Perry Mason 149: Some Slips Don’t Show

Note: The Cool and Lam books – especially the later ones, like this 17^th one, from 1957 -  never got the shake they deserved. Twenty‑eight short novels, all sharp as a tack and as riotous as fun could be, and these days you’d be hard‑pressed to find many of them in e‑format. And very few reviews, even by bloggers hardcore enough to still be writing reviews of more than 100 words.

Some Slips Don’t Show – A. A. Fair (Erle Stanley Gardner)

Erle Stanley Gardner - moonlighting as A.A. Fair when he wasn’t busy with Perry Mason - built the series around two detectives with different values and styles. Bertha Cool is big, blunt, and manages money the way a mother bear guards her cubs. Donald Lam is small, quick, and feels loyalty to clients he doesn’t even like. Somehow, the partnership works. Usually.

The trouble this time starts with Barclay Fisher, who has the uneasy sense he might’ve made a fool of himself in San Francisco. He’d been there for a convention, had a few drinks - well, more than a few - and woke up on the couch of a blonde party girl named Lois Marlow. Barclay can’t remember if he crossed any of the lines that matter in marriage, but he’s sure his wife Minerva won’t appreciate the nuances. One poison pen letter hinting at infidelity and he’s toast.

Someone plans to send exactly that letter. Barclay comes to Cool & Lam with $500 - more than good money in 1957, $5800 nowadays - and the desperation of a man who knows his not broad-minded wife.

Bertha takes the case because five hundred dollars is five hundred dollars. Donald takes a plane to San Francisco because somebody has to do the legwork, and Bertha’s not built for travel. He meets Lois, who’s lovely, cooperative, and just mysterious enough to set off the little alarms Donald keeps tucked in the back of his mind. It turns out the blackmail is only the top layer of something knottier, and before long there’s a dead body, a few bad actors circling, and Donald catching heat from the police for his usual looking too sincere to be telling the truth.

All the elements that make the series hum are here: Bertha throwing her weight around, Donald tampering with evidence, and Gardner keeping the pace brisk. The setup echoes Nero Wolfe - big boss at the office, smaller assistant in the field - but Cool and Lam have their own rhythm, less refined but more combustible. Donald tells Lois, for example, “Bertha hates me.”

And in the middle of trying to keep a guilty husband from the ire of his humorless wife, Donald somehow inspires a modern artist to produce a masterpiece. It’s that kind of case: crooked, lively, and unmistakably Cool and Lam.

Perry Mason 148: TCOT Screaming Woman

Note: Maybe AAA got to Gardner about traffic safety but in this 1957 novel Mason - usually a menace behind the wheel, a busy man who treats speed limits as quaint suggestions - suffers a sudden conversion. To Paul Drake’s astonishment, Perry begins operating the vehicle like a Sunday-school teacher driving a car held together by paper clips. No screeching tires, no hairpin theatrics. Just calm, law-abiding motoring. Drake, who has spent years bracing for impact every time Mason shifted gears, is delighted he can finally uncoil his white knuckles.

The Case of the Screaming Woman - Erle Stanley Gardner

Super-lawyer Perry Mason carefully avoids disputes between spouses. But in this 1957 mystery he acquires a client because the client’s wife – probably due to bitter experience - doesn't believe for a minute her husband's tale. He says he just wanted to help a stranded damsel in the middle of the night and dropping her off at the Beauty Rest Motel. Well, dear, registering as husband and wife seemed like a good idea at the time. The unamused wife asks Perry Mason to cross-examine the confident hubby in order to prove his tale is full of holes.

The husband is a sales manager and trainer who has excessive confidence in his ability to overcome sales resistance and make people relish anything he wants them to swallow. During the interrogation, Mason finds the client is so up to his keister in suspicious circumstances that his lame story won’t wash.

Soon enough the relentless tentacles of the police tighten around the sales guy. Mason too finds himself in legal quicksand. Though he protests legal mires and more challenging and interesting, even his loyal confidential secretary Della Street wonders aloud if he can avoid being disbarred this time.

 Follow Mason as he blazes a trail to uncover black market adoptions, narcotics abuse and blackmail until he plays one last gambit in the climactic court-room scene.

