The Ides of Perry Mason 65

Note: I post something concerning the mystery fiction of Erle Stanley Gardner on the 15th of every month. Recently I was talking to a 30-something - a masters in Library Science - who did not know who Erle Stanley Gardner was, though she did know Perry Mason. No reflection on her knowledge, I think, since culture moves on. There's no reason the past's mega-stars should be remembered. Transience, even for authors who've sold a half a billion novels.

Spill the Jackpot – ESG writing as A.A. Fair

Under one of his many pen-names, Gardner wrote 30 mysteries starring the PI team of Bertha Cool and Donald Lam. This 1941 entry, the fourth, opens with Bertha checking out of a sanitarium in Nevada. For six months she had been recovering from a combined form of flu and pneumonia. On her journey back to health, she has taken off about 100 pounds. Down to 150 pounds, her new look has attracted, for the first time in years, male attention.

On a plane to LA on a layover in Las Vegas, ad man Arthur Whitewell subjects Bertha to the male stare. Getting into conversation, he finds that his fellow passengers Cool and Lam are private eyes. He hires them to find a young woman, Corla Burke.  She disappeared a day before she was to be married to Whitewell’s son Phillip who’s desperate to find Corla. Whitewell’s family problem does not stop him from chatting up Bertha, exerting the fluent charm of a marketing guy.

As the investigation unfolds in the first hundred pages, as usual, Donald Lam faces a lot of challenges. Short and slim, he packs a punch that Bertha claims wouldn’t shoo flies from a jug of maple syrup. In a casino he is socked into next week by an attendant of slot machines. Accused of tampering with the one-armed bandits, Lam is then roughed up by the cops. Getting a line on Helen Framley, who may help with finding Corla, Lam is thrashed by Helen’s semi-psycho BF, an ex-prizefighter named Pug. Though self-absorbed in being attractive again, even Bertha notices Lam’s clothes are dusty and his face is out of alignment.

Then, after being yanked off a train back to the City of Angels, Lam is suspected of murder by menacing police officials. Mind, all this in just the first hundred pages. It’s non-stop action in Lam’s investigations, like when Patrick O’Brian puts our heroes through battle, failed regime change, flight on mules, pox, blizzard, ice fields, hard sailing in a mere cutter, and a lightning strike all in the one novel The Wine-Dark Sea.

When Gardner wrote as Fair, he gave himself permission to loosen up. He actually develops characters in this novel. Ad agency sharper Arthur Whitewell doffs and dons personas at will. Gardner gives a psychological acuity to Whitewell that is persuasive. Ex-prize fighter Louie Hazen is in fact deeper than his image as slap-happy. And Helen Framley is a persuasive examination of the Gardnerian Heroine: young, urban, independent, strong, active, down-right, and only human. Gardner inserts travel writing by having Lam, Louie and Helen hide in the desert for a time; Gardner loved to describe the feelings desert beauty evokes and the soul-satisfying chuck you eat when camping. On the desert sojourn, Louie proves he is not punch drunk by becoming an excellent camp cook and boxing trainer for Lam.

Gardner deploys quips and comic relief in the Mason novels, but in the Cool and Lam novels Gardner gives his keen sense of comedy more play.  Bertha is a marvelous comic creation, a blend of the canny and smarmy, cynical and hard-boiled, greedy and miserly. In this novel, the interplay between Bertha and Lam is hilarious, especially when Lam tells Bertha he’s quitting the detective business because he has fallen in love. Desperate to retain his smarts for her own selfish ends, Bertha pulls out of her hat practical, financial, and misogynist arguments against playing the fool blind to the wiles of women.

Lam however is inarguably Gardner’s best creation. In the Mason novels, Gardner never tried a first-person narration from Perry, Della, or Paul’s point of view. But here and in other novels, Lam tells the story, though he will withhold information from the cops, suspects, Bertha, their office manager Elsie Brand, and the reader. Lam is never overtly upright or high-minded. Yet the people he interacts with, from hard-bitten prizefighters to tough city girls, can tell he is clean and decent for all his tight-lipped and undemonstrative ways. An ex-lawyer, Lam is no fool about the ways of the world and how human beings are likely to respond to internal and external pressures. He uses his well-hidden moral compass to manipulate Bertha, clients and cops so that the innocent are vindicated, underdogs are rewarded, and the unjust and cowardly are punished. Without prating about ethics, Lam would agree with Jewish mothers who say, “You don’t need a brass band to do a mitzvah (good deed).”

Granted, Louie’s tutorial for Lam on the inner workings of slot machines was out of date by 1945. And I wonder about the retro advice on the road work and massage that goes into becoming a practitioner of the sweet science. The reveal turns on an implausible choice of a character. And Bertha acts uncharacteristically in a scene near the end.

