Perry Mason 176: Donkeys, District Attorneys, and the Price of Respectability

Note: Erle Stanley Gardner’s background gives him two vantage points. Growing up in small mining towns, he observed how power operates in remote communities - not formally, but through position, money, and reputation. From his legal practice, he saw how these informal structures shape courtroom outcomes, especially for outsiders. Together, these perspectives recur in some Perry Mason novels: tightly interconnected elites, reputational control, suspicion directed at “the other,” and justice arriving through outside intervention rather than emerging organically.

Donkeys, District Attorneys, and the Price of Respectability: Crime in the Petite Bourgeois Countryside

Across these three non-Mason novels, Gardner reveals an incisive fascination with the way law, reputation, and economic position intertwine in small-town and rural life, where everyone knows everyone else and no one can quite afford to fall. These are communities in which status is anxiously held rather than securely possessed, and where justice, far from being an abstract principle, is filtered through local habits of deference, suspicion, and self-protection. Whether the narrative lens is city criminal lawyer Perry Mason or small town district attorney Doug Selby, Gardner returns again and again to societies dominated not just by village potentates and small-town gentry but by the petite bourgeoisie, whose power lies in their numbers, their visibility, and their fierce concern for appearances.

In the stand-alone novel The Case of the Backward Mule (1946) Gardner places the drama in an agricultural world where property is never merely property. The mule, stubbornly literal and faintly comic, becomes a legal fetish, invested with meanings that far exceed its market value. Ownership here signifies competence, legitimacy, and moral standing. The farmers and rural proprietors who contest it inhabit a precarious middle ground: they are not insulated by wealth, yet they are deeply invested in the idea of order. As a result, disputes that might seem trivial from the outside assume an almost existential intensity, for they threaten both livelihood and the fragile dignity conferred by communal recognition.

The Doug Selby novels sharpen this portrait of small-town morality under pressure. In The D.A. Calls It Murder (1937), respectability emerges as the town’s true currency. Shopkeepers, clerks and secretaries, and service providers fear disgrace more than the law itself, because scandal spreads faster than truth and destroys more efficiently than verdicts. Selby, ostensibly the embodiment of legal authority, finds himself constrained by the very service providers who proclaim their devotion to order. Justice must negotiate its way through a thicket of polite intimidation, moral posturing, and fretful conformity.

The D.A. Breaks an Egg (1949) continues this examination by emphasizing how easily such systems crack. The title gestures toward the delicacy of the social arrangement: a small shock is enough to expose how contingent and improvised it really is. The Lennoxes are marked by their effort to maintain appearances. They present themselves as decent, law-abiding people, but the novel makes clear that this identity is fragile. Their class position is defined less by secure wealth than by anxiety about slipping downward into the lumpen-proletariat. This “respectability under pressure” is a classic Gardner theme: legality and morality are not luxuries but tools for survival. Gardner often situates questionable decisions within economic constraint, and the Lennox family fits that pattern. Their actions - whether evasive, defensive, or ethically gray - are not presented as expressions of inherent vice. Instead, they emerge from the need to protect family, income, or reputation. The novel implicitly suggests that middle-class illegality is often reactive rather than predatory: people bend rules because they fear ruin, scandal, or loss of status not because they seek domination.

Taken together, these novels insist that small-town justice is less than innocent. It is shaped by land, credit, gossip, and the quiet terror of losing one’s place. Gardner is not interested in melodramatic villainy so much as in the everyday moral evasions of ordinary people, for whom respectability is both shield and burden, and for whom the truth must always contend with the social cost of admitting it.

Perry Mason 175: TCOT Worried Waitress

Note: Although this 1966 entry lacks the fireworks of Mason’s most celebrated cases, it fascinates for its subtext. Gardner probes enduring issues - the ethics of witness coaching and the clash of poverty and pride - while reminding us that justice is not a flawless machine but a fragile human process, vulnerable to error and manipulation.  

The Case of the Worried Waitress - Erle Stanley Gardner

Rules were rules, and in the restaurant business they were ironclad: servers were forbidden to solicit professional advice from customers. But Katherine Ellis - Kit to her friends - was desperate. She had no one else to turn to. So when Perry Mason and Della Street finished lunch, Mason left his card beneath the plate with a message that was pure Perry: “My usual fee is ten dollars. Under the plate there’s a tip of eleven.” It was a gesture that broke the monotony of routine and set in motion a chain of events that would test human frailty and the criminal justice system.

Kit’s story was simple - and complicated. An orphan, penniless, living with an aunt who pinched pennies until they screamed. The woman hoarded cash in hatboxes, skimped on food, and even posed as blind to sell pencils outside a factory. Mason’s instincts flared. “Get out,” he told Kit. “If that money disappears, you’ll take the fall.” But the warning came too late. The aunt was assaulted, robbed, and left for dead. Kit was arrested.

The case should have been straightforward. It wasn’t. There was Mildred Aldie, a blind woman who seemed to impersonate Kit’s aunt for reasons no one could explain. There was Stuart Baxley, a family friend with too much interest in the aunt’s fortune - and a willingness to plant evidence. And there were two subplots colliding like runaway trains: two wives battling over a dead man’s estate and rival factions fighting for control of a corporation.

Gardner wove these threads into a tapestry of greed, deception, and human frailty.

Yet for all the complexity, something was missing: urgency. Even Lieutenant Tragg, who made the arrest, seemed unconvinced of Kit’s guilt. He looked the other way when Mason bent the rules - technically legal maneuvers that skirted the edge of propriety. The trial, usually Gardner’s crescendo, felt muted. Hamilton Burger prosecuted with the resignation of a man who knew he was destined to lose - again.

The real drama lies not only in the verdict but in the social and legal systems, and the human beings – a.k.a. imperfect thinkers - who keep them running. In that sense, the novel offers something rarer than courtroom theatrics: a glimpse into the machinery of law and the secrets that shape its outcomes.

