European Reading Challenge #8

I read this for the European Reading Challenge 2026.

A Voice in the Night – Andrea Camilleri

Inspector Salvo Montalbano works in Vigata, Scility, where the sun bakes the streets and the rot runs centuries deep. He’s got two cases on his desk: a supermarket manager found dead by his own hand, and a young woman butchered in her apartment. The supermarket’s owned by the Cuffaro crime family. The girl’s boyfriend is the son of the provincial president - a spoiled brat with too much money and too little conscience.

Montalbano’s used to this kind of mess. The criminals are predictably stupid and ferocious. The politicians are worse. His bosses are scared of stepping on the wrong toes, and the mafia has its fingers in every pie. So Montalbano does what he always does: he digs with his bare hands when there’s no shovel in sight.

His crew is the usual cast. Fazio takes notes like he’s building a case against time and space. Catarella mangles names and addresses with comic precision. Dr. Pasquano curses like a sailor and pokes at Montalbano’s creeping fear that age is catching up with him. The inspector feels it in his bones - he’s not as sharp as he used to be, and the world isn’t getting any cleaner.

Camilleri’s prose moves fast, like a car chase through narrow alleys. Dialogue drives the story, and the scenes play out like a stage drama - misunderstandings, interrogations, midnight break-ins. Montalbano lies when he has to, manipulates when he must. He knows when to wait and when to strike, even if it means flushing out the guilty with a TV interview or a voice in the dark.

There’s no hottie love interest half his age this time, thank the stars. Just Montalbano, aging, stubborn, and still trying to hold the line in a country sleepwalking through corruption. Camilleri’s voice is clear and skeptical, like a man who’s seen too much and still cares. The crimes are brutal, the politics worse, but Montalbano keeps going. Someone has to.

Perry Mason 165: TCOT Caretaker’s Cat

Note. The year 1932 was the worst year of the Depression in the USA. Many adult men (i.e. the readers of pulp mysteries) were feeling demoralized by long-term under- or unemployment and difficulties supporting a family. So in digressions in the novels Erle Stanley Gardner sometimes donned his life coach hat.

Perryisms to Live By:  “What the hell can a man lose? He can't lose his life because he doesn't own that anyway. He has only a lease on life. He can lose money and money doesn't mean one damn thing as compared with character. All that really counts is a man's ability to live life, to get the most out of it as he goes through it, and he gets the most kick out of it by playing a no-limit game.”

The Case of the Caretaker’s Cat – Erle Stanley Gardner

So dig this: 1935, the Great Depression still doing its slow grind, and here comes a Perry Mason yarn that kicks off with Karl Jackson, Mason’s short-lived assistant, laying out the Laxter family soap opera with the clarity of a bookie reading off odds. Old Peter Laxter croaks in a house fire, leaves his grandsons Sam and Frank sitting pretty, while granddaughter Winifred gets the royal shaft. The caretaker, Ashton - crippled, cranky, and living in a basement with his Persian cat named Clinker (named after the coal furnace crud, for you non-stokers) - gets a job for life. Cozy, right?

Except Sam hates the cat. Claims Clinker’s a bed-muddying menace, running up laundry bills like a Beverly Hills princess. Threatens to poison the poor beast. Ashton, who’s got a bankroll fat enough to choke a horse, stomps into Mason’s office, waving his wad but balking at a $500 retainer. Settles for $250 to keep Clinker breathing. Mason, cool as a gin fizz, dictates a letter to Della Street warning Sam he’ll lose his inheritance if he so much as looks at the cat cross-eyed. Ashton exits, and Della spots him being tailed by a guy in a green Packard - because of course.

Cue Nathaniel Shuster, bargain-basement shyster with a rep for jury bribing, barging in with Sam and Frank in tow. Wants to settle Winifred’s beef out of court. Mason says he’s only in it for the cat, tosses them out like yesterday’s racing form. Then tells Paul Drake they’re gonna challenge the will “over a cat.” Drake’s assignment: find Winifred, dig dirt on the grandsons, and sniff out the truth about Peter’s crispy demise.