Perry Mason 147: TCOT Musical Cow

Note: “Stand‑alone” is a slippery label with Erle Stanley Gardner – most of his so‑called one‑offs are really pulp‑era story collections in disguise. The only one of those I’ve tackled is Dead Men's Letters (1990), a posthumous batch of Ed “Phantom Crook” Jenkins tales. As for actual stand‑alone crime novels, I’ve read This Is Murder (1948). Another is the 1950 title reviewed below.

The Case of the Musical Cow – Erle Staley Gardner

Rob Trenton is innocent - naturally. But he’s also the sort of guy who accumulates incriminating circumstances the way some kids got “Kick Me” signs taped on them in school. He returns from Europe on a ship with a suspected dope smuggler. He drives the very car where the illicit goods are stashed. He happens to be at the murder scene, gets off two shots for good measure, and - oh yes - the cops recover his gun with two shells missing, the slugs in the deceased matching up as easily as colorful socks from the dryer. Add a sworn eyewitness pointing straight at him, and you’ve got yourself the sort of evidentiary dogpile that would make Perry Mason say, “Sorry, son, include me out.”

Gardner’s blurb writers bill this 1950 outing one as a new twist on the classic courtroom thriller, and for once the copy writers aren’t completely blowing bushwah. The trial sequence introduces a fresh hero model and enough procedural zigzags to keep even seasoned Perry-maniacs awake. And despite the author’s fondness of the far‑fetched - Gardner trusted his readers to just enjoy the ride - it all goes down surprisingly smooth. I, for one, enjoyed it enough to postpone sleep, which should count as an endorsement or a medical warning.

Is it a perfect stand-alone? Hardly. The first forty percent sways like a jet‑lagged tourist stepping off their first trans‑Pacific flight; only when Rob is hauled in does the plot finally decide to sprint. By the time the forensic specialist Dr. Dixon unspools his lecture on bullet mysteries, most hardcore mystery readers will already have pieced together the essentials. The characters themselves barely register, and some resolutions take place offstage with all the drama of this scribe re-writing an informed consent form.

But the courtroom scene - baby, that’s the payoff. Gardner brings the hammer down with precision and confidence, reminding you why millions of readers like us kept coming back. Flaws and all, it’s a brisk, fun ride - classic Gardner, complete with thin characters and his relentless use of full names.

Perry Mason 146: Stoic in a Snazzy Suit

Note: To us post-moderns ridden by teams and Teams at work, Erle Stanley Gardner’s stories drip with rugged individualism. His heroes - Perry Mason, Donald Lam, Doug Selby - are lone operators who bend rules to serve justice. Gardner’s world distrusts bureaucracy and prizes personal grit. 

Perry Mason: The Stoic in a Snazzy Suit

Perry Mason doesn’t quote Epictetus, but he lives by the Discourses and the Handbook. Strip away the quick wit, keen logic and courtroom theatrics and you find a man carved from Stoic granite: reason over protocol, duty over fame, and disdain for fees and the best tables in restaurants. His clients panic, the press howls, the prosecution breathes fire - and Mason remains unshaken. He knows what Marcus Aurelius advised: focus on what is up to you, don’t get caught up in what is not up to you. We have no power over what other people are going to do. But we do have domain over our thoughts, words, and actions.

Whoever got anything in life by being careful? Every time you stop to figure what the other fellow's going to do, you unconsciously figure what you'd do in his place. The result is that you're not fighting him, but yourself. You always come to a stalemate. Every time you think of a move, you think of a perfect defense. The best fighters don't worry about what the other man may do. And if they keep things moving fast enough, the other man is too busy to do much thinking. (TCOT Baited Hook)

Analysis of evidence, risk-taking, argument, timing, tolerance of frustration and distress - these are within his grasp. Public opinion? Police enmity? Flight of witnesses? Hot flirtatious persons of interest? Irrelevant noise.

Mason’s audacity is courage guided by his values. In adversity, he demonstrates the Stoic virtue of perseverance. His enjoyment of verbal sparring reflects the Stoic belief that there’s no learning or growth in easy victories, that conflict with a worthy opponent sharpens intellect and character. Yet he tempers his fighting spirit with magnanimity, showing respect even to prosecutors in their defeat - a reminder that virtue lies in conduct, fairness is treating both friend and foe with the dignity all human beings deserve.

