Perry Mason 145: Retail, Ramblers, and Respectability

Retail, Ramblers, and Respectability: A Field Guide to Class Warfare in Perry Mason

A hardcore reader can approach the Perry Mason novels as a set of field notes on how people actually organize power outside of big cities. Gardner isn’t writing theory, but he keeps circling the same structure: a small social world where three kinds of people - local elites, the striving middle, and the plebian drifters - keep bumping into each other, usually just before different interests collide and something goes pop.

Start with the local elite who happen to control money, property, or legal leverage in a village, town, or small city. They get to define what counts as a reasonable story about those resources. In The Case of the Lame Canary (1937), shady businessman Walter Prescott operates exactly this way. He uses money, divorce law, and the threat of scandal to frame the situation to his advantage. He is in a position to decide what others will believe. Something similar happens in The Case of the Crooked Candle (1944), where wealthy owners and speculative businessmen stay comfortably removed from risk, letting caretakers and local professionals absorb the consequences. Power flows downward, but burden of risk rarely does.

Then there is the petite bourgeois world, which is where Gardner seems most at home. These are people whose entire lives depend on being seen as trustworthy: shopkeepers, clerks, aspiring professionals, and women trying to secure a foothold in a precarious economy. In The Case of the Shoplifter’s Shoe (1938), the Trent family’s jewelry business runs on reputation alone; once suspicion enters the picture, their livelihood starts to dissolve almost immediately. Or take The Case of the Borrowed Brunette (1946), where Eva Martell’s problem isn’t just that she is impersonating someone - it’s that she lives in a world where even a hint of impropriety can permanently close off economic options. What Gardner shows, over and over, is that this middle tier is held together by a delicate fictions such as pretty is as pretty brands itself. 

Finally, there are the disconnected figures - drifters, hitchhikers, opportunists - who seem, at first glance, to exist outside the system entirely. But they’re actually essential to how it works. In The Case of the Vagabond Virgin (1948), Veronica Dale survives by constantly adjusting who she is to the situation at hand. She is not rooted anywhere, which makes her both useful in a badger game and dangerous if she starts spilling. These are the characters who carry messages, stage encounters, and keep lookouts. They are not the masterminds, but nothing much would happen without them.

Put these pieces together and you get a kind of informal map of American social life: elites generate the pressures and possibilities, the middle class absorbs the shocks, and the marginal figures make everything move. Perry Mason’s role, in this light, is less that of a heroic individual than of a go-between - someone who can pass from one world to another, translate between them, and, at least temporarily, make the whole arrangement a bit more fair for the underdog, the unjustly accused, no matter their station in life.

Perry Mason 144: TCOT Stuttering Bishop

Note: The plot is so complicated it needs a plot of its own just to keep track of the plot. Near the end, you might think you know who did what to whom and why, but you are wrong because Gardner is hiding extra whoms and whats behind secret doors. Only in the last chapter does Perry Mason pull off the big reveal where he explains everything to Della and Paul like a magician explaining why the pretty lady didn’t scream when she was getting sawed in half, and you sit there nodding like “Yes of course that makes sense” while inside your head your Wise Mind be objectifying, “Wait … what?”

The Case of the Stuttering Bishop – Erle Stanley Gardner

This 1936 mystery opens with Perry Mason grumbling over paperwork until Della Street rescues him with a visitor: an Australian bishop named William Mallory. Mason’s antennae twitch immediately - Mallory stammers, unexpected in a man whose calling demands fluency.

Mallory spins a tale as tangled as threads in a seamstress’ stash. Renwold C. Brownley - one of Gardner’s grandiose tycoons - wrecked his son’s marriage and drove Julia Branner, the daughter-in-law, to Australia. Desperate, Julia gave up her baby for adoption. Now Brownley wants his grandchild back and has hired shady detectives to locate the heir. Julia insists the girl they’ve found is a fraud. Mallory predicts Julia will soon seek Mason’s help.

She does - and promptly lands in deeper trouble. Brownley turns up dead, and Julia is charged with murder. Mason believes her innocent but faces a client who won’t explain why she's innocent. Meanwhile, Mallory vanishes after an attack, and imposters parade through the case like phonies preaching sincerity. 

The plot is a labyrinth - one of the most complex in the canon - yet the limited number of suspects keeps the guessing game manageable. No courtroom theatrics here; Mason and D.A. Hamilton Burger even share a civil conference, a collegiality that would vanish in later books. What remains constant is Mason’s relentless pursuit of truth, armed with logic and a gambler’s nerve.

Bottom line: A first-rate puzzle, rich in deception and character interplay. For longtime fans, it’s a showcase of Gardner’s confidence in his readers’ ability to keep pace. For newcomers, it’s proof of why Gardner ruled the mystery world for decades and sold a half-billion novels.

The Nones of Noir: Sorry, Wrong Number

Note: In film noir fashion, the phone becomes an instrument of the fickle finger of fate. Its use for overhearing conspiracies and failing to call for help underlines themes of miscommunication, helplessness, and modern alienation.

Sorry, Wrong Number
1948 / 1:29
Tagline: “Tangled Wires … Whispering of Murder! Tangled Lives … Fighting to Escape!”
[internet archive]

In Lucille Fletcher’s famous radio play a rich woman finds her imperious self in deep trouble when she overhears a murder plot on the party line, i.e. a telephone line shared by many subscribers in New York City in those long-ago days of public pay phones and soda fountains in drugstores.  

Paramount persuaded Fletcher to adapt the play for the silver screen.  To the 22-minute radio script, Fletcher added backstory with the film noir stand-by, flashbacks. The many flashbacks are seamlessly woven into the narrative (with even a flashback in a flashback) without any relief of the mounting tension of the rich woman, confined to her bed, on the phone, flipping her lid.

Barbara Stanwyck is superb. On one hand, her character is a familiar Stanwyckian fighter. A spoiled and selfish rich woman, she takes no prisoners as she irritably and commandingly barks orders and throws her weight around. On the other hand, her troubled soul is subject to panic attacks due to her fear of abandonment and fending for herself in a hostile dangerous world. Her distress gives her heart palpitations, chest pains and physical weakness. Dr. Wendell Corey claims she does not have a genuine cardiovascular problem but she is confined to her bed, unable to engage in activities of daily life, which probably worsens her case of nerves. Her untreated anxiety, which she’s apparently had since she was a child, makes it impossible for her to be anybody’s notion of a good wife

Burt Lancaster is effective as her husband from Grassville, a town name that broadcasts “wrong side of the tracks.” In the flashback of their courtship, he says, “There’s nothing nice or pretty about my life.” He evinces no love or respect for his mother, no sense of security and comfort related to a woman who had a drunken husband and eight little ingrates like Burt to take care of. Having a hole where he should have a little gratitude is one reason he doesn’t have the slightest inkling how to be a good husband.

Between Barbara’s anxiety and Burt’s broken emotions, no wonder their marriage is troubled. He didn’t realize when he married her that Barbara expected him to be either a poodle or a sextoy as required. Kicking against his pampered dependence, Burt strikes out on his own by orchestrating murky activity that draws the attention of the authorities and mobbed-up plug-uglies like William Conrad (who, like Raymond Burr, was a stout fellow often cast as the imposing villain; his voice was perfect). Some critics complain that virile and tough Lancaster is miscast as a cowardly drip but I would argue he was a similar mix of weak-brained and spineless in Criss Cross and Come Back Little Sheba.

Ann Richards plays the old girlfriend of Burt Lancaster.  Her odd voice – she sounds like a snooty bookworm - doesn’t seem to go with her Grassville origins or that her character is married to a poorly paid civil servant. She calls Barbara to tell why she thinks her special prosecutor husband is investigating Burt. The flashback of her following her lawyer husband and his colleagues to Staten Island is a great set piece. The subway station looks menacing even in daylight. Staten Island looks desolate, a bleak place where bad people get up to bad things.

As in many noir movies, sheer bad luck takes a hand when Barbara calls the police to report the murder plot. The desk cop is distracted by a baby who getting set to either bust his watch or creep off a table. It’s a funny scene in keeping with the all the other scenes in that it stokes nervous anticipation as to what in hell is going to happen next. Stanwyck’s mounting hysteria as the movie progresses is both terrifying and wonderful - this kind of cinematic excitement being exactly why film noir thrillers are so satisfying.

There are other stellar moments of tension. While Ann and Burt talk in a restaurant, they are constantly interrupted when they desperately need to talk and Burt is distracted by a shady European in the background. Makes the movie-goer want to throw something. Cadaverous Wendell Corey plays the doctor and it’s also exasperating when he is interrupted by his impatient wife while he’s in a phone booth. One of the few breaks in the tension is the montage of Barbara and Burt’s European honeymoon, the familiar “romantic idyll” montage that women’s movies inevitably had.