Winifred turns up flipping waffles at a joint called Winnie’s Waffles - because nothing says American grit like syrup and batter. She’s signed away her rights thanks to Shuster’s sweet talk, but doesn’t care. She’s hell-bent on making it solo in the cold, hard world. Mason, digging her style, drops a line fit for a motivational poster: “It’s not the future that matters; it’s the present. It’s not what you save, but what you make and how you make it.” Heavy, man. Then he mentions the cat, and good-hearted Winifred’s all in. Her boyfriend Doug Keene tosses Edith DeVoe, Peter’s nurse, into the mix, and suddenly the plot’s got more twists than a pretzel factory.

From there, it’s pure pulp fireworks: Edith spins a lurid yarn, Mason huddles with DA Hamilton Burger, they dig up Peter’s charred remains, and then - bang! - a strangulation murder, a blunt-instrument murder, missing diamonds, Holcomb slamming desks and chasing streetcars like a Keystone Cop on Benzedrine. Della breaks speed limits, Perry plays square-shooter hero, and the courtroom finale rocks harder than a Chick Webb set at the Savoy Ballroom. All this, and we’re still sweating bullets over that damn cat.

The Thirties Mason? He’s less buttoned-down barrister, more two-fisted adventurer, grousing to Della about paperwork while dodging death and dishing Stoicism. Sure, the cars have running boards and California still hangs its killers, but the vibe? Timeless. Cool as a cat named Clinker.

Perry Mason 164: The Mean Girl Rewrites the Script

Note: Gail Patrick left law school to become a movie actress. Often cast as the bad girl or the other woman, she appeared in more than 60 feature films between 1932 and 1948, notably Stage Door and My Favorite Wife. Retirement bored her so she created her job as executive producer for the hit TV show Perry Mason from 1957 to 1966.

The Mean Girl Rewrites the Script (and Wins the Case)

It is hardly a contradiction, though it can appear that way at first glance. Gail Patrick, cool, lacquered, bored, amused, built an acting career on surfaces that concealed intent. She played the socialite, the interloper, the mean girl, the woman lingering just beyond the boundaries of propriety and therefore exercising influence over them. In My Man Godfrey among others, she embodied something subtler than chaos. She was an arrangement of tone, posture, and advantage. Of self-knowledge as well: social butterfly Cornelia understood perfectly that she was squandering her time, energy, and talent; super-thief Myra possessed the icy confidence required to match wits with the cunning George Sanders in Quiet Please: Murder.

Then came television. Executive producer of Perry Mason. Less performance than stewardship of performance. Something carries across. As producer, Patrick favored scripts and characterizations that rewarded intelligence, discipline, and competence, particularly in the portrayal of Della Street.

The look of the series, its restraint, polish, and almost chilly cleanliness, feels more like an insistence than an aesthetic preference. Nothing extraneous. Every gesture purposeful. One can hear the echo of those earlier roles: the woman who knew exactly when to speak, when to hold back, how to allow silence to accomplish its work.

Many of Patrick's screen roles centered on social performance and concealed motives. As producer, she showed a similar sensitivity to credibility, helping maintain Perry Mason's disciplined tone and avoiding the melodramatic excess common in contemporary television.

And the women, often relegated to the margins in comparable series, are altered here, quietly but decisively. Della Street neither flutters nor waits. She anticipates, investigates, and verifies. Her work functions less as secretarial support than as a parallel enterprise. She is competent without fanfare, and because the series treats that competence as routine rather than remarkable, it becomes all the more convincing.

This matters, if only because the period so reliably preferred the opposite. The endangered woman, the nosy neighbor, the childlike witness, the decorative secretary still appear in Perry Mason, yet they are displaced, or more accurately, balanced by another possibility. Della, and often other women* moving through the show's tight architecture, possess a self-command that resists easy categorizing. Rescue never enters the equation; they are already in motion, solving, adjusting, correcting.

