The Ides of Perry Mason 64

Note: The 15^th of the month features a piece about Our Favorite Lawyer in the novels or on the tube. This novel was made into the second episode of the series, aired September 28, 1957. Darryl Hickman plays Steve Harris. He looks familiar because as a kid actor he was in The Grapes of Wrath, among others. His little brother Dwayne played Dobie Gillis on The Many Loves of ~, a show I liked when I was around ten for Bob Denver as Maynard Krebs (Work!! still sums up my attitude) and Sheila James as Zelda Gilroy (even as a boy I knew the best girls were the smart kind loyal girls).

The Case of the Sleepwalker’s Niece – Erle Stanley Gardner

Perry Mason’s would-be client, Peter B. Kent, has psychological, marital and commercial anxieties so severe that he is driven to walking in his sleep. The titular niece, Edna Hammer, tells a weird story as she seeks lawyer Mason's advice.

While sleepwalking, Uncle Pete took up a carving knife and wandered about his mansion. He was found by the police outside the bedroom door, which his alimony hound of a wife, Doris, had locked against his attack. Although Doris is making lovey-dovey noises about a reconciliation to support her disturbed husband, she wants big bucks. She might try to get Uncle Pete declared incompetent, warehouse him in a nursing home, and take charge of his sizeable estate and holdings. Edna Hammer wants Mason to facilitate Uncle Pete’s divorce so that he can marry his selfless nurse Lucille Mays.

As if the personal front didn’t provide enough anxiety to provoke midnight strolls, his iffy business partner Frank Maddox and Maddox’s niggling lawyer, John Duncan, are being difficult about contracts and settlements. Holed up in Uncle Pete’s mansion for negotiations, Mason makes no secret of his disgust quibbling about the verbiage of contracts instead of making a fool of DA Hamilton Burger in open court during a murder trial.

In an Agatha Christie move, Gardner has the characters spend the night in Uncle Pete’s old dark mansion. The next morning all hell breaks loose with a corpse found in the guest room and a bloodstained carving knife found under Uncle Pete’s pillow.

At the levers of the criminal justice mincing machine is Lt. Tragg’s brutish predecessor Sgt. Holcombe. He sensibly concludes that Uncle Pete is the culprit, in light of previous history of a sleep disorder, prolonged stress, and the carving knife incident. It’s up to Mason and his team to determine if Uncle Pete committed the murder at all and if he did, his culpability given he was sleepwalking during the commission of the crime.

The courtroom scene in the last third of the book is not too slow or too complicated.

In the early novels such as this 1936 mystery (the eighth of about 80), Mason is blunt and outspoken, not the gallant suave Mason of the Fifties. True to smirking, sarcastic pulp heroes, Mason is a hardboiled tough guy for the low-brows and a quick-witted professional for the high-brows. He smiles “fiendishly” and calls women “sister.” He expresses outrageous opinions, like advocating blackmail as a way for a woman to get her money back from a man who squeezed cash out of her by pretending to love her. A self-confident and bold Leo, Mason brusquely disbelieves Edna’s astrological analysis of Uncle Pete’s character.   

Typical of the style of pulp magazines, the writing is so concise as to be terse, with dialogue briskly moving the plot.  Gardner catered to the male readers of Black Mask with lots of action, surprises, wisecracks and banter, and good old American scorn for and resistance to authority. Joy in foiling The Man’s determination to put an innocent person in the gas chamber may be an expression of defiance sharpened by the Depression. Also pulpy is the rapidly sketched out parade of characters:  a hypochondriac, a gold digger, a crackpot inventor, and a New Age niece before woo-woo really took off during the Age of Aquarius.

It’s odd that though Gardner assumed readers craved action over characters, we loyal Mason fans like not only the page-turning narrative magic but also the interaction among Perry, Della, and Paul.