The 15th of every month until I don't know when I will post a review of a Perry Mason mystery. For the Hell of it.
The Case of the Shoplifter’s Shoe - Erle Stanley Gardner
The 13th Mason novel from 1938 is an amazingly good mystery. In a department store restaurant (remember those?), a little old lady (LOL) is accused of shoplifting. With ample justification, too. However, lawyer Perry Mason, who witnessed the incident with his secretary Della Street, turns the situation on its head. He thus rescues the guilty-as-hell LOL from the too eager grip of the floor walker, who should’ve made the bust after she left the store.
Later the LOL falls victim to a hit and run during which, according to eyewitnesses, a pistol flies out of her handbag onto the road. Soon, a body is found, and the LOL is accused of murder. A complex chain of events begins, including another murder, leading to such a clever solution that even the astute reader will have to read it twice to get it.
In the Perry Mason novels of the 1930s, the lawyer comes off like a tough private eye in the pulp magazines. An overbearing Mason, for example, treats PI Paul Drake more like a wimpy gofer than a trusted sidekick. Mason also applies well-timed punches to the noses of uncooperative thugs. Calling Della, when the phone rings a long time before she picks up, Perry says, “Having a heavy date, Della?” She tosses it back, “If this was a heavy date, I wouldn't have even heard the phone.”
And later tipsy Della and workaholic Perry converse:
“You should know, Chief, that you mustn't be so serious on my birthday. The trouble with you is you're cold sober.”
Mason glanced surreptitiously at his wrist watch. “Well” he said, “it's not an incurable disease.”
Della Street surveyed him with exaggerated gravity. “Yes,” she said, “it is. You're working. You might hoist a drink or two, but it would run off your back like water off a duck's stomach.”
In a philosophical passage unusual for Gardner, Mason respects his LOL client for her hard-boiled acceptance of the first-degree murder charge and the prospect of being checked out of this vale of tears via the gas chamber. But I guess the stoic acceptance of a stern reality isn’t so unexpected in a Depression Era novel whose setting is a dog-eat-dog world.
Nowadays, of course, we trust our post-pandemic world will be just the opposite.
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