Whether this emphasis originated directly with Patrick or emerged from a broader creative collaboration is difficult to determine. Nevertheless, the show's treatment of Della Street reflects qualities associated with Patrick's best screen performances: intelligence, composure, and self-possession.

So the irony, villainess turned arbiter of truth, dissolves somewhat. Villainy was never the essence of those performances. What mattered was expertise in appearances: understanding how deception settles into the body, how it sounds when it speaks. Repurposed, that knowledge becomes vigilance. The architect of duplicity becomes, quite plausibly, its most efficient detector.

The skills that made Patrick effective as an actress - discipline, observation, and control - appear in a different form in the series she helped produce. Patrick spent much of her acting career portraying women whose intelligence carried a hint of menace. On Perry Mason, that intelligence loses its threatening quality and becomes professional competence. Della Street and many of the series' female characters are neither ornaments nor victims. They are people with work to do, and the show takes that work seriously. If Patrick helped shape that perspective, her most lasting role may have taken place behind the camera rather than in front of it.

Links to Gail Patrick movies and my reviews can be found here.

* Amazing actresses such as Constance Ford, Audrey Totter, Frances Reid, Joyce Meadows, Marie Windsor, Katherine Squire, Geraldine Wall, Lurene Tuttle, Sheila Bromley, Louise Latham, and Jeanne Cooper, to name only a few. They all played women with souls – and elbows.

Matinee Musings: Ned Sparks

Note: Ned Sparks (1883 -1957) was born in Guelph, Ontario and raised in St. Thomas. As a teenager prospecting in the Klondike, he ran out of money and took to performing. After some turns to a seminary and the railways, he got chosen for his first New York show in 1912.

Ned Sparks: Canadian, Comedian, Curmudgeon

Pull out my fingernails and the nuclear codes die with me. Make me carry a box of glazed donuts, though, and after ten minutes of sticky fingers I’ll sing like a canary about what makes Ned Sparks so goddamn funny. Everybody has a breaking point. Mine is sticky fingers.

Most comedians of the early sound era attack a scene. Sparks endures it. Hal Skelly and Jack Oakie would get a laugh being a clownish type. Sparks would just perch a sour face atop that neck, a neck so tom-cotton thick for such a slight man that it looked like it had been borrowed from sumo wrestler Chiyonofuji.

Trixie Lorraine: Isn't there going to be any comedy in the show?
Ned: Oh, plenty! The gay side, the hard-boiled side, the cynical and funny side of the Depression! I'll make 'em laugh at you starving to death, honey. It'll be the funniest thing you ever did. - Gold Diggers of 1933

The typical comic performer of the Thirties is all motion, all enthusiasm, all noise. Wheeler does the innocent, Woolsey plays the sharper, Eddie Collins makes mouth noises. Sparks reacts as though he has just been informed of a yet another damn thing comin’ down the pike. His face conveys the nagging suspicion that he is always the last to find out. Always.

What makes this work is that he never appears to know he's being funny. The run of comic actors want the laugh. Sparks seems to regard the laugh as yet another glitch in the works. He delivers every line in that famous gravel-dump monotone, as though the effort of speaking exceeds the value of communication.

Ned: Without my wife, I'm comparatively alone in the world. Even with my wife, I'm comparatively alone in the world. - The Bride Walks Out

And yet, somehow, he is usually the funniest person on screen.

The secret, I think, is contrast. Put Sparks next to romantic lead Joel McCrea delivering a heartfelt declaration and he becomes hilarious as the humorless puritan (Kept Husbands). Put him next to put-upon heroine Mae Clarke and he becomes even funnier as not the least of her trials (The Fall Guy). The greater the emotional temperature around him, the more amusing his glacial indifference becomes. He is a one-man corrective to excessive enthusiasm.