Despite her memorable performance, Barbara Stanwyck lost to Jane “Johnny Belinda” Wyman for Best Actress Oscar that year. I don’t take awards and prizes seriously so I don’t care, but there’re lots of movie-goers that still say Stanwyck was robbed. I don’t recommend movies very often but this is the rare movie where you know you are being played like a pinball machine but you don’t mind because the thrills are so delicious.

Perry Mason 143: Beware the Curves

Note: This 1957 outing is one of the best PI team Bertha Cool & Donald Lam books. Gardner plays to his strength - courtroom drama - while giving us a detective yarn that’s sly and thoroughly entertaining. 

Beware the Curves – Erle Stanley Gardner writing as A. A. Fair

John Dittmar Ansel strolls into Cool & Lam’s office claiming he’s a writer - a claim supported by his bushy hair and delicate hands. He wants Bertha and Donald to find a fellow named Karl - last name unknown - who hailed from Citrus Grove, a sleepy suburb of Santa Ana. Ansel says he met Karl in Paris six years ago, Karl gave him a killer idea for a story, and now Ansel wants to buy the exclusive rights.

It sounds routine, but Lam’s instincts start buzzing. Donald knows Ansel’s tale is baloney. Lam as usual tells Bertha nothing of his suspicions.

Donald Lam tracks down the name – whose holder Karl Endicott was murdered - and delivers it to the client. Worse, a cabbie dropped off a fare at Endicott’s house right before the killing, and the fare looked an awful lot like Ansel. So much for the “just a writer wanting to do the right thing” routine.

But Lam is surprised when the client wants more. Lam points out that if Ansel cared about the murder, he wouldn’t have made three blunders: hiding the truth, omitting that the suspect looked like him, and vanishing without a phone number to warn him that the cops are so interested in the case that they ran Lam out of town when he asked too many questions.

Bertha Cool, however, accepts a second assignment: determine whether it’s safe for the client to return now that the only man who could identify him in the murder case is dead. It isn’t safe - the client is arrested in an elaborate police trap. Donald schemes, keeps Bertha in the dark, dodges the amatory attentions of two honeybunnies, and plays consultant to his law school buddy defend Ansel.

Gardner serves up a lean, readable mystery with a love affair, revenge, small town corruption, political monkey business, and even a climactic murder trial, which is highly unusual in a Lam & Cool novel.

Bertha rues the day she ever met Donald (and it’s a hoot), Donald dazzles, and the courtroom finale is worth the four hours reading this novel will take. No Perry Mason-style lecture for the reveal - just Gardner’s trademark legal fireworks.

The Kalends of Noir: Algiers

Note: This movie from 1938 isn’t formally classified as film noir - since the noir style is usually said to crystallize in the 1940s - but it certainly displays many proto-noir traits and is often viewed as a key precursor to the genre.

Algiers
1938 / 1:32
Tagline: “Strange Loves Hiding in the Casbah City of Secrets!”
[internet archive]

Pepe Le Moko is fed up. The gentleman thief been two long years holed up in Algiers after pulling off a big jewel heist in Paris. He suffers a painful longing for The City of Light and its coffee, boulevards, and night life. He’s sick of the narrow streets and same old faces of the Casbah, the native quarter which, like Queens, has a high per capita of secrets and iffy people.

The movie is more a study of characters in the suffocating boredom of a life of involuntary expatriation than a story with a beginning, middle and end. Too, for the long-term expatriate with a case of clinical nostalgia, see how little it takes for expats to develop passionate and destructive desires and aversions.

Charles Boyer is a suave thief, dressed in sharp suits with silk ties.  He’s on good terms with everybody, including Police Inspector Slimane (Joseph Calleia, excellent as a weasel). The discerning movie-goer may also be reminded of Tarzan, the white guy who just has to show up and he’s the King of the Jungle. A foreign jewel thief appears one day in the Casbah and becomes Big Shot on the Esplanade. One doubts Algerian crooks – given their ancestors were into piracy and the related enslavement of Europeans - would have meekly accepted such a Jacques-come-lately.

We post-modern movie-goers have to make allowances in another case too. Boyer’s mistress Inez is played by Sigrid Gurie. She was of Norwegian stock, so they had to use skin darkener on her to make her look like a Berber. She looks like the walking wounded staggering out of Zoom Tan. That faux pas is made up for by her fine performance as a woman that’s totally immune to sweet reason, especially from a narcissistic jerk like Boyer’s Pepe. Having been on the receiving end of more than a couple sinister looks from women in both professional and private contexts, I can testify that Gurie’s baleful look is a persuasive mix of hurt, indignant, and threatening.

As for Hedy Lamarr and the love triangle, it’s reasonable to believe that Pepe and Hedy’s Gaby character bond over their common homesickness for Paris; they are from the same district, in fact. They are both trapped, he in the Casbah and she in an engagement to a gross rich man she does not love.

Stir-crazy Pepe falls in love with her because he so bored  with hiding out in the Casbah. “Music, singing, gibberish,” Pepe moans. “I'm sick of everything. It's like walking in my sleep.” I have no trouble believing that he falls for her because she’s new in town and so gorgeous and smells nice. Pepe’s longing for Paris and his love for Gaby pull him out of his sanctuary and into inevitable downfall -resonating deeply with the doomed protagonists and fatal attraction that define noir.

In her first Hollywood role, Hedy gives Gaby almost no personality. She’s stunning to look at but emotionally distant - like the Toronto skyline seen from the 401 on the way to Belleville.  Plus, from the stiff way she moves, the movie-goer would never think she was a tennis player and swimmer.

Shot by James Wong Howe, Algiers emphasizes dark, claustrophobic alleys and oppressive atmosphere - especially in its Casbah sequences - mirroring the chiaroscuro aesthetic central to noir. We see twisty narrow streets and warrens and light has to shove and bump to get through dust and smoke from hookahs. There are weird close-ups Boyer’s greedy appraisal of Hedy Lemarr’s over the top pearls. Boyer and his boyz interrogate the informer Regis (Gene Lockhart) and a hand-held camera moves around the table where the cats are playing with mouse.

I’m glad I watched this movie because Howe’s images are striking. And some scenes have their own snap, crackle, and pop. James M. Cain received a screenwriting credit for "additional dialogue" so some of the dialogue swishes by the ear like a bird getting a bit close. But it’s too long, the love story is weak, and the scene in which Boyer sings a happy song while shining his shoes was way Gene Kelly. So odd, so out of place.

European Reading Challenge #5

I read this for the European Reading Challenge 2026.

Through the Lands of the Serb - Mary Edith Durham

This 1904 travel narrative is a book that invites comparison with the old, stern tradition in which the road is a trial that tests patience and endurance. Think Alexander William Kinglake’s Eothen, or Impressions of Travel brought Home from the East. Durham’s narrative possesses the same austere courage: she goes not to be pleased, but to see; not to collect pretty impressions to describe prettily, but to learn the stubborn contours of reality.

Durham travels among peoples whom Europe had reduced to abstractions - “Balkan,” “bandits,”  “tribal,” “victims of the Turk,” “turbulent” - and she restores to them the dignity of complexity. Her Serb lands are not arranged for the visitor’s comfort. The mountains oppose her, the tracks dissolve into mud, and hospitality is generous yet nervous the spy-happy cops will notice aid to the stranger. Violence lies close beneath the surface of custom. In Čačak, a city in central Serbia, she is invited to the execution of four killers:

Taken aback, I listened, speechless, while the plan was unfolded. I was to rise very early and to drive for three hours up the mountains with the condemned men and the file of soldiers who were to carry out the sentence. The words called up before me a picture of the grisly little procession crawling uphill in the grey of the dawning. Adding up the pros and cons rapidly, I said to myself that it was my duty to see everything, but searched my brains for a decent way out of it. Then I recollected that if I went, for the next fifty years it would be said that all Englishwomen were in the habit of seeing men shot before breakfast. Gripping thankfully at this idea, I said I had rather not accept the invitation; I had not come so far to see Servians killed. My reply caused disappointment ….

Durham records these facts without sentimentality, and this sensible restraint gives the book its authority. One senses, as in Eothen, that the writer accepts discomfort of varying kinds and degrees as part of the travel experience.

The strength of the book lies in Durham’s eye for social detail. She notes dress, gesture, and ritual with the exactness of an ethnographer. A village council, a blood-feud recalled at supper, a roadside inn filled with suspicion - such scenes are sketched briskly, yet they carry the accumulated weight of credibility.

Kinglake often shields himself with irony and it took being in the midst of plague to shake him out of it. Durham is not ironic. Durham allows earnestness to appear. She feels no sense of disenchantment with European civilization and progress.

