The Case of the
Drowsy Mosquito – Erle Stanley Gardner
His doc told Banning Clarke to take it easy on account of
his iffy heart. But Banning Clarke’s old prospecting pard Salty Bowers urges
him to stop babying himself, that old prospectors go downhill in a jiffy if
they don’t live under sun and stars and tramp all day looking for precious
metals. So Banning Clarke takes to sleeping in the rock garden of his mansion
which has been planted with cactus and saltbush.
His doc has insisted that nurse Velma Starler live there
24-7, ever ready with medication and cautions to take it easy. Also living in
the mansion are his in-laws the Bradissons (mother and son), the son’s mining
broker Hayward Small, and his cook-housekeeper Nell Sims and her con-man
husband.
Banning Clarke has retained ace lawyer Perry Mason to represent
him in a fraud case. The plot thickens when the Bradissons and then Perry and his
assistant Della Street are poisoned with arsenic. After the inevitable murder,
an interesting legal question comes up: who is culpable for the killing if the
victim is shot after ingesting a big bad dose of arsenic?
This is doubtless one of the best Masons I’ve read, and
I’ve read a couple dozen of them. To appeal to the kid in us, he has material
about the legendary lost gold mines of California. The legal twists are so positively serpentine
that Mason gets ahead of himself. It’s an illustration too that Gardner
respected his readers enough that he trusted their intelligence to follow the complex
legal reasoning of the opposing attorneys.
Gardner puts in more comic relief that usual, with PI
Paul Drake posing as a drunken prospector and Nell Sims as a known Mrs.
Malaprop who mangles maxims and proverbs as in “A stich in time saves a pound
of cure.” While Gardner’s nature writing about the austere beauty of the desert
is not exactly W.H. Hudson, it enjoyable to read his advocacy of the simple
outdoors life and nature’s ascetic lessons of self-reliance and resilience. Finally,
as the novel was written in 1942, during WW2, the topical references give us
postmoderns a sense of how the rationing of sugar, for example, influenced daily
behavior of ordinary people.
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