T. Fenny Sylvester: You know, dat song gives you somethin' to work to. Sort of a prod to do big things. In the hustle and bustle of daily life, a guy's liable to forget his mudder. But that song brung me back me babyhood. Ain't them words swell? "Who calmed your baby fears, and brushed away your tears? Your mudda." Boy, nuttin' can take the place of your mudda, can it?
Ned: You can't prove it by me - I was an incubator baby. - Sing and Like It

There is also something surprisingly modern about him. Many silent and early talking-picture funny guys can feel trapped in their own period. Sparks does not. The deadpan one who refuses to play along with the emotional assumptions of the room is now a staple of American comedy. You can draw a line from Sparks to Jack Benny, from Benny to Bill Murray, and from Murray to every sitcom character whose principal personality trait is being tired of everybody else's nonsense.

Mae Clark: And get cleaned up!
Ned: I already took a bath. I'm so clean I'm uncomfortable. - The Fall Guy

The strange thing is that many Ned Sparks jokes are not especially remarkable on paper. Read them and you may smile politely. Watch Sparks deliver them and they become funny through sheer force of personality. The line is rarely the joke. Ned Sparks is the joke. His exhausted gaze, his world-weary voice, his absolute certainty that mankind cannot be helped: that is the schtick.

Ned: Yeah, what's caviar to the few is applesauce to the gander. – Kept Husbands

He perfected a comic character so thoroughly that he turned pessimism into a performing art. The perpetual irritation of Sparks’ supporting character stole scenes for years, much in the stock character of fluttery fragile ZaSu Pitts whom audiences also loved. W.C. Fields cultivated a larger-than-life persona: a blustery, self-serving schemer with verbal flair and physical comedy. In contrast, though Ned used his stiff movements to great comic effect – talk about man in crying need of yoga time on the mat - Sparks embodied sardonic restraint.

Nobody ever looked less delighted to be in a motion picture. Nobody ever got more laughs from it.

Dave the Dude: If we have to dig up a husband for Annie, let's to it and get over it.
Ned: Now you got to dig up a husband for...
[shouting]
Ned: Where you gonna get a husband just like that?
Dave the Dude: How about you, Happy?
Ned: Me?
Missouri Martin: Oh, that's a swell idea. I think you'd be just precious.
Ned: That's a wonderful idea but there's one thing that stands on the way. I got a wife that is very fussy. She don't like me to go around and marrying people! - Lady for a Day

Perry Mason 162: TCOT Duplicate Daughter

Note: I’m not a reader that pays much attention to titles. The thing is, titles of Perry Mason books always promise meaning, but often in the same way horoscopes do: vaguely, and only after you’ve shrugged off confirmation bias. In this 1960 production, the title is practically the only clue we get - until the courtroom explodes like a Fourth of July firecracker. Is it fair that the next real clue arrives when the novel is 96% over? Of course not. But fairness is for afternoons in May and virtue ethicists, not Perry Mason plots. Gardner knows his readers will wait patiently for that last-minute twist, because nothing tastes sweeter than watching Mason pull a rabbit out of a hat while Burger is still deciding between the homburg or the fedora.

The Case of the Duplicate Daughter – Erle Stanley Gardner

The story begins with a game of deception so subtle that the reader, if reading too fast, will be left bewildered by its sudden reversals. Carter Gilman, investment wizard and pillar of respectability, vanishes one morning while his twenty-year-old daughter Muriel (talk about a name that screams dutiful daughter) is preparing the kind of Anglo breakfast that has sent generations of men to early graves - bacon, eggs, buttered toast.

When she returns, her father is gone. In his workshop, she discovers a broken chair, a pool of crimson liquid, and ten thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills scattered like confetti. Convinced she has stumbled upon a murder scene, Muriel obeys the instructions in her father’s briefcase: “If anything happens, call Perry Mason.”

Mason arrives to find the “blood” is paint, but the money is real - worth over a hundred thousand in today’s currency. He dispatches Paul Drake to probe the Gilman household: Carter, his daughter Muriel, his second wife Nancy, and Nancy’s daughter Glamis. Before the detective can report, Gilman materializes in Mason’s office, delivers cryptic instructions, and disappears again - this time for good.