The Nones of Exploitation: Marihuana

Marihuana
1936 / 0:50
Tagline: “See the Truth about the Smoke from Hell!”
[internet archive]

It is a curious thing - one might say a melancholy one - that in the detritus of antique amusement, amidst the refuse heaps of what passes for cinema, there should glimmer, now and again, a spark of something nearly noble. I speak here not of a work wrought with care or conscience, but of a base and tawdry spectacle - an exploitation film, vulgar in its intentions, slipshod in its execution, and yet, by some accident of human truth, not wholly devoid of merit.

Observe, if you will, the young woman - her foot turning idly, joyously, upon the running board of a battered motorcar, her face alight with the unselfconscious radiance of youth and affection. It is a gesture so slight, so unstudied, and yet it speaks with the eloquence of a Turner sky: of vitality, of freedom, of the fleeting grace of being alive and beloved. Such a moment, though framed by the crude machinery of commerce, is not unworthy of art.

Elsewhere, the drama descends - nay, collapses - into the grotesque. A quarrel between mother and daughter, rendered with the subtlety of a cudgel, culminates in the girl’s flight from home. But even here, amid the shrillness, there is a gesture of pathos: she pauses, embraces her lapdog with a tenderness that betrays the ache of her decision. It is the last act of a soul not yet hardened by the world’s indifference.

Later still, as she descends into what the moderns call “degradation” - a word too often used without understanding - she casts a glance, guilt-ridden and persuasive, upon her sister. It is not the look of a villainess, but of a soul in torment, aware of its fall and yet unable to arrest it. That such a moment should arise in a film otherwise so bereft of moral imagination is, I declare, astonishing.

But alas, these are but fragments - pearls cast into a mire of incoherence. The film, taken as a whole, is a shambles. Its narrative is as a house built upon sand; its characters, mere shadows of intention; its climax, a thing so mishandled that it leaves the viewer neither stirred nor satisfied. The acting is passable, the direction perfunctory, and the moral vision - if such a term may be applied - entirely absent.

And yet, even in this mire, there is revelation. For it is only by witnessing the debasement of form that we come to appreciate its true expression. Just as the sight of a polluted stream makes us long for the mountain spring, so too does this film, in its failure, remind us of what cinema might be when guided by truth, beauty, and reverence for the human soul.

As for the final descent - four young women, stripped of both clothing and dignity, frolicking in the Pacific surf - it is not merely a violation of the Hays Code, but of decency itself. That such imagery should be offered as entertainment is a sign, not of liberation, but of cultural exhaustion.

Let us then take from this experience not pleasure, but instruction. Let us remember that art, even when sullied, may still reflect the divine spark - and that the worst of pictures may yet contain a moment worth saving.

 

Perry Mason 174: Mason & DBT

Note: Raymond Burr’s Perry Mason was the still point in a world spinning with agitation and half-truths. Great actors truly listen, and Burr gave us a lawyer who listened - not perfunctorily, but with an attentive calm that made silence feel electric. Fans remember the courtroom fireworks, but I’d argue the most remarkable moments were often in the jail cell interviews, where Burr revealed that Mason’s real power lay in restraint. Burr gave fellow actors space to sustain a scene, as Mason absorbed his client’s story like a sponge - intently, mindfully. Burr’s Mason didn’t interrupt; he inhaled. And when he exhaled, it was with the quiet authority of a man who had glimpsed the light and stillness he could bring to a client’s crisis, even as the police misconstrued evidence and assumed guilt.

Perry Mason Through the Lens of Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)

Perry Mason, the iconic defense attorney from Erle Stanley Gardner’s novels and the subsequent TV adaptation, exemplifies traits that can be examined through the framework of Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT). DBT emphasizes four core skill sets: mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness - all of which resonate with Mason’s approach to law and life.

Mindfulness is central to Mason’s investigative style. He remains fully present during client interviews and witness’ testimony in the courtroom. This ability to listen and discern while suspending judgment allows him to identify inconsistencies and details others overlook and craft compelling defenses. His mindful attention to nuance mirrors DBT’s principle of “wise mind,” balancing logic and emotion - a hallmark of Mason’s success. Staying present, being here, now, also reinforces courage:

Make up your mind to one thing, Mrs. Warren. After water has run downstream and over the dam, you can't find any way on earth of getting it back upstream and over the dam a second time. Take things as they come. Concentrate on the present, forget the past. (TCOT Phantom Fortune)

Distress & Frustration Tolerance emerges in Mason’s composure under pressure. Clients charged with Murder-One are playing for life-or-death stakes, yet Mason never succumbs to aggravation or alarm or frustration. Instead, he employs problem-solving strategies akin to DBT’s “radical acceptance,” acknowledging the stern reality of high-risk situations while focusing on actionable steps. For instance, when evidence seems damning, level-headed Mason reframes the challenge as an opportunity to uncover the truth that is truth and refute the DA’s truth that just seems like the truth.

“A man can nearly always think his way out of any situation in which he finds himself. It’s merely a paraphrase of the old saying that where there’s a will there’s a way.” (TCOT Sulky Girl)

Emotion Regulation is evident in Mason’s controlled demeanor. While passionate about justice, he tempers his emotions to maintain clarity. DBT teaches skills like “checking the facts,” which Mason intuitively applies - choosing calm deliberation over flailing. His ability to regulate emotions not only maintains his credibility but also reassures anxious clients, reinforcing trust.

My experience has always been that these things look much worse than they actually are. In fact, I tell my clients that nine times out of ten they can say to themselves, 'Things are never as bad as they seem.' I admit things look black, but we're going to keep fighting, and don't you get discouraged. (TCOT Beautiful Beggar)

“Things look bad and we are still capable of fighting back” is a solid DBT “both/and” statement that encourages holding two seemingly opposing truths at the same time, moving away from rigid “either/or” thinking. It calls to mind Marine General Puller saying at the Chosin Reservoir, “We’ve been looking for the enemy for some time now. We’ve finally found him. We’re surrounded. That simplifies things.”

