The Case of the Deadly Toy – Erle Stanley Gardner
Horace Livermore Selkirk didn’t get to be a rich banker
in San Francisco by being an agreeable fellow. Though granting he didn’t like
the pickles his scapegrace son got into, he tells Perry Mason that he intends to avenge
his son's murder. The cops have Perry’s client, the son’s ex-fiancé, in
custody but Horace wants the killing pinned on the son’s ex-wife, because he
wants custody of his son’s son, the only one carrying on the Selkirk name.
Thus, this was first serialized in
1958 as The Case of the Deadly Grandpa
in The Saturday Evening Post.
But the story does not feel 63 years old. Gardner brings in the scary practices of stalking and sending poison pen letters. Stalking has hardly gone away. And social media gives sad angry misfits world-wide reach to be cruel and unusual in writing.
Gardner examines the influence of TV watching on the anti-social behavior of kids. While interviewing persons of
interest, Mason pries out of a babysitter that on a whim she allowed her
seven-year-old charge to play with a .22 with the shells removed. Under the
influence of “pistol performances” on TV, the boy, she admits, might have
gotten hold of the gun and loaded it with a shell.
Mason gets a witness on the stand to admit that
she was coached by the police to make her identification, having been allowed
to observe the defendant surrounded by police before the witness identified her
in a line up. Still with us are miscarriages of justice due to police-generated witness testimony.
This 1959
outing is not one of the best Mason novels I’ve read. But the subtext about
when and how children should be allowed to handle weapons was interesting to
me, since this is another issue that has hardly gone away in the 60 years since
this mystery was published.
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