Enter Vera Martel, a private investigator with ethics as flexible as a rubber band. She telephones Mason, warning him to abandon Gilman’s cause and to tell the man his troubles are worse than imagined. Mason, intrigued, consults Drake, who brands Martel a blackmailer - a woman who turns sensitive information into cash. Soon after, Martel is found dead, and Carter Gilman is indicted for her murder.

The courtroom becomes a theater of psychological warfare. Hamilton Burger, savoring the prospect of humbling Mason, subpoenas him as a witness for the prosecution. But Mason, master of timing, unmasks the killer before taking the stand. The solution, resting on an ancient fictional device, is not fair play - but it is dazzling.

Beneath the legal fireworks lies a motive steeped in the mores of mid-century America. Nancy’s youthful Bohemianism - she was an artist, which in the 1950s was shorthand for the moral laxity of beatniks - becomes a weapon in the hands of the prosecution. Gardner exploits this cultural hypocrisy with relish, reminding us that blackmail thrives where society clings to its taboos. Today, when scandal has lost its sting, such plots seem quaint.

This late-career Mason novel is a study in contrasts: the glitter of money against the shadow of murder, the brittle façade of respectability against the raw nerve of desire. It is a story of greed, fear, and the perilous games people play when secrets become currency.

Perry Mason 162: Goodbye, Tragg; Hello, Procedure

Note: By the time Ray Collins was cast as Perry Mason’s nemesis, he was a seasoned actor on the stage, screen and radio. Collins had one of those movie careers that wandered cheerfully from Citizen Kane to Ma & Pa Kettle.

Goodbye, Tragg: Hello, Procedure (Or, How the Fun Got Filed Away)

Ray Collins played Lieutenant Arthur Tragg, the gruff homicide detective on Perry Mason. He did it with the kind of lived-in authority as though he’d been on the scene for every murder in Los Angeles since Prohibition. He remained a comforting fixture on Perry Mason until emphysema forced him to retire in 1963 - an exit that felt less like a casting change and more like a frail uncle quietly leaving the family party early so that no one who liked him would worry he’d overdone it.

As a kid, I just accepted Tragg as a kind of prehistoric lawman - at least a generation older than Perry Mason, possibly older than the courthouse itself. He had that “I remember when the uniform’s finishing touch was a rubber hose” vibe.  So imagine my adolescent shock - eager to take umbrage as teenagers are - when the novels reveal that Tragg and Mason are roughly the same age. Suddenly Tragg isn’t a veteran but a contemporary who seems to have aged an extra twenty-five years from presiding at crime scenes that would make EMTs blanch.

Ray Collins’ played Lieutenant Tragg in the spirit of the novels. Though adversaries, Tragg and Mason feel grudging admiration for the detective skills of the other. They respect each other, though Tragg would mockingly call Mason “Counselor ” and Mason would say tightly, “I feel I spend all my time introducing you…,” when Tragg would pop in unannounced during an office conference with the hapless scared client.

Tragg circled Mason like a seasoned chess adversary, occasionally smiling as if to say, “Well played – till next time.” In the first three seasons, the show breathed the smoky pulp air of radio suspense and film noir. Tragg’s authority rested in experience and force of personality, not in paperwork or protocols. He intuited, from seeing it scores of times before - how the pieces of evidence probably fit - not usually correctly, but with enough good faith that his thinking errors felt human, never lazy or malicious or stupid.

Enter Lieutenants Andy Anderson and Steve Drumm, played with a clean, almost antiseptic efficiency by Wesley Lau and Richard Anderson respectively. Suddenly the temperature drops. These dour dudes are not there to play; they are there to get the Freedom Deprivation Logistics humming. If Tragg embodied the instincts of the beat cop elevated by experience but eschewing the rough methods of yore, Andy and Drumm are the modern bureaucrats shaped by college degrees and workshops on Carceral Workflow Optimization.