Finally, Interpersonal Effectiveness defines Mason’s relationships with clients, colleagues, witnesses, persons of interest, and even adversaries like Lt. Tragg. He navigates complex social dynamics – such as asking complete strangers nosey questions - with assertiveness and empathy, embodying DBT’s goal of showing respect for people while achieving his own objectives – milking them for information before the cops do.

“What right have I got to sit back with that ‘holier than thou’ attitude and expect [clients] 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." (TCOT Curious Bride)

Like some DBT therapists advise their clients today, Mason knows that people-watching can be a mindful activity that fosters empathy.

“I like to watch people around a depot. It’s fascinating. You can see so much of human nature that way. People aren’t on their guard when they’re dead-weary or when they’re completely removed from their usual environment. A person who lives here in the city feels he’s on his own home ground, no matter what part of the city he’s in, unless it’s the depot. But the minute he walks into the depot he’s started, so to speak, on a complete change of environment and he lets his guard down.” (TCOT Lonely Heiress)

Viewed through DBT, Perry Mason exemplifies psychological flexibility and effective people skills. His success stems not merely from legal acumen but from behaviors aligned with DBT principles: mindful observation, tolerance of uncertainty, emotional balance, and effective interaction. These qualities position Mason as more than a fictional lawyer; he becomes a role model of adaptive functioning under constant challenges - a testament to the enduring relevance of DBT skills in helping  people navigate problems from addictions and cutting to pushing people away and overthinking unto paralysis.

Matinee Musings: Get Her Talkin' 'n Listen

Note: The pandemic effectively furloughed my teaching career, leaving D. H. Lawrence's "passion of instruction" with nowhere productive to go. Naturally, it has redirected itself into dating advice, a space in which I possess the impeccable credentials of someone who has not been single since Generation X were wearing three-cornered pants. So if you've need date questions inspired by Pre-Code movies, I'm here to help. What could go wrong, apart from everything?

Matinee Musings: Dating Advice for Fans of Pre-Code

The best women like a guy who can talk. But they like even better a guy who can listen.

That's where the amateurs get into trouble. They think a date is an audition. They arrive armed with stories, opinions, and enough self-promotion to launch a congressional campaign. Then they wonder why there isn't a second date.

The smart man asks questions.

Not because some dating guru said so. Not because he wants to control the conversation. He asks questions because he wants to find out who is sitting across the table from him. Let the lady talk. Listen closely. Listen for what excites her, what frightens her, what she admires, and what she cannot stand. Before long you'll know more about her values than any profile could ever tell you. Then you can decide whether your match was made in heaven or in one of those charmingly furnished circles of hell found in Pre-Code movies.

Take The Cheat (1931). Tallulah Bankhead plays a woman who loves excitement so much that she mistakes the rush of poker for happiness. That's a useful thing to know about a person. So ask your date: "Do you think Elsa was really in love with anybody, or was she mostly in love with excitement?"

Now listen.

If she says life is for taking chances and risks, you'll learn something. If she says Elsa's recklessness hurt everybody around her, you'll learn something else.

Try another: "What did you think of Elsa keeping her big financial problem to herself?"

Because how a person answers tells you how they think about trust.

Or: "What do you think was up with Livingstone, how he treated people?"

You'll discover a great deal about what she considers healthy behavior in relationships.

The beauty of movie questions is that nobody feels examined. You're discussing Tallulah Bankhead, not your date. But somehow, your date ends up revealing herself anyway.

And for Pete's sake, don't do that phony listening routine. You know the one. Lean forward. Furrow the brow. Nod solemnly. Say "uh-huh," "interesting," and "wow." Then immediately launch into the story you were planning to tell all along.

That's not listening. That's waiting for your turn.

If she says Elsa's gambling wasn't really about money, ask why she thinks that. If she says Livingstone is obviously a creep, ask what gave him away. If she thinks Elsa's husband is partly to blame, ask her to make the case.

Real listening requires a follow-up question.

Anybody can talk. Plenty of men can pretend to listen. Very few can hear an answer, think about it, and respond to what was actually said. Practice improves quick-wittedness in conversation. 

So practice.

Do that, and whether the relationship goes anywhere or not, you'll leave the evening knowing far more than the poor devils in most Pre-Code pictures ever managed to learn about one another before disaster struck.

The Kalends of Exploitation: Sing Sinner Sing

Note: This is the kind of movie that ought to be a mess, and maybe it is a little, though it looks better than many Poverty Row productions. But Leila Hyams keeps the whole thing on the rails. She's likable, believable, and never acts like she's above the material. The movie may be a minor Pre-Code oddity of interest only to Pre-Code fans like us Thirties buffs, but Hyams makes it feel like something worth sticking around for.

Sing Sinner Sing
1933 / 1:04
Tagline: “Would You Plead Guilty to a Crime You Did Not Commit---To Save Some One You Love?”
[youtube]

In this tale of modern Babylon, we are introduced to a floating casino moored off the coast of Los Angeles - a vessel not of commerce, but of pleasure, where jazz music and bathtub gin flow in equal measure. Here sings a lady of torch and torment, whose voice, though sweet, is steeped in sorrow. She is bound, not by love, but by a tempestuous entanglement with the ship’s proprietor - a man of volcanic temperament and dubious fidelity.

Upon discovering his dalliance with a chorus girl of questionable virtue, our heroine, in a fit of wounded pride and reckless ambition, resolves to marry a millionaire playboy. This gentleman, though possessed of wealth and charm, is pursued by a specter more fearsome than poverty: the hereditary madness that haunts his bloodline. He drinks not for pleasure, but to silence the howling of ancestral banshees. His descent into hopeless drunkenness is portrayed with a frankness that startles us post-modern movie-goers in 2026, accustomed as we are to the innocuous buffoonery of the comic relief drunks of Code-era Hollywood.