Justice is his telos, the end toward which every stratagem aims. When the world tilts - when guilt looks inevitable - he doesn’t flinch. He adapts.  A Stoic doesn’t curse the rain; he uses his damn umbrella. Mason does the same, turning setbacks into leverage with a calm that says he practices radical acceptance. Courage will fuel optimism or help despondent clients steel themselves for the ordeal to come.

My experience has always been that these things look much worse than they actually are. In fact, I tell my clients that nine times out of ten they can say to themselves, 'Things are never as bad as they seem.' I admit things look black, but we're going to keep fighting, and don't you get discouraged. (TCOT Beautiful Beggar)

This ethos mirrors old ornery American values: simplicity, self-reliance, skepticism of authority, defiance of convention, rule-skirting and risk-taking and the unshakeable belief that one determined person can find the can-do to accomplish anything. Gardner’s plots celebrate brains, boldness and theatrics, making his characters embodiments of an American ideal - justice delivered not by committees or working groups or five men in a back room, but by a relentless individual who refuses to quit.

The Ides of Noir: Black Magic

Note: Probably taking on the part because it was not playing a heavy, Raymond Burr appears only in the opening scene. He’s his handsome self not only because of the trim beard but also he’s dressed to the nines as his “man about town” character has just gone to the opera in the Paris of 1848. He plays Dumas, Jr. who questions his father Dumas, Sr. about his latest writing project, a biography of the Italian adventurer Cagliostro in Paris during the run-up to the French Revolution.

Black Magic
1949 / 1:40
Tagline: “...It Will Hold You in its Spell!”
[internet archive]

The best thing going for the movie is its striking sets and film noir-influenced cinematography _ shadows, light, and mirrors everywhere. The traditional noir theme of doubling is cleverly used, with Karen Guild playing both Marie Antoinette and a young aristocrat caught in a treasonous plot. The costumes and opulent furnishings of the French courts are amazing, and Cagliostro’s palace is pretty cool. Even the seemingly hundreds of extras are superbly costumed.

The tone of the movie is out of control to the point of kooky. In this boiling cauldron of a film, many scenes have undeniable power - like the “I can afflict” moment, the live burial, and the swordfight. But there are also scenes that are hard to take seriously. Cagliostro falling victim to mesmerism in the royal trial sequence made me squirm in embarrassment for Orson Welles the hambone. Even I had to mutter, “What the hell!” - and I’m usually an easy-going movie-goer willing to go anywhere a director points.

Welles, in almost every scene as Cagliostro, is sometimes brilliant with that incomparable voice of his, but other times too earnest. He makes his eyes pop, which is funny instead of ardent. Though Welles isn’t the first actor you think of when it comes to wearing clothes well, he looks well-turned out in a few highly-worked outfits.

He convincingly plays a fearless main chancer who lets his power over mediocre people from all walks of life get out of hand. Like greed heads from Caligula to Musk, he starts to believe his own hype. He loses our sympathy due to his predictable megalomania and ruthless treatment of the young aristocrat. Akim Tamaroff plays his sidekick with dignity and plausibility. Margot Grahame does a creditable job as Mme. DuBarry, a figure that loomed large in the American pop imagination for reasons obscure to me.

See it. It’s worth viewing primarily for its look. While it’s a bit long and the tone overheated, it’s also moody, which has its appeal. The word seems to be that Welles had a hand in the direction, though nothing is written down. Shot in Rome, the movie was the most fun he’d ever had making a film, said Welles.

As for the connection with the original Perry Mason TV series, Berry Kroeger plays Dumas, Sr. in the opening scene. With a superb radio voice, Kroeger appeared in seven episodes, often as a crook, sometimes as the richly-deserving victim, sometimes as the culprit, never as the accused. My favorite was his performance in TCOT Lame Canary in which he plays a soft-spoken insurance broker steeped in fraud up to his elegantly tied full windsor knot.

Perry Mason 145: Retail, Ramblers, and Respectability

Retail, Ramblers, and Respectability: A Field Guide to Class Warfare in Perry Mason

A hardcore reader can approach the Perry Mason novels as a set of field notes on how people actually organize power outside of big cities. Gardner isn’t writing theory, but he keeps circling the same structure: a small social world where three kinds of people - local elites, the striving middle, and the plebian drifters - keep bumping into each other, usually just before different interests collide and something goes pop.

