Intro: On the 15th of every month, I post a review of a Perry Mason-related mystery or episode from the original TV series. In 1939 the productive Gardner Fiction Factory (his words) churned out product for an American public nervous about turmoil in Europe. It released two Cool and Lam mysteries, The Bigger They Come and The Knife Slipped; one Doug Selby mystery The DA Draws a Circle; and two starring Our Favorite Lawyer, this one and The Case of the Rolling Bones. Recall that Gardner kept writing and selling novelettes to the pulps. When did the man sleep? Did his secretaries ever consider organizing?
The Case of the Perjured Parrot – Erle Stanley Gardner
The fourteenth Perry Mason mystery opens with office manager Della Street teasing Our Favorite Lawyer for getting behind in paperwork. But Charles W. Sabin, the son of murder victim Fremont C. Sabin, gets Mason off the hook. He asks that Mason look into his father’s killing and keep the avaricious widow from taking control of the estate.
Gardner gives more backstory than usual in order to give victim Fremont’s bizarre actions more plausibility. Fremont, it seems, believed in American can-do-ism: “The privilege of struggling for achievement was the privilege of living, and to take away that right to struggle was equivalent to taking away life itself.” You would think that such a rugged individualist would not bother his head over public opinion. But Sabin's aversion to publicity compels him to make strange and unfortunate choices.
Fremont ends up shot dead with a 40-caliber derringer in his mountain cabin where his parrot Casanova is squawking “Helen, put down that gun … don’t shoot! … you’ve shot me!” Charles W. Sabin, the son, however, tells Mason that in fact the parrot is not Casanova. Fremont's greedy widow is named Mrs. Helen Watkins Sabin and Fremont’s most recent wife is named Helen Monteith. Which Helen is the parrot talking about? Why would somebody, presumably the killer, have switched parrots?
The marriage of Fremont and the quiet librarian Helen Monteith seems unlikely on the face of it. But Gardner has her explain enough to Mason so that both their choices make sense, especially hers in the context of being single in her thirties, in a small town, during the Depression. Gardner didn’t refer to current events because he thought dated books wouldn’t sell. But he refers indirectly to the effects of long-term unemployment such as chronic feelings of demoralization and self-hatred which were eating away at people, especially men, in the late 1930s.
Finally, in a characteristic digression, Gardner has Mason explain at length the importance of that element of wisdom the Stoics called “good calculation:”
I’ve mentioned before, when people get fixed beliefs, they interpret everything in the light of those beliefs. Take politics, for instance. We can look back at past events, and the deadly significance of those events seems so plain that we don’t see how people could possibly have overlooked them. Yet millions of voters, at the time, saw those facts and warped their significance so that they supported erroneous political beliefs. The same is true of things which are happening at present. A few years from now we’ll look back in wonder that people failed to see the deadly significance of signs on the political horizon. Twenty years from now even the most stupid high school student can appreciate the importance of those signs and the results which must inevitably have followed. But right now we have some twenty million voters who think one way, and some twenty-five million voters who think another. And both sides believe they’re correctly interpreting the facts.
From 1911 to 1918 Gardner worked as a lawyer in Oxnard, California, representing Chinese and Mexican immigrants living in poverty. The fact Gardner was on the side of the angels makes the reader fairly sure “erroneous political beliefs” is a poke at the nativism and fundamentalism of the 1920s. And the reader is pretty sure in 1939 “signs on the political horizon” meant the inevitability of WWII and millions of isolationist America Firsters that were breezily confident they could do business with Hitler.
Gardner, as usual, makes the plot move with a briskness that borders on hectic. He works in legal technicalities about wills. Whether the wealthy Sabin did or did not divorce his wife Mrs. Helen Watkins Sabin before his killing will determine who the executor of the estate will be, the money-hungry wife or the loyal son. Gardner, by the way, must have liked coming up with the character of the hard-charging middle-aged woman because they have sharp elbows in his novels. Mrs. Helen Watkins Sabin brings energy to her fusses and tantrums and assault and battery. Taking people as they are, Mason never loses his cool. Mason respects a fighter.
In the last quarter of the book, instead of the usual preliminary hearing at the end, a folksy coroner and sheriff run an inquest. They are assisted by ominous bully Sgt. Holcomb. He hates Mason with a passion that can’t be good for his gastro-intestinal functioning or cardio-vascular health. The end features a fine reveal and a surprise.
I highly recommend this classic Mason mystery.
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