Paul Lukas, a gentleman of Hungarian extraction, imbues his role with a fiery Magyar nobility, though the lines he is given are as wooden as a church pew. Leila Hyams, the torch singer, is a vision of loveliness and restraint, her performance elevated by the presence of Ruth Donnelly, who plays the worldly-wise companion with a wit as dry as vermouth. Don Dillaway, as the doomed heir, astonishes with a moment of clarity and rebellion, denouncing the snobbery of his wealthy guardians with a fervor worthy of a Dickensian hero.

The sets, borrowed from a more prosperous studio, are sumptuous, and the costumes - particularly Miss Hyams’ beaded gowns - are of such elegance that My Bride, a fiber artist of exacting taste, insists they be mentioned in tribute. The music, a curious blend of fox-trot jazz and early swing, is delightful, though the musicians remain anonymous, as if swallowed by the very fog of the era.

The plot, it must be said, is melodrama of the highest order, but the film’s true distinction lies in its origin: the Pre-Code era, that brief interregnum between the advent of sound and the iron rule of censorship. Here, the moral atmosphere is low and thick, like the air in a gambling hell. Women are brazen, men are debauched, and virtue is a thing to be mocked. The film does not flinch from showing the consequences of folly, nor does it pretend that wealth can purchase peace of mind.

In conclusion, this picture is not a moral beacon, but a lantern held up to the darker corners of human desire. It is a cautionary tale, wrapped in sequins and shadow, and though I am a man of puritanical leanings, I confess: it held me fast.

European Reading Challenge #9

I read this for the European Reading Challenge 2026.

A Coffin for Dimitrios - Eric Ambler

This well-regarded thriller from 1939 kicks off when a Turkish police officer invites Charles Latimer, a former British academic now a mystery writer, to a corpse viewing. Police pulled from the Bosphorus one Dimitrios, a con man and spy.

The policeman gives Latimer a sketchy account of Dimitrios’ life of crime: thief, killer, spy, narcotics trafficker, assassin and smuggler of human beings. Latimer, partly as an experiment, partly out of pique at being treated like an amateur by the policeman, decides to fill in the blanks in Dimitrios’ criminal history.

The story narrates Latimer’s meeting Dimitrios' former victims, marks, and henchmen. Things start to get messy and dangerous. Rum guys wonder why a professorial type should be interested in somebody whose death relieved a lot of dodgy people.

There’s no whining about the big bad world but there’s no ethical ambivalence either, a point I like in these old suspense novels. Although all the thrillers Ambler wrote in the 1930s are worth reading, A Coffin for Dimitrios is the classic that has never gone out of print.

Perry Mason 172: Being Wrongly Accused

Note: Erle Stanley Gardner dramatizes injustice as emotionally real, not merely melodramatic or an example of the “cruel world” fallacy. Being wrongfully ensnared by the same authorities that are supposed to protect us causes shock, despondency and anger.

The Dread Machinery of Being Wrongly Accused

There is, in the Perry Mason canon, a recurring and rather alarming proposition. An ordinary citizen may discover that the apparatus of justice has decided that they are guilty because the circumstantial evidence says so. Presumption of innocence? Puh-leez. Not when a homicide detective’s “gut” says it probably happened this way.

The Case of the Velvet Claws (1933) presents a client who is intelligent, desperate, and duplicitous - repeatedly hindering Mason while trying to escape suspicion for her husband’s murder. Her deceit unsettles the reader but so does her vulnerability to a system that mistakes appearance for proof. Gardner taps a primal fear: the loss of control. The prospect of being powerless before authority is not abstract but visceral, rooted in our instinct to protect our autonomy and minimize risk - where over-reacting is often safer than trusting that members of the tribe will sort the dispute out in your favor.

Wrongly accused narratives hinge on a disturbing premise: truth may fail to prevail simply because it is too costly - too time-consuming, too inconvenient - for authorities with other priorities. Under such conditions, survival depends not on patience but on intervention, even subversion. In The Case of the Howling Dog (1934), the courtroom drifts toward theater: evidence is fragmentary, motives obscured, and the official story suspiciously tidy. The system appears less committed to truth than to closure. To counteract this, Perry Mason employs ethically questionable tactics - manufacturing a confession for the newspapers and hiring an actress to impersonate a witness. - drawing the reader into an uncomfortable ethical calculus. When fairness is not assured, must it be aggressively, even improperly, reclaimed?

Yet wrongful accusation in Gardner is not solely the product of institutional failure. Layered over this is Gardner’s surprisingly blunt sense of fate. Fortuna intrudes like the indifferent goddess she is. The Case of the Half-Wakened Wife (1940) presents a protagonist trapped by memory gaps and incriminating circumstance, unable even to reconstruct her own actions. The universe need not conspire; it merely has to misfire. The hardcore reader is reminded that a single random event* can upend the body, the mind, or a life’s trajectory. Under such conditions, how exactly is prudence supposed to proceed?

What makes these narratives so curiously sticky in the mind is that they mirror lesser injustices we have all experienced: the misinterpreted remark, the undeserved blame, the slow realization that explanation will not bring about exoneration.** Gardner scales that familiar discomfort into existential threat. The reader recognizes, uncomfortably, how easy it would be to be in that chair at the defense table, wedged between Perry and Della, looking like a deer in the headlights.

Unjustly accused stories endure not because they are dramatic, but because they speak to our amygdala and hypothalamus that are sensitive to threat. Gardner understood that the terror lies in the accusation - that devastating pivot from citizen to suspect, from member of the tribe to shunned outlaw and despised alien.