Kragujevatz otherwise is brand-new, and here as elsewhere it is easy to see that the Servians have done more in fifty years for the improvement of the place and the conditions of life than the Turk did in four centuries. Much yet remains to be done, nevertheless a journey from Servia into Turkey is like stepping off the pavement into the sewer.

Her sympathy for the Serbs, especially Serbian women, is candid and at times severe in its judgments of Western ignorance and indifference. This is travel narrative sharpened by conscience. She does not merely observe injustice; she names it, plainly and without rhetorical flourish.

At times, the prose hardens into documentary, and readers seeking late Victorian ornament may find it spare and plodding. But this bareness is integral to the book’s ethic. Durham writes as one who believes that the traveler’s duty is neither to flatter the visited nor to entertain the reader, but to instruct with the truth expressed faithfully.

She is deeply invested in questions of imperial pressure, ethnic identity, and violence. Her advocacy for Balkan peoples encourages a restrained, sincere tone. One place where dry English humor appears most clearly is in Durham’s self‑presentation. She acknowledges her own cultural naïveté. She occasionally casts herself as faintly ridiculous - out of place, gamely handling endless ritual politeness, dealing with the chaos of travel arrangements in three or four languages, all broken. This self‑deprecation is modest but important; it softens what might otherwise seem like a purely anthropological voice.

Through the Lands of the Serb remains a stimulating work. In an Edwardian age inclined toward comfort, it stands, like Kinglake’s best pages and in her memorable High Albania, as a reminder that travel, pursued by dogged and unafraid people, is an encounter with difficulty, and that difficulty forces us to face the world directly, not through filters of a common language or routines where everybody knows their lines.

Perry Mason 142: The Blue Gardenia

Note: Raymond Burr battled his weight his entire life. At 6’2” he looked his best at 185 pounds but reached peaks between 250 and 300 pounds. Because of his weight, he was typecast as the villain. Over and over and over. But he never just phoned in a performance. His performance in this movie is second only to his outstanding performance in Pitfall.

The Blue Gardenia
1953 / 1:28
Tagline: “There was nothing lily-white about her!”
[internet archive] 

Raymond Burr's performance in the 1953 picture The Blue Gardenia is an outstanding example of his ability to portray the heavy. Directed by Fritz Lang, this thriller with noir trappings features Burr as Harry Prebble, a sleazy and manipulative “painter of calendar girls.”

Burr's portrayal of Harry Prebble is marked by a chilling blend of the smooth charm and predatory menace of the stereotypical ladies’ man. He effortlessly embodies the character's ravenous nature, making Prebble as repellant and compelling as a wolf. His interactions with Anne Baxter's character, naïve Norah Larkin, are particularly striking. Burr's ability to switch from suave to sinister in seconds adds a layer of tension to their two scenes together.

One of the most vivid aspects of Burr's performance is his physical presence. He uses his imposing height and rotundity to dominate scenes, creating a sense of unease. His physicality is complemented by his nuanced facial expressions, especially his rare smiles and expressive eyes. He laughs gently as he asks caressingly, “"Do you know what a mermaid's downfall is?"

Burr's body language highlights his versatility as an actor. I don’t know how Burr does it, but when Prebble spikes the woman’s drink with Roofies, his movement seems practiced. This gives the movie-goer the distinct impression that Prebble has date raped many times before.

Burr knew how to use his deep voice too. His warm, confident voice seems trustworthy, which contrasts sharply with the character's remote calculating eyes and underlying malevolence. This vocal performance helps to create a sense of duality in Prebble, making him both alluring and threatening. On the telephone, in a voice devoid of care, sympathy, or support, he deals with a distraught woman who needs to talk about their future together. In the upscale Chinese restaurant, his voice is warm and friendly as he urges the woman drink up, have another Polynesian Pearl Diver. “These aren't really drinks. They're trade winds across cool lagoons. They're the southern cross above coral reefs. They're a lovely maiden bathing at the foot of a waterfall.”

By the middle 1950s, Burr had put in dozens of performances playing a portly villain. As an actor serious about his craft, he must have kept himself from getting bored by creating heavies who were believable and multifaceted. As an illustrator, Prebble genially entertains the women working the switchboard at a newspaper in LA by drawing caricatures. Naturally, he flirts with them and that does not make us feel foreboding. But Prebble also eavesdrops and grabs women’s hands inappropriately, both of which indicate he is not to be trusted.

Overall, Raymond Burr's performance contributes much to this critique of 1950’s dating culture of ladies’ men with black books; good girls being responsible to stop men from “trying something” or if not, running the risk of being labelled a hussy; putting out or walking home so women carried change on dates in case they had to call somebody to pick them up. Burr worked with director Fritz Lang on this movie, not the only time he worked with a well-regarded director; for example, Anthony Mann in Raw Deal and André De Toth in Pitfall.

As for the connection with the classic Perry Mason TV series, Richard Erdman, a brilliant character actor, appeared in seven episodes, as a villain, victim and upstanding citizen. In TCOT LostLast Act, the movie-goer wonders if he was expressing his own opinion when his character says, "The theater is something very special to me, Mr. Mason. It's been my family, my home; everything I've ever wanted. When I'm inside a theater, I'm in a church. When I see a great play, I hear angels singing. When I see great performances, I'm walking the streets of Heaven. Those streets are very clean and beautiful, Mr. Mason. They should be kept that way." 

Perry Mason 141: TCOT Borrowed Brunette

Note: This mid-period novel is highly regarded despite downsides. Rather talky: Mason and Drake have extensive and complicated conversations exonerating the persons of interest. Boo. Familiar characters such as Della, Lt. Tragg, and DA Burger don’t play roles. Boo. But there are many more suspects than the usual three or four, all of whom have cool retro names: Orville L. Reedley, Cora Felton, Daphne Gridley, Carlotta Tipton, Arthur Clovis and Helen Reedley. Yay.

The Case of the Borrowed Brunette – Erle Stanley Gardner

The 28th Mason outing (1946 vintage) arrives with quaint relics such as ration books and rules still written by men with loud voices and heavier wallets. Gardner obliges with two enterprising women: one trying to wriggle free from a husband who treats matrimony like a deed of ownership; the other dabbling in Hollywood fakery for rent money and a shot at being noticed. Naturally, they end up in Mason’s office - who else handles the odd and the risky with such breezy assurance?

Soon enough, the expected corpse appears (Gardner never taxes the reader’s patience once a gun is introduced), and the police, with their touching faith in surfaces, decide the case is already solved. A blackmailer is perforated, a pistol turns up where it shouldn’t, and the DA’s bulldog begins sharpening procedural knives. Mason, as ever, cares less for appearances than for chronology: when, precisely, did the curtain fall on the extortionist - and how inconveniently does that timing clash with the official story?

What’s curious this time is who isn’t crowding the stage. The regulars - Della, Tragg, Burger - hover in the wings while Gardner parades a livelier rogues’ gallery, all named as if christened by a casting director with a flair for the Trollopian: Reedley, Gridley, Tipton, Clovis. Mason and Drake talk - and talk- but the chatter has caffeinated purpose, an almost mathematical pleasure in elimination.

It’s a surprisingly gripping exercise in pure reasoning, provided the reader can swallow the old impersonation chestnut without stamping a foot. If you can, Gardner rewards you with one of his tidier contraptions: fewer courtroom fireworks, more clockwork intrigue - brisk, clever, and difficult to set aside even for dinner.

Perry Mason 140: The DA Holds a Candle

Note: The Thirties. After the Crash. Streets full of men with empty pockets and eyes like busted windows. Gardner’s lawyers - Mason, Selby - grinding through the gears of a system built on hustle and hope. Dog-eat-dog law, chiseling as survival, free enterprise chewing its own tail while the headlines scream and the ink runs. We Americans used to read everything – books, magazines, comics, almanacs – even newspapers. 

The DA Holds a Candle – Erle Stanley Gardner

This 1938 mystery is the second of nine Doug Selby mysteries Gardner published between 1937 and 1949. Like its siblings, it first ran in The Country Gentleman, a rural magazine with 2.5 million subscribers - a fact that tells you plenty about Gardner’s intended audience and about his deliberate turn from big-city Perry Mason theatrics to the moral politics of small-town justice.

The setup is classic Gardner: Selby, the idealistic young D.A., and his loyal sidekick Sheriff Max Brandon jawing about a roadhouse that smells of trouble. Big-city gamblers run poker games involving local rich kids with more allowance than sense. One of those kids is heir to a sugar-beet empire, and Daddy Beet isn’t shy about throwing his weight around at city hall. Brandon is a straight-shooter out of pulp tradition. Sylvia Martin - Selby’s girlfriend and crusading reporter, a sassier cousin to Della Street - would love nothing better than to see the beet magnate taken down a peg.

