We are nearing the second anniversary of this custom, which features a review of a mystery with our favorite lawyer on the 15th of the month. It's hard to believe the last year really happened. Or is still happening with about 1500 deaths a day in the US....
The Case of the Daring Divorcee - Erle Stanley Gardner
The 72nd Perry Mason novel (1964) has its funny moments and the usual two-guns shenanigans. But you can hear the gears grinding. It’s too complicated for ready understanding, the dialogue is stiff, it hides crucial information, and it recapitulates a minor sequence of events three times.
A woman wearing big sunglasses leaves in Mason’s office Adelle Hastings’ purse with $3,000 and a recently fired .38 with two spent shells. When Mason tracks Adelle down she explains that her purse was stolen from her car. Adelle explains that she, the third wife of Garvin Hastings, is in the process of obtaining a divorce. Garvin wants to keep things amicable even to the point of acting in such a way that it seems he’s having second thoughts about asking Adelle to go to Las Vegas for the divorce.
The bullets from those two shells are found, one in poor Garvin’s brain pan, and the other having passed through his skull into the bed where he was sleeping. In the exposition and through a character, Gardner explains the premeditation and cold-bloodedness it takes to murder a sleeping man. The double harangue is odd for Gardner, who didn’t usually repeat himself, especially with points the reader already knows.
The fun highlights are two. Detective Tragg wants Mason’s receptionist Gertie to identify Adelle. Mason has her put on her big dark glasses while Della ushers in six women also with dark glasses for a surprise line-up. Tragg is sore at Mason’s tactic. In another scene a shyster lawyer tells Mason that he values the good opinion of Mason. To which Perry replies, “Don’t value what you can’t have” like the stoic role model that Mason is.
Indeed, if our pandemical year has taught me anything, it's "Don’t make your happiness depend on things that are not up to you; if you want something good get it from inside yourself." Anyway....
As is his wont, Gardner takes aim at The System. That is, he criticizes the practice of overcharging, i.e. when a prosecutor multiplies the number of crimes a defendant allegedly committed.
“If it [a stolen gun] should appear,” Mason said, “that the defendant and this witness conspired to get some evidence from my office, then the taking of the gun would be an overt act which would make him guilty of a separate crime, the crime of criminal conspiracy. Taking the gun is one thing, conspiring to take it is another. They are both crimes.”
“That’s splitting hairs,” [Prosecutor] Ellis said.
“No, it isn’t,” Mason said. “Whenever you people draw up an information or a complaint against a person you put in just as many counts as you can think of. You put in a count of criminal conspiracy and you put in a count of the criminal act. Then you try to talk a jury into returning a verdict of guilty on every count in the indictment. You claim each count is a separate crime, that you don’t make the law, you only enforce it, that if the legislature has chosen to make it a crime to conspire to commit an unlawful act and a defendant conspires to commit such an act and then does commit the act, he’s guilty of two separate crimes.”
Needless to say, this is a problem that has by no means gone away, prosecutorial discretion being what it is in our year 2021. And prosecutors enjoy complete immunity. For the sake of St Paddy's Day, let's paraphrase the Irish blessing, "Heaven between us and the criminal justice system."
In short, a Mason novel, like numerous late-career Mason novels from the 1960s, that would be of interest only to hardcore Mason fanatics.
Don't value what you can't have, to a shyster lawyer, does sound like it makes the book worth reading though!
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