The Perry Mason novels explore the terrifying possibility that truth might require extensive professional excavation in the presence of a plausible motive and the absence of a water-proof alibi. And so we read, perhaps with more intensity than we admit, hoping not merely for resolution, but for reassurance that truth can still be uncovered, that fairness can still prevail, and that, should life pull a dirty trick on us, somewhere there will be lawyer to defend us even after finding out everything about our poor choices and dumb moves.

 

* In a universe where a random cosmic ray can bust into a cell’s nucleus and click “mutate” like it’s a radio button and start something that’ll make a hardened oncologist gasp … honestly, what are we mortals supposed to do about that? Mindfulness meditation?

** Husbands who've been married a long time have learned that concise explanations invite more questions and long explanations more suspicion. After twenty years, you learn the ideal answer is just detailed enough to sound truthful and just boring enough to prevent a follow-up.

Perry Mason 171: TCOT Calendar Girl

Note: Apparently, this 1958 outing is the one Mason case where nobody cares if the murder weapon had fingerprints. It’s also the first time Mason saves his client by practically convicting someone else… and then graciously takes that poor soul as his next client. Talk about job security. And the structure? Unfair. The reader gets zero clues until Mason drops them like plot grenades, so forget solving the mystery on your own.

The Case of the Calendar Girl – Erle Stanley Gardner

George Ansley the honest contractor, a paragon of virtue, finds himself entangled in a sordid affair involving Meredith Borden - a man whose business dealings reek of extortion and influence peddling. Borden, it seems, has the uncanny ability to call off building inspectors who, in their zealousness to enforce code, are making life miserable for Ansley’s construction crews. To keep his projects afloat, Ansley pays Borden off. A regrettable lapse, and Ansley hates having to be a payer, but not as bad as the intimidation of Borden’s extortion.

Then fate intervenes. Distracted and demoralized, Ansley crashes his car. The other driver? A woman of striking beauty and suspiciously persuasive charm. Despite her apparent injuries, she convinces Ansley to drive her home. There, she proceeds to disarm him with feminine fragility, flirtation, and a kiss - a trifecta of manipulation that would make any distracted dude forget his best interests.

Later that evening, Ansley recovers his sense. He seeks legal counsel from Perry Mason, cornering him and his ever-present secretary, Della Street, in a restaurant. Mason, ever the sleuth, insists on inspecting the accident scene. They arrive at Borden’s estate, only to be repelled by barbed wire and vicious dogs.

Coincidentally - or perhaps not - Borden is murdered that very night. The police, diligent as ever, begin their search for suspects. Mason, in his usual obnoxious fashion, embarks on a parallel investigation, tracking down “calendar girls” - models who straddle the line between commercial photography and so-called “art.”

Now, I must object to the narrative liberties taken. Gardner’s storytelling, while brisk, sacrifices fair play. Evidence is withheld, clues obscured, and the resolution hinges on exposition rather than deduction. The reader, like the jury, is denied the opportunity to weigh the facts. In this case, Gardner’s usual flair falters, and the verdict on the novel’s merits must be: mildly disappointing.

Perry Mason 170: Five Perry Mason Starters

Note: New to Perry Mason? Start with five cases that showcase Gardner at his most cunning - plots that snap, dialogue that crackles, and courtroom fireworks that pop. From parrots with secrets to mink coats with murder stitched in, these novels prove why Mason still hits the legal-thriller notes for many hardcore readers.

Five Perry Mason Starters: Murder, Mink, and Mason’s Magic in Court

The Case of the Perjured Parrot (1939)
A Perry Mason gem with a gimmick that works: a murder witnessed by a parrot. Gardner spins it fast and tight - no padding, just plot. Della teases Mason over paperwork until Charles Sabin hires him to block a greedy widow and solve Fremont Sabin’s killing. Fremont, a publicity-shy rugged type, ends up dead in his mountain cabin while Casanova squawks, “Helen, put down that gun!” Which Helen? Wife or librarian? Depression-era despair gives bookish Helen Monteith depth, and Gardner salts the mix with will-law tangles and Sgt. Holcomb’s bullying bluster. The coroner’s inquest finale delivers a twist that’s pure Gardner - audacious and satisfying.

The Case of the Vagabond Virgin (1948)
Gardner serves up a cocktail of sex, money, and murder with a twist that stings. Addison, a retail tycoon, plays Good Samaritan to a platinum-haired waif - and lands in a tabloid trap. Enter Mason, cool as gin, to untangle blackmail and scandal. Then a partner turns up dead, and the courtroom becomes a chessboard. DA Burger blusters, Holcomb huffs, and Mason slices through the bluster with surgical precision. Gardner skips psychology for pure propulsion: greed, lust, and panic drive the plot. The ending? A jolt - rushed but daring. Call it Gardner at his gaudiest: fast, flashy, and fun.

The Case of the Moth-Eaten Mink (1952)
Gardner hits high gear with a mink that’s more trouble than glamour. A waitress vanishes, a shabby coat turns up, and Mason dives into a whirl of pawn tickets, lipstick scrawls, and mob whispers. The trail leaps from L.A. to Seattle, dragging in a cop’s murder, a boyfriend on the hook, and a rising body count. Gardner keeps it lean - dialogue fresh, tempo racing - while Mason juggles roles as counsel and witness. Lt. Tragg shows grit, Holcomb rages, and the finale delivers Gardner’s trademark surprise. No frills, no fat - just a taut, twisty ride that earns its perfect 10.

The Case of the Hesitant Hostess (1953)
Gardner trades plush parlors for neon glare - nightclubs humming, gambling joints grinding, hostesses as bait for bruised egos and busted wallets. It’s noir with a sociological snap: middle-class dreamers lured into a racket greased by cops and graft. Yes, the client’s late to the party and motives wobble, but Gardner compensates with velocity - two courtroom clashes, Mason pounding pavements and pulp-style punches. The mystery’s no brain-bender, yet the dialogue rocks, the pace sizzles, and the energy leaps like a live wire. When the gavel drops, you’re grinning like a canine smelling bacon.