Unlike The D.A. Calls It Murder, the first Selby outing, Gardner keeps his plot lines separate until the right moment. It starts small: a poor kid in hot water over a bad check - an offense that exposes how casually the town’s well-off can endanger the children of mechanics and secretaries. Then the screws tighten. A hitchhiker turns up dead in an auto camp, carbon dioxide the killer. Two buckos rented the cabin, but five other suspects lurk in the wings. Gardner spins the web with his usual skill, pulling threads until everything knots in a neat, satisfying finish.

No courtroom pyrotechnics here. Gardner is less interested in legal showmanship than in the everyday bargaining of a pastoral county where everybody knows everybody - and expects favors. Sylvia wants scoops in exchange for endorsements. The beet baron wants slaps on the wrist for his DWI-charged son and sneers that Selby can’t “hold a candle” to big-city D.A.s, branding Brandon a “comic-opera sheriff.”

Gardner makes it clear that reformers like Selby fight uphill battles against cronyism and corruption, and must match the toughness of the crooks they pursue. Social justice matters to Gardner, but so does individual grit. Selby believes reason and logic can untangle the nutty behavior of ordinary folks and curb abuses of authority such as nepotism, cronyism and favoritism. That faith drives him, even when the change-hating system - and incurable human nature - push back hard.

Gardner also touches a hot Thirties theme: generational friction. The old guard clings to Victorian proprieties; the young toss them aside for ‘free love,’ mistaking license for freedom and charm for character. Gardner doesn’t preach, but the warning is there.

Readable? Absolutely - especially for the plot mechanics, which are first-rate. Mystery expert Mike Grost calls the 1938–1942 stretch one of Gardner’s peaks, and this book backs him up. No fireworks, no Perry Mason theatrics - but a clear sense of why Gardner kept setting stories in towns like the ones where he grew up, where power operates not formally, but through position, money, and reputation.

Perry Mason 139: Perry Mason in the Forties

Note: On TV, Perry Mason sailed into WWII and came back with a wounded arm. In Gardner’s books? Mason never enlisted - though Donald Lam did, serving in Naval Intelligence. I get teary-eyed reading the scene in which Elsie Brand expresses her pride when he enlists. Honoring loyalty, one day I’m going name a Weimaraner after Elsie Brand.

Perry Mason in the Forties: The Ultimate Trio

The Case of the Baited Hook (1940)
Topped FictionDB’s list with a perfect 5/5 rating, marking it as the highest-rated Mason mystery of the decade. Celebrated for its intricate gripping plot.

The curtain rises on Perry Mason’s office at midnight, stale with smoke. A wealthy architect arrives with a masked woman. He warns Mason to watch the newspapers; ruin looms for them both. No questions, no answers. Mason accepts half of a $10,000 bill - a staggering sum in the early Forties.

From this cryptic start, Gardner spins a web of law, finance, and identity. Mrs. Tump, a shrewd advocate for a young woman scarred by an illegal adoption, adds depth as one of Gardner’s tributes to forthright womanhood. Action unfolds in dialogue: Mason fencing with men whose words conceal more than they reveal. 

The stakes? A stock swindle, a trust fund in peril, and a lucid exposition of agency law. Russian émigrés, a baby farm, and a fraudulent share deal complicate the maze. Mason’s first challenge: discover who his client is. 

No courtroom fireworks this time - only hearings and maneuvers on arcane legal points. Della Street stands as partner in peril and strategy. TCOT Baited Hook is Gardner at his most intricate: a drama of masks and motives, completed only on the final page.

The Case of the Careless Kitten (1942)
Also earned a 5/5 FictionDB score. Heralded for its clever twist and tight legal drama within its serialized Saturday Evening Post run.

Published during WWII, this Perry Mason novel carries the wartime undertone of fear and suspicion. Japanese families were being sent to internment camps, and though the book never names it, that shadow lingers. Komo, a character who calls himself Korean but is seen as Japanese, embodies the era’s prejudice. Gardner uses him as a mirror for judgment and misunderstanding.

The mystery begins with Franklin Shore, a banker missing for ten years. His sudden message summons Mason to a meeting, but Mason finds a corpse instead. From that moment, the story races through eighteen sleepless hours of danger and deception. Della Street, Mason’s loyal secretary, is arrested; Tragg gloats, Burger smirks, and Perry plays chess with the law.

Threads of greed and jealousy tighten as Shore’s reappearance threatens family fortunes. A kitten named Amber Eyes sparks the plot, proving even small things turn big wheels.

Gardner writes lean and vivid, blending human drama with legal maneuvering. Beneath the intrigue hums a question of belonging - what kind of American are you? Komo doesn’t answer. His silence and presence speak for the times.

The Case of the Lonely Heiress (1948)
Another 5/5 FictionDB favorite, widely praised by readers and critics for its emotional depth and suspenseful pacing. Frequently cited for character-driven storytelling.

In early 1948, Perry Mason faced one of his most unusual cases. It began with Robert Caddo, a dubious publisher of Lonely Hearts Are Calling, a magazine mixing plaintive ads and lurid confessions. Among its columns appeared an ad from Marilyn Marlow, a young heiress seeking a suitor “untainted by avarice.” Police suspected fraud, claiming Marilyn was a fiction to boost circulation. Caddo begged Mason to prove her real.

Mason doubted the story - until he learned Marilyn’s mother had inherited a fortune from eccentric George Endicott and planned to pass it to her daughter. This prospect enraged Endicott’s relatives. Soon, the nurse lay murdered, the weapon found in Marilyn’s car. Circumstantial evidence tightened around the girl as the law moved to indict her.

From lonely hearts to lethal passions, Mason unravels a skein of greed and deception.

Honorable Mention: TCOT Silent Partner (1940) and TCOTVagabond Virgin (1948)

The Ides of Dick Powell: Susan Slept Here

Note: This 1954 comedy has a plot that would not fly today. A middle-aged man and a minor six months short of legal fall for each other and get married. Back then lots of people probably said “peeyew” at May/December romances but at the same time just as many folks just shrugged at teenaged girls getting married. The early Fifties saw the peak of teen marriage in the US.  In 1954, approximately 6.1% of women who were 16 years old got married. This translates to about 6,361,000 women who got married at the age of 16.

Susan Slept Here
1954 / 1:38
Tagline: “WHAT GOES ON? When a girl almost 18 latches on to a man-about-town?”

In the early 1950s, millions of American girls under 18 were marrying, yet this comedy cheerfully ignores that reality and plunges into pure fantasy. Dick Powell plays a weary Hollywood screenwriter desperate to escape the fluff factory. Like Sullivan in Sullivan’s Travels, he yearns for grit and truth, so he asks his police pals to find him a genuine juvenile delinquent for research.

On Christmas Eve, two vice cops deliver Debbie Reynolds to his apartment. She’s been arrested for brawling - specifically, breaking a bottle over a drunken sailor’s head because he was acting like, well, a drunken sailor. Rather than jail her for the holidays, they beg Powell to babysit until she’s shipped to detention.

Convincing audiences that Reynolds – the impossibly adorable singer of Tammy - could be a JD takes effort. At first, she’s a wildcat, rattling Powell’s underemployed household of secretary and houseman. Then she discovers she’s read one of his novels and softens. The Christmas morning phone call from Powell’s fiancée Izabella (Anne Francis) is a comic gem: Reynolds innocently makes Powell sound depraved, chirping that they stayed up all night “playing games… card games.”

Soon Powell learns Reynolds faces six months in reform school unless she shows “visible means of support.” His solution? Marry her. Cue a neon-lit Vegas spree, dancing till dawn, then snoozing in a cab back to L.A. - a $1,500 fare in today’s money.

Powell flees Hollywood to write his magnum opus, aided by Glenda Farrell’s world-weary secretary (still funny, though the old-school man-hungry shtick hasn’t aged well). Les Tremayne supplies comic surprises as Powell’s frazzled lawyer, and Alvy Moore shines as the street-smart houseman. Red Skelton pops in for a cameo - mercifully silent, though his trademark mugging sneaks through.

Meanwhile, Reynolds tries to “grow up” with mixology, horseback riding, and golf - Izabella’s turf. Her mimicry of Francis in home movies is priceless, as is her ambush of Powell lip-syncing to one of his own dreadful scripts on the late show.

Technicolor is the film’s secret weapon. Anne Francis, with eyes like animated sapphires, looks alternately divine and deranged thanks to genius costuming. And Reynolds’ dream sequence? A riot of color and surreal comedy that actually advances the plot.

This is a looney holiday fantasy - half screwball, half satire - wrapped in eye-popping hues. It’s not reality by longshot - Powell’s Oscar statue sometimes narrates from its own point of view - but it’s a fascinating artifact of mid-century Hollywood.