Andy and Drumm do not wink. They never seem bemused. Della is not granted their courtly attention. One suspects they file reports in triplicate and torture subordinates over trifles. Where Tragg sparred with Mason, Andy and Drumm simply stand in opposition, bitterly assuming Mason is just a showboat trying to get the obviously guilty off for who knows what nefarious reasons.

The tonal shift is unmistakable, if understated. Without Tragg, the cases still unfold and Mason still prevails - but the journey ticks like an administrative metronome. The law, once personalized through Burger and Tragg’s relatable fallibility, becomes impersonal - an apparatus staffed by professionals who don’t have time to add respect to an adversarial relationship.

In replacing Tragg, the show traded passion for efficiency. The stories become cleaner, yes, but also colder. And in that chill, we glimpse Sixties television’s own evolution: from storytelling that invites audiences to play along to storytelling that expects them simply to watch - and to endure hearing, yet again, “You’ve got 24 hours to wrap this up.”

Perry Mason 161: The Count of Nine

Note: I use AI as an editorial tool so that my writing weaknesses won't annoy you or waste your time. AI helps identify excess wording, repetition, plot-heavy passages, unsupported claims, and places where my fondness for silly metaphors or wooly-headed abstractions obscures the point. I review its suggestions critically and use them to make the writing clearer, more concise, and more focused on analysis rather than summary.

The Count of Nine – Erle Stanley Gardner writing as A. A. Fair

Donald Lam has finally made partner in the private detective agency run by Bertha Cool - an achievement long overdue. Ex-lawyer Lam has always done most of the legwork while Bertha lines up the cases, spends the fees, and keeps expenses tight enough to squeak. Partnership doesn’t change the balance of power much, but it does give Lam a little leverage, which proves useful when Bertha lands what looks like an easy job: guarding a high-society party from gatecrashers.

The client is Dean Crockett, a wealthy eccentric obsessed with privacy and security. Three weeks earlier, one of his lavish parties ended with the theft of a valuable carved jade Buddha. This time, Crockett wants absolute control. He lives alone on the twentieth floor of an apartment building with a special elevator that runs only to his penthouse. Guests must be cleared at the front desk, approved again by Crockett himself, and possess a verified invitation before they’re allowed upstairs. Bertha is there to check names and keep out gatecrashers. Simple enough.

Naturally, the security arrangements fail. Despite Crockett's elaborate precautions, another theft occurs, pushing Cool and Lam from security guards to investigators and drawing them into a case that soon turns deadly.

Gardner's great strength is efficiency. Scenes arrive late, end early, and rarely waste a sentence. The result is a novel that moves at a brisk pace while giving Lam plenty of opportunities to demonstrate his understated intelligence. Unlike the hard-boiled detectives who dominate much mid-century crime fiction, Lam wins through observation and persistence rather than toughness. His small stature and unassuming manner encourage others to underestimate him, usually to their regret.

Gardner is known for his plotting, not characterization but in this outing amusing is the comic friction between Lam and the people he meets along the way. A lecherous photographer prides himself on manipulating women, prompting a sharp, funny exchange where Lam pretends admiration for the lady’s man while despising every word the crumb says. The reader catches the contempt immediately; the photographer, blinded by ego, misses it entirely.

The Count of Nine is the eighteenth book in Gardner’s long-running Cool and Lam series, written under the pen name A.A. Fair. Bertha is her usual loud, greedy, tightfisted self, eternally convinced she can handle things alone. Lam - slight, brainy, and chronically underestimated - ends up doing the real detective work, taking a few beatings, attracting unwanted romantic attention, and finally putting the pieces together. Gardner's portrayal of the police is decidedly unsympathetic; they are as fallible, stubborn, and self-interested as anyone else in the story.

Structurally, this is Gardner’s version of a locked-room mystery. Most of the action takes place over a only a day or two, with little emphasis on gunplay or brawls. It showcases Gardner's strengths: airtight construction, memorable eccentrics, and a detective whose intelligence consistently proves more effective than force. For readers who enjoy classic puzzle mysteries with a hard-boiled edge, it's an easy recommendation – no wonder Hard Case Crime re-released it in 2018.