The Case of the Queenly Contestant (1967)
Gardner swaps neon noir for satin and scandal. Ellen Adair - department-store duchess with a beauty-queen past - hires Mason to muzzle a hometown newspaper exposé of her single motherhood. Behind the gloss: a vanished lover, a secret child, and blackmail that sours into murder. Gardner threads the Sixties shift in attitudes toward single mothers through a brisk plot of bent cops, fixer-lawyers, and courtroom pyrotechnics. Yes, gender assumptions creak like Victorian floorboards, but the pace is taut, the rogues vivid, and Mason - cool, relentless -steals the show. Verdict withheld, but Gardner proves he can still lace a whodunit with social sting.

Perry Mason 169: The Best of Season 5

Note: In the classic Perry Mason TV series, cultural quirks of 70 years ago abound: nearly everyone seems to keep a firearm tucked in a glove compartment or handbag, a norm that feels startling today. And then there’s the fashion. My Bride points out that Della Street sports what can only be described as “Barbie shoes”—even when traipsing through rugged foothills alongside Perry and Paul in pursuit of clues. Practicality clearly wasn’t part of the costume design brief. Plus, the show is sepia-toned postcard from a California that hadn’t yet been strip-malled into oblivion. Back when palm trees were romantic, not ironic, and the freeways hadn’t metastasized like an experiment in urban planning gone horribly wrong. Even in monochrome, those locations had a kind of accidental enchantment, the kind you can’t fake with CGI. 

The Best of Season 5 (1961-62)

The Case of the Shapely Shadow. Elaine Devry lights up the little black and white tube as the wallflower secretary turned into hachi-machi with the help of a makeover. With Devry, the viewer wonders how in hell she made her red hair and green eyes come across on the monochrome screen. Not to mention any responsible cardiologist would advise us codgers to avoid prolonged exposure to her ultra-feminine voice and manner. The court room scene is excellent with Burger falling into Mason’s cunning trap and having a blustering sputtering meltdown. That’ll learn him for all of those triumphant smirks.

The Case of the Travelling Treasure. Any episode that has Lisa Gaye in swimsuit gets an automatic four stars. But in fact the acting is top notch in this episode. Arch Johnson plays a cranky gangster who ends up croaked in a locked cabin on board a fishing boat. Our pal Vaughn Taylor plays a mild-mannered chemist who’s too absent-minded to be devious. Familiar TV face Jeff York plays Perry’s client, a relatable working man. Most of the action is set on boats so it’s invigorating to be outside for half of this episode. Rare too for the story to turn on a classic puzzle mystery involving a locked room.

The Case of the Absent Artist. Many different personalities engage our attention: loud boy cartoonist Pete Manders (Wynne Pearce), world-weary sculptor Alexander Glovatski (Victor Buono), and a sneaky artist Otto Gavaert (Mark Roberts) that yearns to get away from it all and paint like the louse Charles Strickland in The Moon and Sixpence. Plus, the snoopy landlady Daphne (ZaSu Pitts), sensuous beat girl Fiona Cregan (Arline Sax), and nervous accountant Monty (Richard Erdman). Besides the outstanding cast, unique settings make episode unlike any other: an oily fishing village that’s also an artist’s colony and the craft and business of syndicated comic strips. Finally, in the studio of the sneaky artist, in the background, we spy the purple woman painting from season 2 and a crying cherub painting from Season 3.

The Ides of Crime: Bodyguard

Note: This is a movie that doesn’t ask for your approval - it demands your attention. It’s messy, moody, and weird. And in the pantheon of RKO B-movies, it deserves a place of honor, preferably somewhere between Out of the Past and The Narrow Margin, with a meat hook dangling nearby.

Bodyguard
1948 / 1:15
Tagline: “A Real ‘Who-done-it’ Thriller”
[internet archive]

I hesitate to over-sell old movies like this one, a noir oddity that feels like it was stitched together from the dreams of Raymond Chandler and the nightmares of a union-busting plutocrat. It opens with a scene so absurd it could only be true: a tyrannical dowager, imperious and upholstered like a Victorian fainting couch, berates her nephew for hiring a bodyguard. She’s receiving death threats, but she’s more offended by the bodyguard’s lack of etiquette than the possibility of being murdered. This is the kind of Post-WWII existentialism-lite where the absurdity is the point.

The bodyguard, Mike, is played by Laurence Tierney, a man whose face looks like it’s been carved out of granite. Tierney, usually cast as the heavy, gets a rare turn as the hero here - but don’t worry, he’s still unpredictably violent. Mike is an ex-homicide detective with a chip on his shoulder and fists that do most of the talking. He’s got integrity, though, the kind that inspires loyalty in street kids and a blonde girlfriend named Doris who records case notes on vinyl. Yes, vinyl.

The plot is a tangled mess of class warfare, murder, and meat hooks – ah, good old meat hooks - and it’s all delivered with dialogue that crackles. A young Robert Altman had a hand in the script, and you can hear his chortle in lines like “It’s as cozy here as Grand Central Station” and a butler being called “Dracula” with no irony whatsoever. The film doesn’t wink at you - it stares you down and dares you to snicker.

Visually, it’s a feast. Shot in black and white, the cinematography is rich with texture: cracked glass, fringe, tassels, and shadows that conceal sprites, pixies, goblins, oh my. There’s a scene in an eye doctor’s office that looks like it was directed by hyper-caffeinated Fritz Lang full of coffee from South Sulawesi. And the Southern California setting is a time capsule - Los Angeles with streetcars, arcades, and meatpacking workers in neckties. It’s surreal in the way only the passing time can make something surreal, like visiting a place you’ve not been to since childhood.

