Mount TBR #4

I read this book for Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2019.

The DA Holds A Candle – Erle Stanly Gardner

This 1938 mystery was the second of a nonet published between 1937 and 1949 that starred the idealistic DA Doug Selby. The Gardner Fiction Factory (his words) is famous for the Perry Mason and Cool & Lam novels, too many of which have been reviewed in this blog. Like the other eight, this novel was first serialized in The Country Gentleman, an agricultural magazine with about 2.5 million subscribers.  

The DA Holds A Candle opens with Selby and his mentor Sheriff Max Brandon discussing a problem with a roadhouse in their county. The forces of law and order suspect big city gamblers are being imported to separate the local young blades from their pappy’s money. The situation is complicated because one of the youngbloods happens to be the son of a sugar beet potentate, who stoops to local politics only when his interests are threatened. Brandon, a true pard out of Westerns, and Selby’s GF Sylvia Martin, crusading reporter who could be Della Street’s sassy sister, want the moneybags taken down a peg or two.

Gardner none too subtly examines the challenges of a DA in a backwater county. Both friends and enemies assume that the DA and sheriff will accommodate their expectations for fear of political repercussions. Sylvia frankly wants scoops in exchange for political endorsements from her newspaper. The potentate wants the tickets torn up when his son speeds and gets popped in the gambling hell. The potentate derides Selby as unable to “hold a candle” to big city DA’s and calls Brandon a “comic opera” sheriff.

Gardner implies that the fight against civic corruption and malfeasance starts with realistic reformers who are as ruthlessly determined to clean up cheating and chiseling as the crooks are about making money and the bigwigs and toadies are about maintaining their position. Gardner seems to think too much money, power, and reputation have a corrupting influence on the rich and famous and their hangers-on and those who would counter the results of that corruption – cops, teachers, reporters, lawyers, doctors – must work hard forever against behavior coming out of avarice, lust, cowardice, and injustice.

Compared with The DA Calls it Murder, the first of the Selby books, the two main currents of the plot do not get tangled up (the incidents are intricately tied up and need alert attention to keep straight) and wry asides are few. Characters get a bee in the bonnet and are driven by their one big irrational idea to extremes. Selby has a touching faith in the capacity of reason and logic to explain the facts of nutty behavior. Gardner’s highly readable prose drives the story effectively. We readers can always trust his stories to move.