Friday, August 15, 2014

Vintage Mystery #9



I read this book for the Vintage Mystery Bingo Reading Challenge 2014. The challenge is to read 6 or more Vintage Mysteries. All novels must have been originally written before 1960 and be from the mystery category.

I read this for L-2: Read a Book that’s been made into a movie. I hope a TV episode is good enough – this was first broadcast on November 1, 1958.

The Case of the Buried Clock - Erle Stanley Gardner, 1942

Perry Mason fans regard this WWII-era mystery as one of their favorites. In the 22nd novel starring the lawyer and his trusty sidekicks Della Street and Paul Drake, Gardner shows that he’d mastered his distinctive way with brisk narrative. Plenty of clues make the plot elaborate but not incomprehensibly complicated: a clock set to sidereal time; the “truth serum” scopolamine in the vic's body; an uncertain estimated time of death; camera and negative strangeness; and finally Gardner’s dependable old “two revolvers” confusion. The Perry Mason novels that Gardner published during WWII make passing references to war-time culture, such as blackouts, tire rationing, and frugality with gasoline.

No comments:

Post a Comment