The film’s best moments are its strangest: Mike playing catch with a disabled boy inside a trailer, sailors picking a fight in an arcade because he’s nagging a clerk, and Doris using a “Record Your Voice” booth to store evidence. On vinyl. These scenes don’t advance the plot, but they deepen the world. They make it feel lived-in, like a place where people love, work and belch even when the camera isn’t rolling.

Tierney’s Mike is a bulldozer in a trench coat. He impersonates cops, commits burglary, beats up optometrists, and steals a police car - all in the name of justice. The final fight scene, set in a meatpacking plant, is a ballet of brutality featuring swinging meat hooks – ah, good old meat hooks. It’s the kind of climax that makes you want to cheer and wince at the same time.

As for the Perry Mason connection, June Clayworth played a small part as the neglected wife of the deserving victim in the TCOT Fraudulent Foto, one of the most noirish episodes of the series. Steve Brodie, a meatpacking toiler in this one, was a political fixer in a great episode TCOT Witless Witness.

Matinee Musings: Ann Harding Turned Misery

Note: The sad girl trope in movies features a female protagonist who is profoundly melancholic, visibly traumatized, or emotionally fragile, often styled in an aesthetically pleasing or poetic way. Movie-goers have to decide for themselves whether this validates female grief and aggravation and fosters empathy or promotes passive heroines or reduces identity to pain. Me, I like how the sad girl trope rejects the societal expectation that women must always be put-together. It's okay to be a mess. It'll pass.

The Gallant Lady Weeps: How Ann Harding Turned Misery into Luminous Heartbreak

Ann Harding belongs to a brief moment in early sound cinema when a woman could be intelligent, self-aware, and fated to suffer beautifully. Projecting the modern "sad girl" trope backward into the 1930s, Harding emerges as a performer who turns emotional suffering into an aesthetic experience.

In the early talkie era, Hollywood prized actresses who combined beauty with vocal control. Harding's stage training allowed her screen persona to take rapid, unmistakable shape. By the early 1930s she was consistently cast as the "beautiful, virtuous, self-sacrificing woman," a type studios revisited with near ritual insistence. Across these roles, her characters absorb frustration, disappointment, and renunciation with a composure that approaches stylization.

In Paris Bound (1929), Jim and Mary begin their marriage with modern, permissive ideals, yet it is Harding’s Mary who pays the emotional cost when theory collapses. Left with a child and her suspicions, she becomes the film’s still center of suffering, waiting and doubting. Harding renders Mary's anguish with restraint. When she insists that marriage requires "vacations," her faltering voice reveals the strain beneath the pose.

In Her Private Affair (1929), Harding plays Vera, whose life is derailed by guilt, blackmail, and secrecy. Harding makes her suffering palpable through her expressive face and stage-trained voice, conveying anxiety, fear, and moral anguish. The film is static and stage-bound, but her performance gives it emotional weight and helped launch her stardom.

If Paris Bound establishes this pattern, East Lynne (1931) refines it into its purest form. As Lady Isabella, Harding portrays maternal loss and social disgrace not through melodramatic display but through restraint. Her face registers grief in subtle ways, lingering sadness in the eyes, hesitation in a glance, composure maintained at evident cost. The drama lies in watching her struggle to contain emotions that threaten to overwhelm her.

In Westward Passage (1932), Harding plays disillusionment as a state of suspended aftershock. Having left a failed marriage, she moves through her new life with composed restraint, even as the past intrudes. When her first husband returns, the emotional conflict sharpens: whether the past can ever be recovered.

The Animal Kingdom (1932) centers on a love triangle, but its emotional weight comes from Harding's Daisy. After Tom impulsively marries another woman, Daisy discovers too late how deeply she loves him. Harding gives the character a wounded tenderness that makes her heartbreak memorable. Her farewell, "Good-bye... 'til Doomsday," transforms loss into a form of grace.

In Double Harness (1933), Harding plays Joan, whose determination to reform the irresponsible John gradually turns into painful love. After tricking him into marriage, she is consumed by guilt and struggles to earn the affection she fears she does not deserve. Harding balances strength, vulnerability, and restraint, making Joan one of her most affecting heroines.

As film critic Molly Haskell has argued, Hollywood often turned female suffering into emotional spectacle, inviting identification while encouraging resignation. Harding’s films exemplify this tendency. They ask viewers to admire endurance - to value the woman who transforms loss into moral clarity and composure.

What distinguishes Harding is the intelligence she brings to this paradox. Her performances lend psychological credibility to roles that might otherwise seem same-old, yet their repetition across films exposed the limits of the type itself. Her performances are never trivial; they possess a psychological clarity that deepens even conventional roles. Yet that same clarity, repeated across films, lends the suffering a certain predictability. Press resentment - fueled by her reserve offscreen - hardened into sarcasm, dubbing her “Noble Ann Harding.”

With the stricter enforcement of the Production Code in the mid-1930s, Hollywood retreated from the kind of adult emotional material that sustained Harding’s* career. Her achievement endures: she demonstrated how cinema could render wounded feminine energy** as something formally persuasive and aesthetically compelling.

 +++++++++++++

* And the careers of Leila Hyams, Evelyn Brent, Mary Nolan, Genevieve Tobin, Marian Marsh, Madge Evans, Helen Twelvetrees and the wonderful Mae Clarke and Nancy Carroll.

** Look it up! I can’t do everything for you. I give and I give….

Perry Mason 168: Godzilla

Note: Too heavy to be a leading man in the movies, Raymond Burr usually gave terrific performances in supporting roles, most often as villains, in the ten years after WWII. Many movie fans of all ages are still watching his turns with Alfred Hitchcock (Rear Window) and George Stevens (A Place in the Sun). And hardcore fans of noir still watch Raw Deal (Anthony Mann), The Blue Gardenia (Fritz Lang), Horizons West (Budd Boetticher) and Great Day in the Morning (Jacques Tourneur).