Perry Mason 138: Not So Innocent

Note: A handful of Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason novels keep tripping over the same joke on humanity: proving you didn’t commit murder doesn’t mean you behaved like a blameless lamb. Mason’s clients are innocent, sure, but also economical with the truth and spectacularly bad at making sensible choices.

Not So Innocent

Across these Perry Mason novels, Erle Stanley Gardner returns to a paradox that the courtroom can resolve officially but human life cannot: legal innocence does not cancel moral fault. Mason’s clients, in these novels, did not commit the murder. Yet they behaved in ways that made murder plausible, attractive, even efficient for someone else. They lie, delay, conceal, improvise, and negotiate privately when, as tedious and dumb as it is, law would have been safer. 

In The Case of the Curious Bride (1934), Rhoda Montaine responds to the reappearance of her first husband, Gregory Moxley, not with disclosure but with evasion. Rather than clarifying her marital status through legal channels, she lets the situation hover in a gray zone of fear, bargaining, and silence. The threat Moxley poses - to her social position, her second marriage, her respectability - is real, but her response to that threat is to suppress the truth rather than neutralize it. In doing so, she turns Moxley into a walking liability: a blackmail risk and a financial irritant whose continued existence inconveniences too many people. When Mason finally goes to confront Moxley, he finds him already dead. Rhoda did not kill him, she merely creates the conditions under which someone else decides it would be cleaner if nobody ever saw Moxley again.

The Case of the Sulky Girl (1933) sharpens this pattern by adding temperament to concealment. Fran Celane is secretly married and pregnant, facts she hides while aggressively pressuring her uncle, Edward Norton, to release her trust. Her duplicity poisons every interaction. Norton feels manipulated; Fran’s husband feels cornered. Poster girl for flaming youth, Fran’s volatility - her loud scenes, her storming out of rooms, her fierce unpredictability - completes the picture. She looks capable of anything, which means that when violence occurs, it reads as the emotional climax everyone has been bracing for. By forcing the situation to a breaking point while refusing transparency, Fran endangers not only herself but those around her. The murder does not arise from malice so much as from panic generated by her refusal to choose clarity over drama.

In The Case of the Howling Dog (1934), Gardner explores a quieter but equally corrosive form of culpability: prolonged passivity. Bessie Foley is the lawful wife of Clinton Foley, yet allows another woman to occupy that role publicly for years. She does not assert her identity, does not demand legal recognition, does not intervene. This abdication enables a sprawling deception that infects wills, property, and domestic arrangements. A neighbor, Arthur Cartwright, becomes entangled in the question of who Foley’s “real” wife is and begins redirecting his estate accordingly. What should have been a simple legal clarification metastasizes into accusations of insanity, staged threats, and elaborate ruses. By remaining invisible, Bessie allows others to treat her as expendable. When she finally appears and asserts herself, the architecture of lies collapses. Foley attempts to weaponize the good-hearted dog and murder erupts at the precise moment her long‑delayed claim to identity forces a reckoning.

The Case of the Dangerous Dowager (1942) replaces secrecy about identity with secrecy about addiction. Poker degenerate Sylvia Oxman accumulates gambling debts whose danger lies not in the expense but in the evidentiary power of IOUs: they can be used to label her an unfit mother and strip her of custody of her child. Rather than confronting this through counsel immediately, she attempts to retrieve the IOUs privately, placing herself alone in negotiation with a crook whose incentives align perfectly with exploitation and intimidation. The conflict slides from law into blackmail. In desperation, Sylvia brings the family gun to the confrontation. She does not fire it - but by introducing a weapon, she ensures that any later violence will point back to her. Guns are bad medicine in the hands of the desperate.

Finally, The Case of the Careless Kitten (1942) dramatizes the dangers of misplaced trust. Helen Kendal receives a late‑night call from a man claiming to be her uncle Franklin Shore, long presumed dead. She does not verify, does not alert authorities, does not buttonhole Perry and Della in a restaurant. Instead, she acts. Recklessly. She keeps the matter informal, familial, ambiguous - exactly the conditions under which funny business thrives. By agreeing to arrange a clandestine meeting, she turns a dormant inheritance dispute into a physical rendezvous fraught with peril. When Mason arrives, they find not Uncle Franklin but a corpse.

Perry Mason’s genius is not moral absolution. He rescues clients from the law while quietly permitting readers to recognize a harsher truth: innocence is not the same as blamelessness. These clients are spared conviction and Q's smokehouse, not consequence. Gardner’s world insists that violence rarely arrives out of nowhere. It is sometimes invited - indirectly, inadvertently, through silence, fear, and the belief that postponing clarity is safer than facing it.

The Nones of Dick Powell: You Never Can Tell

You Never Can Tell
1951 / 1:18
Tagline: “A Picture for People who Think they've Seen Everything!”

In this quiet comic fantasy, the German Shepherd King is living large. He has the run of a millionaire’s mansion, eats tasty morsels daily, hangs out with doggie buds, and is spoiled rotten by Peggy Dow, the millionaire’s smart, kind and comely secretary. But the millionaire dies of ornery old age. His misanthropic bequest of his estate is to the canine. If and when the canine dies, millions go to the secretary.

Unfortunately, poor King does die. The cops bring in the secretary for questioning and the state freezes the probating of the will. The secretary is released for lack of evidence but her reputation is besmirched. In animal heaven, loyal and devoted King requests that he be allowed to return to earth in order to find his killer and clear the name of kindly Peggy. The request is granted. He is sent back with the companion Golden Harvest, who in life though a filly was a moderately successful race horse.

King in the human guise of Rex Shepherd, PI, is played by Dick Powell. This is rather a take-off, because Powell on screen and radio played hard-boiled private investigators as in Murder My Sweet. Golden Harvest, or Goldie, is played by athletic 21-year-old Joyce Holden. What’s funny is that they both retain preferences and behaviors from their former incarnations. Powell likes munching down Kibble and playing with a ball with a bell inside it. He has a phobia about the dog catcher. Speaking in a charming Kentucky accent, Goldie can run like the wind. She has an encyclopedic knowledge of turf matters and keeps a proud eye on her grandchildren’s career progress. Her purse is a feed bag.

The movie is not a parody of noir private eye movies but has its share of cynical asides. Powell observes to Holden, “These are humans we're dealing with. You can't tell them the truth and expect them to believe it.” With a mix of compassion and cynicism, Holden remarks, “People can’t help being people.” When Powell is placed in a holding cell, the deviants and degenerates are enraged and beat him up when they think he is a dog poisoner. While it’s very human to go off violently on no evidence whatsoever, even misfits have their standards of behavior.

Perry Mason 137: TCOT Crooked Candle

Intro: This mystery from 1944 had been out of print for 25 years when in 2012 Arcturus published it as part of its Crime Classics series. Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor ranked this story as #6 in their collection of Fifty Classics of Crime Fiction, 1900-1950. It pops up on reading blogs when readers are listing their “Best Mason Stories.”

The Case of the Crooked Candle - Erle Stanley Gardner

Gardner takes us off dry land and onto a yacht for this one, and the tides aren’t the only thing running high. Perry Mason, in 1944 a hard-boiled legal tough, is hired by Carol Burbank to save her father, Roger, from a murder rap. The victim? Roger Milfield - a man who looked harmless enough but had a Christmas card list of enemies and secrets dirtier than bilge water. The case hinges on a candle  - a crooked candle, in fact - found beside the corpse, burned a bit and leaning at 17 degrees like a jaunty jacktar after a couple of belts. Sounds trivial, but that crooked candle is the Rosetta Stone of this mystery.

The plot moves like a speedboat. Gardner doesn’t waste time on character depth - he never does and we hardcore fans don’t want him to anyway - but he knows how to keep dialogue snapping like a mainsail in a stiff breeze. The book is under 200 pages, and I polished it off in two evening sittings. It’s mostly talk, talk, talk, but when the talk is courtroom fireworks, who’s complaining? Chapter 16 alone, the first day of the preliminary hearing, might be Gardner’s longest courtroom set piece, and it’s a beauty.

The mystery itself? Top shelf. Gardner juggles tides, rigor mortis, and that cockeyed candle with aplomb. The solution is ingenious, though you’ll need to brush up on your nautical jargon to follow every twist. Mason and Della even spend a night aboard the yacht to test tidal effects - because why not turn sleuthing into a sleepover? The reconstruction of the crime, factoring in the tilt of the craft and a bloody shoeprint, is classic Gardner: complicated but satisfying.

As always, book-Perry is tougher than his TV twin. His sparring with Tragg is more adversarial, though there’s grudging respect under the barbs. And yes, Perry rests his head in Della’s lap at one point - something CBS would never have aired. There’s even a subplot where Mason skewers an insurance company and wrings a fat settlement for a hard-luck kid. Cold-blooded? Maybe. Effective? Absolutely.