Start with the local elite who happen to control money, property, or legal leverage in a village, town, or small city. They get to define what counts as a reasonable story about those resources. In The Case of the Lame Canary (1937), shady businessman Walter Prescott operates exactly this way. He uses money, divorce law, and the threat of scandal to frame the situation to his advantage. He is in a position to decide what others will believe. Something similar happens in The Case of the Crooked Candle (1944), where wealthy owners and speculative businessmen stay comfortably removed from risk, letting caretakers and local professionals absorb the consequences. Power flows downward, but burden of risk rarely does.

Then there is the petite bourgeois world, which is where Gardner seems most at home. These are people whose entire lives depend on being seen as trustworthy: shopkeepers, clerks, aspiring professionals, and women trying to secure a foothold in a precarious economy. In The Case of the Shoplifter’s Shoe (1938), the Trent family’s jewelry business runs on reputation alone; once suspicion enters the picture, their livelihood starts to dissolve almost immediately. Or take The Case of the Borrowed Brunette (1946), where Eva Martell’s problem isn’t just that she is impersonating someone - it’s that she lives in a world where even a hint of impropriety can permanently close off economic options. What Gardner shows, over and over, is that this middle tier is held together by a delicate fictions such as pretty is as pretty brands itself. 

Finally, there are the disconnected figures - drifters, hitchhikers, opportunists - who seem, at first glance, to exist outside the system entirely. But they’re actually essential to how it works. In The Case of the Vagabond Virgin (1948), Veronica Dale survives by constantly adjusting who she is to the situation at hand. She is not rooted anywhere, which makes her both useful in a badger game and dangerous if she starts spilling. These are the characters who carry messages, stage encounters, and keep lookouts. They are not the masterminds, but nothing much would happen without them.

Put these pieces together and you get a kind of informal map of American social life: elites generate the pressures and possibilities, the middle class absorbs the shocks, and the marginal figures make everything move. Perry Mason’s role, in this light, is less that of a heroic individual than of a go-between - someone who can pass from one world to another, translate between them, and, at least temporarily, make the whole arrangement a bit more fair for the underdog, the unjustly accused, no matter their station in life.

Perry Mason 144: TCOT Stuttering Bishop

Note: The plot is so complicated it needs a plot of its own just to keep track of the plot. Near the end, you might think you know who did what to whom and why, but you are wrong because Gardner is hiding extra whoms and whats behind secret doors. Only in the last chapter does Perry Mason pull off the big reveal where he explains everything to Della and Paul like a magician explaining why the pretty lady didn’t scream when she was getting sawed in half, and you sit there nodding like “Yes of course that makes sense” while inside your head your Wise Mind be objectifying, “Wait … what?”

The Case of the Stuttering Bishop – Erle Stanley Gardner

This 1936 mystery opens with Perry Mason grumbling over paperwork until Della Street rescues him with a visitor: an Australian bishop named William Mallory. Mason’s antennae twitch immediately - Mallory stammers, unexpected in a man whose calling demands fluency.

Mallory spins a tale as tangled as threads in a seamstress’ stash. Renwold C. Brownley - one of Gardner’s grandiose tycoons - wrecked his son’s marriage and drove Julia Branner, the daughter-in-law, to Australia. Desperate, Julia gave up her baby for adoption. Now Brownley wants his grandchild back and has hired shady detectives to locate the heir. Julia insists the girl they’ve found is a fraud. Mallory predicts Julia will soon seek Mason’s help.

She does - and promptly lands in deeper trouble. Brownley turns up dead, and Julia is charged with murder. Mason believes her innocent but faces a client who won’t explain why she's innocent. Meanwhile, Mallory vanishes after an attack, and imposters parade through the case like phonies preaching sincerity. 

The plot is a labyrinth - one of the most complex in the canon - yet the limited number of suspects keeps the guessing game manageable. No courtroom theatrics here; Mason and D.A. Hamilton Burger even share a civil conference, a collegiality that would vanish in later books. What remains constant is Mason’s relentless pursuit of truth, armed with logic and a gambler’s nerve.

Bottom line: A first-rate puzzle, rich in deception and character interplay. For longtime fans, it’s a showcase of Gardner’s confidence in his readers’ ability to keep pace. For newcomers, it’s proof of why Gardner ruled the mystery world for decades and sold a half-billion novels.