But any concerns I have are trivial. Plot and incident are not really the thing to catch a king or a reader. I highly recommend this vintage mystery for its characterization, especially of the series characters. How often can you say that of a Gardner story?

Today is Sports Day

スポーツの日 Supōtsu no Hi.  This Japanese national holiday was established in 1966 as 体育の日 Taiiku no hi (literally Phys Ed Day). I’m pretty sure it was still called that when I was in Japan (1986-92). The Japanese associate the coming of autumn with reading books and enjoying sports. Anyway, it became Sports Day in 2000 as a new Monday holiday. Let’s celebrate by reading a non-fiction book about Japan.

Night Work: Sexuality, Pleasure and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club – Anne Allison

In the 1980s, Allison, now a professor of cultural anthropology at Duke, conducted field research by working as a hostess in a Tokyo nightclub. Her role involved entertaining Japanese business executives with karaoke, drinks, and flattery. Her 1994 book explores why large Japanese companies fund such entertainment for their male employees.

Allison argues that hostess clubs help white-collar men bond, foster company loyalty, and boost their egos. She claims that the interplay of work and play enhances job performance. The clubs offer short-term excitement without disrupting work commitments, as the interactions are non-sexual, maintaining a “respectable” image and preventing jealousy among colleagues.

Allison’s fieldwork included interviews and background reading. She found the hostess role manageable due to her teaching and language skills, though enduring crude remarks was challenging. She notes that not all business executives enjoy these outings, and their wives tolerate the extra hours as necessary for career advancement. 

Overall, the book is recommended for those interested in gender relations, women’s studies, or Japanese nightlife, despite some academic jargon.

Reading Those Classics #17

Classic Plague Narrative. The author released this popular history in 1949. Though it avoided footnotes and read as easily as a novel for non-expert readers, historians and epidemiologists regarded it as a model examination of a season of yellow fever in Philadelphia, the capital city of the USA in the days of Our Early Republic.

Bring Out Your Dead: The Great Plague of Yellow Fever in Philadelphia in 1793 - J. H. Powell

In 1793, Philadelphia was the busiest port in the USA. As such, it was the natural center of the banking, finance, and insurance industries. It was a major center for learning in the natural and medical sciences.

The winter of 1792-93 had been mild. The summer of 1793 brought a drought. Because the city had no water system, people caught and stored rainwater in rain barrels. Perhaps the mosquitos that carried yellow fever bred in those barrels of standing water. Or, perhaps the mosquitos were brought on ships that carried Francophone refugees away from an uprising of enslaved people that had started in 1791 in Haiti.

Per what was surely an undercount, Yellow Jack killed 5,000 people from August through November. Its symptoms start suddenly with fever, chills, headache, backache, nausea, and vomiting. It gets its name because jaundice makes the skin and eyes look yellow. There is no specific treatment beyond supportive care and attentive nursing, neither of which were available due to labor shortages caused by people fleeing the city in fear for their health and lives.

At the time a tiny number of observers wrote to the papers with the theory that mosquitoes transmitted the disease among humans, but doctors did not pay any mind because they were so embroiled in their own controversy as to the origin and treatment. Dr. Benjamin Rush and his supporters thought that the disease was caused by foul miasmas that in turn brought about imbalances among the four bodily fluids (blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile). So patients with yellow fever were to be treated with purges, such as bloodletting, vomiting, and pooping. French physicians, who fought the virus in the Caribbean and theorized it was contagious, used gentler palliative treatments. The public prints saw diatribes and screeds between the two points of view, so many that lay readers complained they were tired of reading about the controversy.

Powell judiciously tells about people who left the city and people who heroically stayed to do what they could. Leavers included the Governor of Pennsylvania, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington. And, unsurprisingly, the entire U.S. Congress left the stricken city, thus demonstrating the courage we have come to expect from politicians.

The Mayor of Philadelphia, Matthew Clarkson, stayed to cope with the crisis despite a lack of governmental institutions. At the Mayor's request, volunteers from various walks of life came forward to work in their Assembly. From scratch, they arranged care for the sick, the old, the poor and the orphaned.  Powell also relates the heroic work of Black Philadelphians and Francophone refugees. Much to his credit, Powell does not express elation over heroism or wax indignant over people acting - shall we say - less than human.

In conclusion, this is a great read, especially in light of the clear social, economic and psychological parallels to our own pandemical experience. I’ve been a long-time plague buff, reading In the Wake of Plague in 2014 and Defoe long before this blog. But our pandemic only sharpened my interest, given my – our – first-hand experience: see The Great Influenza (John M. Barry); Flu (Gina Kolata); The American Plague (Molly Caldwell Crosby); The White Castle (Orhan Pamuk);  The Forgotten Plague (Frank Ryan); Year of Wonders (Geraldine Brooks); and Pandemic (Sonia Shah).