Would I hand this to a Mason newbie? Probably not. The nautical angle and tide tables might scare off the faint of heart. But for seasoned fans, this is Gardner in high gear: brisk, stripped-down prose, dialogue that sounds natural, and a puzzle that rewards close attention. The crooked candle burns bright in the Mason canon.

The Kalends of Dick Powell: Christmas in July

Christmas in July
1940 / 1:07
Tagline: “If you can't sleep at night, it isn't the coffee - it's the bunk!”
[internet archive]

This comedy is based in the reality of 1940. In its heyday, the radio broadcasting industry didn’t depend so much on selling time for commercials but teamed up with companies to host shows such as The Bing Crosby Show for Chesterfield. They also worked together to sponsor endless contests. The competitions would involve playing games, doing stunts, or writing essays and jingles. Suspense would be carefully built over weeks before the winner was declared. This picture opens satirizing this process and the phony radio gabbers that would stoke it. Franklin Pangborn is cast perfectly as one unctuous voice of the airwaves.

Our hero Jimmy MacDonald (Dick Powell) is a dreamer just like his late father. So Jimmy is an inveterate contest enterer. He figures, though a movie-goer doubts the statistics would bear this out, that every contest loss will double your chances of winning the next one you enter.

Jimmy also takes the popular view that happiness depends on obtaining a pile of money. His girlfriend Betty (Ellen Drew) claims two can live as cheaply as one, to which he replies, “Who wants to live cheaply.” Betty argues you need just enough money to keep worries down to a minimum, since worries are “the only terrible thing about being poor.”

Three practical jokers named Tom, Dick, and Harry trick Jimmy into believing that he has won a $25,000 prize (about $400,000 in today’s money). Zaniness ensues when generous Jimmy spends money that he doesn’t really have. Despite the circus of unbridled consumption that forms around them, somehow Jimmy and Betty, the innocent and honest couple, maintain their values.​​

The writer and director Preston Sturges observes masses of clerks toiling away at unspecified drudgery. Even distilling his picture down into a mere 60 minutes and change, Sturges doesn't lose a chance to aim smacks at The System and its contradictions. He examines our perennial hope for a better future, especially for and among youth. Young people, argues Betty, simply want a chance to succeed or fail. This hope that a chance still existed took a battering in the 1930s as the Depression went on and on.

But he also wonders if our hopes are at least partly illusory, given our confusion over values due to our own endless struggle with materialism. Our leaders are no better than us when it comes to judging the worth of people and things based on their success or failure on the fickle, spoiled, dumb marketplace. In fact, despite their posturing self-confidence, our leaders may be a sight worse than us when it comes to using the sense Heaven gave them.

The mere appearance of affluence impresses us unduly even though we know nice people are often poor and rotten people are often rich, that blessings rain down on the unworthy and trouble comes to the blameless and harmless. Even work demonstrates the falsity of appearances. The boss says, “I'm a success. And so are you, if you earn your own living and pay your bills and look the world in the eye” but how much self-respect is possible given the endless grind of paperwork, the punching of clocks, to the ringing of bells as if we were in grade school, under fussy close supervision because they don’t trust us to get the job done unless they are hovering over us?

Okay, so much for the ideas in the movie, some are still relevant, some not. Dick Powell is perfectly cast due to his Dagwood Bumstead looks that call to mind a bloodhound. Ellen Drew is all freshness we like to see in the Greatest Generation when they were in the bloom of youth. Raymond Walburn is wonderful as the windbag president of a coffee company.

European Reading Challenge #4

I read this for the European Reading Challenge 2026.

Colossus of Maroussi - Henry Miller

The author of Tropic of Cancer took an extended trip in Greece from August, 1939 to early January, 1940.  He wrote about the Greeks because he met people whose exuberance matched his own. The title, in fact, refers to Katsambalis, a Neal Casady-like character, larger than life.

Miller describes the beauties of Athens, Corfu, Crete, Mycenae, Delphi and many other spots.  He focuses on his own response to people that he talked to and meals that he ate. The intended audience is anybody who enjoyed his previous writings or feels slacking is a reasonable alternative to struggling against The Combine. Miller argues that Greece teaches how to be human being, simple and transcendent, again, instead of replaceable wheels in the industrial machine.

Miller is besotted with Greece but he never gushes.  His colloquial style is the readable antitheses of his travel companion Lawrence Durrell’s nearly impenetrable multi-syllabic prose. While not always coherent or clear or sensible, Miller’s informal voice is forceful, original, fluid, readable, with a mix of everyday lingo and mystical words that don’t mean much.

On the other hand, he makes few nods to Greek history and none to geography. He doesn’t read newspapers so he willfully pig-ignorant of the world on fire in the run-up to WWII. Miller gives no word, not one, about Orthodox Christianity and its possible influence on the world view of the Greeks. Miller sometimes babbles or pontificates for pages at a time. Oddly, there are times when he sounds preachy, as when he sums up his revelations and shares them with us lesser beings at the end of Part 1. For somebody so astute and down to earth, he’s strangely credulous upon receiving the findings of an Armenian astrologer that he visits in Athens. It’s one thing to be a clown or holy fool, quite another to be a gull.

This is the book for you if Miller’s preference for old hotels resonates: "I like hotels which are second or third rate, which are clean but shabby, which have seen better days, which have an aroma of the past." I think it suits the intended audience, of skeptics, malcontents, seekers and those who connect with the neglected and out of the way.

I liked this book, though my eyes did roll rather. It was the first Miller I’d read in about 20 years. I’d forgotten how vigorous his prose was. If his goal was to get me to want to visit Greece, he met it.

 I don’t think I’d re-read this book but I recommend it to any readers into travel books written between the wars. This book is one of the last ones of the era and genre, which ended in September 1939.

Perry Mason 136: TCOT Missing Interior Life

Note: This essay argues that Perry Mason’s power lies in emotional minimalism: a hedgehog lawyer organized around one moral idea, who rejects psychological depth so evidence and momentum can dominate, revealing truth by moving relentlessly forward rather than inward.

The Case of the Missing Interior Life

No hardcore reader of old‑school mysteries comes for the interior decorating of the soul. We arrive knowing that characterization, like a Toyota RAV4, will be serviceable at best. Rex Stout gives us Nero Wolfe, a collection of mannerisms assembled from orchids, appetites, and beery genius. Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op is less a guy than a junk drawer of professional reflexes - cynical, efficient, immune to reflection. These detectives are not mirrors of anybody’s soul; they are Subaru Crosstreks that carry stories on the roof rack.

Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason belongs squarely in this tradition, though his emblematic vehicle would be a top‑of‑the‑line Ford Edsel Citation – impressive, confident, and up to the minute. Mason is less a character than a moral appliance. Plug him into a case and the truth pops automatically, toasted crispy and exonerating. In Isaiah Berlin’s terms, Mason is a hedgehog: a figure organized entirely around one large, immovable idea.

For Mason, the law is a rational system that works - provided you work it harder than anyone else in the courtroom. Each novel is a variation on the same old choreography: preparation bordering on obsession, procedural mastery, and the courtroom reveal that snaps the entire mess into focus. All tactics point in one direction. There is no wandering.

Gardner even lets Mason say this out loud.* He takes chances, follows hunches, believes in innocence and trusts The System to see the truth when Mason lambastes Burger, Tragg and Duh Judge with it. He insists - correctly - that a lawyer is not a jury and that representation is a right, not a reward for driving carefully most of the time. This is not a crisis of conscience; it is a statement of guiding principles. Values are only the start, but they have to be in place for consistent action.

What Mason notably does not experience - anxiety, dejection, longing for the woman he spends his days with, the urge to stare out a window at the falling rain - is precisely what makes him effective. Gardner opts for radical emotional minimalism. Mason’s inner life is kept firmly offstage so that action, timing, and consequence can occupy the foreground. He does not brood. He does not have episodes. When anger appears, it is directed inward only insofar as he failed to see what should have been obvious. Even his irritation is efficient. 

This absence of turmoil is often misread as flatness, but it’s better understood as discipline. Gardner was writing for mass circulation, for readers who wanted momentum over meditation. Psychological depth would only muddy the waters for readers who act out of habit, emotion, social pressure, self-deception, or confusion. The Perry Mason novels are not about a lawyer’s soul; they are about identifying truth under pressure. They move forward, always  - and that movement, for Gardner, is the point of his entertainments. The novels are like a bag of Chex Mix: once started, must finish.

