an inveterate contest enterer. He figures, though a movie-goer doubts the statistics would bear this out, that every contest loss will double your chances of winning the next one you enter.

Jimmy also takes the popular view that happiness depends on obtaining a pile of money. His girlfriend Betty (Ellen Drew) claims two can live as cheaply as one, to which he replies, “Who wants to live cheaply.” Betty argues you need just enough money to keep worries down to a minimum, since worries are “the only terrible thing about being poor.”

Three practical jokers named Tom, Dick, and Harry trick Jimmy into believing that he has won a $25,000 prize (about $400,000 in today’s money). Zaniness ensues when generous Jimmy spends money that he doesn’t really have. Despite the circus of unbridled consumption that forms around them, somehow Jimmy and Betty, the innocent and honest couple, maintain their values.​​

The writer and director Preston Sturges observes masses of clerks toiling away at unspecified drudgery. Even distilling his picture down into a mere 60 minutes and change, Sturges doesn't lose a chance to aim smacks at The System and its contradictions. He examines our perennial hope for a better future, especially for and among youth. Young people, argues Betty, simply want a chance to succeed or fail. This hope that a chance still existed took a battering in the 1930s as the Depression went on and on.

But he also wonders if our hopes are at least partly illusory, given our confusion over values due to our own endless struggle with materialism. Our leaders are no better than us when it comes to judging the worth of people and things based on their success or failure on the fickle, spoiled, dumb marketplace. In fact, despite their posturing self-confidence, our leaders may be a sight worse than us when it comes to using the sense Heaven gave them.

The mere appearance of affluence impresses us unduly even though we know nice people are often poor and rotten people are often rich, that blessings rain down on the unworthy and trouble comes to the blameless and harmless. Even work demonstrates the falsity of appearances. The boss says, “I'm a success. And so are you, if you earn your own living and pay your bills and look the world in the eye” but how much self-respect is possible given the endless grind of paperwork, the punching of clocks, to the ringing of bells as if we were in grade school, under fussy close supervision because they don’t trust us to get the job done unless they are hovering over us?

Okay, so much for the ideas in the movie, some are still relevant, some not. Dick Powell is perfectly cast due to his Dagwood Bumstead looks that call to mind a bloodhound. Ellen Drew is all freshness we like to see in the Greatest Generation when they were in the bloom of youth. Raymond Walburn is wonderful as the windbag president of a coffee company.