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?