____________

* I’ve always tried to represent clients who were innocent. I’ve been lucky. I’ve taken chances. I’ve played hunches, and the hunches have panned out. Circumstantial evidence can be black against a client, and I’ll see something in his demeanor, some little mannerism, the way he answers a question or something, which makes me believe he’s innocent. I’ll take the case, and it will work out . . . . I do know that a lawyer can’t simply sit back and refuse to take any case unless he thinks his client is innocent. A client is entitled to legal representation. It takes the unanimous verdict of twelve jurors to find a person guilty. It isn’t fair for a lawyer to turn himself into a jury, weigh the evidence, and say, ‘No, I won’t handle your case because I think you’re guilty.’ That would deprive an accused person of a fair trial. (TCOT Silent Partner)

Perry Mason 135: TCOT Curious Bride

Note: Fifth Mason book, 1934. Early Mason plants fake evidence just to mess with the D.A. - a stunt he’d never pull later. Gardner also trots out multiple characters to recap the facts, giving magazine serial readers the “just-the-facts-ma’am” tour straight to the culprit, if they are paying attention over weeks.

The Case of the Curious Bride – Erle Stanley Gardner

A woman walks in the office, says she’s not a bride, but her manner says otherwise. Perry smells a rat. Della Street - secretary, oracle - knows the score: lady’s married, lady’s lying. After trying out some half-truths about a friend's problem, she flees the interview. Mason is philosophical if contrite:

What right have I got to sit back with that ‘holier than thou’ attitude and expect them to come clean with a total stranger? They come here when they’re in trouble. They’re worried and frightened. They come to me for consultations. I’m a total stranger to them. They need help. Poor fools, you can’t blame them for resorting to subterfuges. I could have been sympathetic and drawn her out, won her confidence, found out her secret and lightened the load of her troubles. But I got impatient with her. I tried to force the issue, and now she’s gone.

The setup: husband presumed dead in a plane crash pops up alive. The “friend” story collapses under its own weight. Then the dominoes fall - murder charge, cops snarling, DA readying the rope. All the evidence points one way: guilty.

Perry’s job? Cheat the hangman. He does it with tricks, fake evidence, and legwork he mostly undertakes himself.

Tone? Hard as nails. Depression-era funk seeps through the cracks. Millionaire in the mix, ethics of an alley cat. Public hated fat cats in 1934, and Gardner milks it. Near the end Mason mutters that the victim “needed killing.” Whoa. Highly unusual for Gardner’s moral compass to spin like a busted fan. Not like him. Sure, the dead guy was a con man, fleeced lonely women, but still - lawyer shrugging off murder? Mason never colder.

Plot mechanics: intricate as a Rube Goldberg mousetrap. Gardner cheats? Nope. He plays fair - repeats the facts like a broken jukebox so you can’t whine later. Why the repetition? Serialization in Liberty Magazine. New readers parachuting in every week. Gardner, ever a professional, says “Readers first” and spoon-feeds them, not following Wilkie Collins's dictum; "Make 'em laugh, make 'em cry, make 'em wait."

Trial scene? Short. Early Mason books didn’t always climax in court. This one’s more about the chase, the feints, the sucker punches. And the atmosphere - antique, pre-war, no sex despite the wink in the title..

Did I guess the killer? Nope. Gardner blindsided me. That’s the fun. You think you’re smart, then wham - you’re not.

Brass tacks: TCOT Curious Bride is a good read, not great. It’s got grit, speed, and a whiff of moral rot, courtesy of the Dirty Thirties. If you want Perry pure and prime, maybe try later stuff. But if you dig the smell of old money and older lies, this early one will do.

Perry Mason 134: Some Women Won’t Wait

Note: In this 1953 outing, Gardner chooses Hawaii as the setting, emphasizing leis, hula, and surfing at Waikiki. Highly unusual because he wasn’t a product placement kind of writer, he even mentions by name three hotels that offer nice lodgings. In those palmy post-WWII days, I imagine the stressful memories of the war were fading and people were thinking of getting away from it all. Later in the Fifties, the massive boom of the jet age and statehood (1959) changed everything.

Some Women Won’t Wait – Erle Stanley Gardner writing as A. A. Fair

Erle Stanley Gardner, best known for Perry Mason’s courtroom theatrics, moonlighted with a different sort of duo: Bertha Cool and Donald Lam. If Mason is all gravitas and method, Cool and Lam are screwy – a partnership of private detectives who somehow always make the situation worse but come out of it smelling like roses. Bertha, a woman of formidable girth and even more formidable greed, is obsessed with getting fat fees. Donald, her pint-sized partner, compensates for his lack of muscle with a surplus of quick-wittedness and a knack for wriggling out of trouble.

This particular caper begins aboard a Pacific cruise ship and drifts into Honolulu’s sun-drenched temptations. The setup? A young, fun-loving playgirl marries a man old enough to be her grandfather. Six months later, he’s dead. She’s not in a widow's black - she’s sunning on a beach in something far more revealing. Was it impatience? Opportunism? Or something nastier? Did her husband really ask her to buy that arsenic? What happened? Why is she alone? And how much trouble is she in?

As usual, Bertha blunders about like five puppies duking it out over three toys, while Donald plays the cerebral sleuth - though here he indulges in spy guy surveillance among the lazy palm trees. The plot is brisk, the dialogue snappy, and the atmosphere pure mid-century vakay with sandy beaches, tropical flowers and balmy temps. With all the “delectable babes” in skimpy swimsuits on Waikiki, it is more male-gazey than usual, and there is a surprising reference to Oriental inscrutability that I would have thought Gardner was above.

Gardner keeps the emotional thermostat at zero - motives revolve around money and its attendant security, not passion. No torrid love affairs, just inheritance schemes and extortion. Gardner has Lam narrate the story, but Lam is no more forthcoming with us readers than he is with the other characters. The real shocker? For once, Donald’s freedom isn’t menaced by cops that want his hide tacked to the wall. Though not much action is on tap, the ride is fun, the setting lush, and Bertha’s swimsuit and traditional Hawaiian garb moments alone are pretty funny. If you like your mysteries brisk, brainy, and just a little absurd, this Waikiki holiday delivers.

Perry Mason 133: Horizons West

Note: In addition to film noir, Raymore Burr appeared in several Westerns before Perry Mason. Some notable Westerns he acted in include Station West (1948). He also appeared in Count Three and Pray as a villainous storekeeper that ran the town, like Flem Snopes in The Hamlet. He auditioned for the lead role of U.S. Marshal Matt Dillon for the Gunsmoke television series in 1955. However, CBS producers felt he was not the right "John Wayne type" they were seeking and passed on him, a role that ultimately went to James Arness.

Horizons West
1952 / 1:21
Tagline: “LAWLESS RUTHLESS DEFIANCE!”
[internet archive]

Two Confederate brothers return to Austin after the war, hoping the family ranch can soothe old wounds. Robert Ryan, all restless energy, chafes at peace; Rock Hudson, sunny and idealistic, sees silver linings. Their father expects Ryan to stay home out of love of ranching but it is impossible for him, bored by peace, to return to the old life in the sticks.

A natural leader, Ryan is drawn to Austin to make money and garner power. Is Ryan driven by bitterness over defeat - or by the rot of a cause built on slavery? Either way, he scorns simple pleasures: good food, honest work, neighborly respect. When asked if he could work with Northerners, Ryan replies, “I could forget grudges for enough money.”

Raymond Burr oozes menace as Cort Hardin. From his first scene, movie-goers know that he’s going to be excellent as a bad dandy, northern and cold-hearted, rich and spoiled. While Ryan seems to portray the type of normal guy who’s wrestling with PTSD or unresolved bitterness over defeat, Burr doesn’t have the default settings of a man of flesh and blood, since even when he is gambling, he is unsmiling and brusque. His brutality peaks in a belt-buckle thrashing and predatory embraces that leave Julie Adams wiping her lips in disgust. Jealous, insecure and alert, he notices right away that his unhappy wife is attracted to Ryan.

Ryan borrows $1,000 to take Burr in poker, loses big, and sinks into debt. To claw back, he recruits war’s leftovers for a cattle-rustling scheme, selling stolen stock to a Mexican general decked out like a parade float. Taking exception to being robbed, Burr tortures Rock Hudson to gather information on the rustling.

Per the traditional noir trope, Ryan loses his soul in short order. Momentum drags Ryan from rustling to bribery, arson, and street murder. Pity and mercy shrivel; ambition hardens, observes crony Jim Arness. In an explanation so terse as to be frustrating, Ryan admits that he yokes cruelty and ambition, with his only goals in life to build an empire and make Julie Adams the great lady of Texas.

The magnificent Technicolor is the reason to see this movie. Outside is stunning, interiors are lush. The clothes have a wide variety of colors. But the human beings Ryan, Burr and Adams are all strong in their parts. A notorious tough guy, Robert Ryan looks at Raymond Burr with so much contempt that Burr’s character seems to wilt and get even doughier. Julie Adams’s solid performance balances the fact that her motivation for falling for Ryan like a ton of bricks is not made clear at all though we movie-goers know that Hollywood seldom explains love at first sight, especially in westerns. Not given much to do except scold and hector Ryan, Rock Hudson looks rather like a lightweight in this movie as if he were a pop idol cast in a movie to attract the youth audience.  

As for the connection with the classic Perry Mason TV series, Julie Adams was the strung-out wife in TCOT Lover's Leap (great is her turn on the stand, blitzed on what in my youth we called Christmas Trees). She played the kindly if intense mom in TCOT Missing Button. She was convicted in error in TCOT Deadly Verdict (a most Hitchcockian outing) and was the patsy again in TCOT Fatal Fortune.

Perry Mason 132: TCOT Gilded Lily

Note: When there’s a butler, as there is in this 1946 outing, mystery fans know the drill: he’s guilty until proven innocent. Did he do it? And what about that phone call? Did he listen in to protect his employer, or was he simply hoping for gossip spicier than the hot and sour soup? In Perry Mason’s Los Angeles, even the butler’s alibi comes with a side of suspicion. After all, if you’re paid to open doors, why not open a few cans of trouble while you’re at it?

The Case of the Gilded Lily – Erle Stanley Gardner

Stewart Bedford had it all: money, power, and a wife young enough to make his friends whisper and his enemies grind their teeth. Twelve years a widower, he’d married Lily, a woman who turned heads and made him feel alive again. Life was good - until the letter came. Twenty thousand dollars in cash, or Lily’s past would be splashed across every scandal sheet in the country. Insurance fraud. Jail. The kind of dirt that could ruin reputations and wreck marriages.

Bedford didn’t hesitate. He played the game. A blonde with legs that could stop traffic drove him to a roadside motel, promising a quick payoff. But the drink she handed him was laced with something stronger than bourbon. When he woke, the blonde was gone - and the blackmailer was dead in the next room. Shot. With what looked like Bedford’s own gun.

That’s when Perry Mason enters the picture. The man who makes the law slip like a yoga teacher’s backbone. Mason takes the case, but this time he’s skating so close to the edge that even Della Street, loyal and levelheaded, wonders if her boss has finally gone too far. Evidence gets shuffled like a deck of cards. Fingerprints, not ballistics, hold the key - and Mason’s trick is so audacious it makes you wonder if Gardner and his dictation-takers busted a gut laughing.

The set-up is pure Gardner, but with a twist. No damsel in distress rushing into Mason’s office. Instead, a slow burn: a wealthy executive, a trophy wife, and a blackmailer who ends up with a bullet instead of a payday. Mason doesn’t pound the pavement this time; he leaves the legwork to Paul Drake and his gumshoes while he plots a legal gambit that feels more like a con. Hamilton Burger, the eternal optimist, thinks he’s finally got Mason cornered. He doesn’t. He never does.

This isn’t the Mason of the early years, racing through interviews and springing surprises every chapter. It’s a later-career story, darker, riskier, with a hero who knows the system and isn’t afraid to squeeze it until its eyes pop. Gardner respects his readers enough to make them sweat through the details - and when Mason finally lays down his cards, the payoff is pure gold.

TCOT Gilded Lily isn’t just a mystery. It’s a cocktail of sex, money, and murder served ice-cold. It reminds you that in the world of power, as the Chinese used to say, “It’s cold in a high place.”

The Ides of William Talman: The Hitch-Hiker

Note: Like Raymond Burr, William Talman was a Prince of Film Noir. He had big ears, a high forehead, asymmetrical eyes, a stern mouth, and a lop-sided face that somehow looked forceful instead of merely funny-looking. He was also six foot tall and athletic. His performance in The Hitch-Hiker so impressed producer Gail Patrick Jackon that she offered him the part of district attorney Hamilton Burger on the classic TV series Perry Mason.

The Hitch-Hiker
1956 / 1:11
Tagline: “When was the last time you invited death into your car?”
[internet archive]

William Talman gives us Emmett Myers, an escaped convict so tightly wound he makes piano wire look like a mess of ramen. He’s the sort of school-leaver who thinks “Mexican” is a language. His self-image? Smart and tough. Reality check? Pig-ignorant along with law-breaking, deceitfulness, impulsivity, irritability, recklessness, irresponsibility, and lack of remorse.

Myers is a walking case study in low frustration tolerance. He can’t wait for change from a big bill  - because patience is for suckers - and every impulse he indulges is a bad idea wearing a sign “I’m a Bad Bad Boy.” He’s allergic to foresight. If Myers had a theory of mind, it’s lost in the same place as his right eye. That blindness isn’t just physical; it’s a metaphor so loud it practically rents a billboard: empathy? Never heard of her.

He mocks prayer, sneers at decency, and congratulates himself for being “free,” which in his dictionary means “armed and stupid.” He blames his ugly mug for society’s cold shoulder, as if sentencing guidelines were written by Vogue. His sarcasm drips like a leaky faucet, and when he laughs, it sounds like phlegm.

Meanwhile, the two hostages - combat vets, stoic as granite - know the score: they’re already dead, so they play the their role of compliant hostages until the indifferent if not hostile universe coughs up a miracle. Myers, too cocksure to notice, is driving straight into the arms of inevitability. The man couldn’t outwit a traffic cone.

Ida Lupino directs with the kind of stark realism that makes you want to check your pulse. Claustrophobic interiors, barren exteriors - she turns geography into psychology. Talman nails the role, Edmond O’Brien and Frank Lovejoy keep it lean, and the whole thing hums with tension.

Highly recommended.

Perry Mason 131: Casting Cool & Lam

Note: In the noir-lite mysteries penned by Erle Stanley Gardner under the pseudonym A.A. Fair, the detective duo of Bertha Cool and Donald Lam is a study in delightful contradiction. Gardner, ever the courtroom trickster, flips the genre’s tropes. Bertha Cool is brash, overweight, and unapologetically vulgar - a bulldozer in dripping in diamonds. Donald Lam, her partner, is the anti-Mike Hammer: diminutive, cerebral, and empathetic. Casting these two from the golden age of Hollywood is no easy feat, but let’s give it the old studio try.

Donald Lam: The Underdog with a Law Degree

Lam is no trench-coated bruiser. He’s the little guy who wins the fight by knowing the law better than the authorities and the crooks. He’s clever, slippery, and always underestimated. So who could play him without turning him into a just a lucky wise-ass?

·         James Cagney: He’s got the size and the speed, and he could talk circles around a DA. But Cagney’s default setting is “ready to punch,” and Lam wins with brains, not fists. Verdict: Too much peppy pugnacity, not enough heft in the brains department.

·         Dick Powell: Post-songbird Powell gave us a credible Marlowe, and he’s got the sardonic deadpan down cold. But Lam’s intellect is scalpel-sharp, and his well-concealed emotions warm. Verdict: Close, but not quite cutting it.

·         William Powell: Too old? Nick Charles had Lam’s charm and smarts, but he also had a cocktail in hand and Nora on his arm. Lam’s world is grittier, less tuxedoed. Verdict: Too debonair, too charming.

·         Dana Andrews: Andrews brings the brooding intensity, but Lam isn’t haunted - he’s harried by clients and cops, bad guys and Bertha. He’s a man dodging punches and talks with the DA, not ghosts. Verdict: Too tragic, not enough hustle.

·         Alan Ladd: Physically perfect, and his performance in This Gun for Hire proves he can play underestimated. But Lam needs to talk fast and think faster. Ladd’s controlled insecurity might come off as self-doubt. Verdict: Right size, wrong temperature.

·         I admit I'm stuck - Gig Young? Jack Lemmon? Martin Milner?

Bertha Cool: The Bulldozer in Diamonds

Bertha Cool is a casting challenge Hollywood often fumbles on the one-yard line. She’s loud and large. She’s not comic relief; she may or may not have a heart buried somewhere under layers of sarcasm and cigarette smoke.

·         Marie Dressler: Dressler had the heft and the humor, but Bertha’s bite is sharper than Dressler’s maternal warmth. Verdict: Too cuddly for Cool.

·         Thelma Ritter: Ritter’s wisecracks are legendary, and she could sell Bertha’s street smarts. But Bertha needs to fill a room physically and vocally. Verdict: Too compact for the role.

·         Marjorie Main: Main could bulldoze with the best of them, and her Ma Kettle had the grit. But Bertha’s urban jungle isn’t Main’s backwoods. Verdict: A maybe.

·         Margaret Rutherford: Rutherford’s Miss Marple had the eccentricity, but Bertha’s not quaint - she’s caustic. Verdict: Too British, too genteel.

·         Lucille Ball: Ball had the brass and the timing, but Bertha’s vulgarity isn’t sitcom-ready. Could Lucy go full-on ferocious? Verdict: Tempting, but risky.