 Godzilla, King of the Monsters
1956 / 1:20
Tagline: “Makes KING KONG look like a Midget!”
[internet archive]

The Japanese studio Toho (Treasure of the East) made the original Gojira in 1954. I think it is one of the few monster movies that transcends its genre because it makes me feel the horror and tragedy of the monster's rampage: the thousands killed and the destruction of infrastructure painstakingly rebuilt after the war. The waste of life and property is simply terrible.

Haunting too is that unforgettable roar – that combo of shriek and factory klaxon.

To make the film more accessible to American audiences, new scenes featuring Raymond Burr as reporter Steve Martin were shot and inserted into the Japanese original. Martin serves as a Western point-of-view character, our man in Tokyo, much like Edward Murrow reporting from London during the Blitz while a national catastrophe unfolds around him.

Nowadays it is easy to mock this narrow-mindedness, but I remember being a kid in the Sixties and hearing rude comments about the Japanese. Only twenty years had passed since World War II, about as long ago then as Hurricane Katrina is to us today. So only 11 years after the cessation of hostilities, in 1956 feelings must still have been raw.

Burr’s scenes are rather jarring in places, feeling disconnected from the original footage. He talks to characters in the original film but all we see are the backs of their heads. Scenes are of him listening at meetings, giving a voiceover to describe what’s going on. A Japanese American guy translates for him since Martin says, “My Japanese is a little rusty.” This is lame, since nobody would expect him to speak the Japanese of paleontology. A funnier line might have been: "My conversational Japanese is fine, but this geological and biological mumbo-jumbo is way over my head."

Burr, ever the professional, rises above the sometimes weak material and never gives the impression that he is merely collecting a paycheck. He gives a serious and stoic performance. Burr's best scene comes when he finds himself trapped in a vulnerable office building. Fighting back panic and maintaining his professional composure, he records what he believes may be his final report.

To my mind, there are two unintentionally amusing scenes.  One is a Japanese-American as an Odo Island peasant that speaks what even I know is kitchen Japanese. The other is seeing Burr so heavily bandaged that he looks as though a group of children had practiced first aid on him, calling to mind the funny scene in TCOT Grinning Gorilla.

Burr reportedly joked that he received a generous paycheck for only two days' work on Godzilla, but that claim seems doubtful. In the sequence on Odo Island that suspensefully leads up to the first sighting of the monster, there is a day scene and a night scene that would have taken at least a couple days to set up and film. In fact, Burr and crew worked six days to do his scenes.

The American version, I think, does not cut any of the monster’s depredations. So it feels just as grim as the original. For example, it retains the dreadful scene in which a mother is assuring her two little kids they will soon meet the father they lost in the war while the trio is cowering in a shop’s doorway as the monster is only steps down the street. Given moments like this, it is easy to understand why some countries initially restricted the film to adult audiences.

Matinee Musings: Conquest of Space

Note: To keep this blog's connection with the classic TV series Perry Mason, I'm compelled to point out that Dr. Elsbach is played by Michael Fox who appeared in 25 episodes, usually as a doctor or forensic pathologist. Chinese guy playing a Japanese guy named Imoto, Benson Fong guest starred as the accused in TCOT Caretaker’s Cat. For some odd reason, William Hopper (Paul Drake) is billed higher than Fong though Hopper is in only two brief scenes and Fong is almost always in a scene. 

Conquest of Space
1955 / 1:20
Tagline: “Dramatic Effects Never Before Equaled - Or Even Imagined!”
[internet archive]

The Commander, a figure carved from the granite of military tradition, is a cinematic archetype - stern, rule-bound, and yet quietly aware of the psychological erosion that comes with prolonged duty in space. The Wheel, a rotating space station that doubles as a construction port and a fort, becomes a metaphor for the grinding monotony of interstellar vigilance. The crew, suffering from the tedium of their orbital tour of duty, begins to unravel: irritability, nausea, dizziness, and a creeping sense of existential dread permeate the mise-en-scène.

When the mission is unexpectedly re-routed from the Moon to Mars, the Commander’s reaction is not rebellion but resignation - a classic gesture of the professional soldier, the kind of man who thinks “Mine is not to reason why.” His stoicism is not heroic in the sense Marcus Aurelius would endorse, but tragic: a man burdened by his unbending sense of duty, but also haunted by the dark implications of his own obedience. The stakes are high - Earth’s survival depends on the success of this mission - but the film’s true drama lies in the Commander’s internal conflict, his slow descent into metaphysical unease.

As the narrative unfolds, the film anticipates a familiar trope in science fiction cinema: the psychological breakdown of a crew member, the “madness in space” motif that would later be explored from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Ren & Stimpy. But here, the breakdown is not merely personal - it’s philosophical. The Commander begins to question the very premise of the mission, suggesting that humanity’s reach into the cosmos may be a form of cosmic trespass, a violation of the divine order.

The supporting cast, while not given the depth of characterization one finds in Citizen Kane, nonetheless serves the themes the director explores. The members of the crew are unable to articulate the moral dimensions of space exploration to their CO and thus unable to dispute his religious and philosophical misgivings about the mission. Their inability to form and express an argument becomes a critique of technocratic culture - a reminder that scientific progress is a hollow, if not hazardous, enterprise without reflection about values and the ability to formulate and argue your point of view to unknowing or unsteady authority.

Visually, the film is a mixed bag. The Technicolor palette is both a strength and a liability: the close-ups, a staple of television aesthetics, sometimes betray the limitations of the medium, but the spacewalk sequences are genuinely striking. The Angry Red Planet, rendered in vivid hues, is a painterly abstraction - a hostile, beautiful terrain that reflects the inner turmoil of the characters.

Not wanting to oversell this picture, I grant that this is a film that lacks the polish of later sci-fi epics. But in the final analysis, it compensates with a sincerity of purpose and a thematic ambition that elevates it above its pulp origins with a meditation on duty, doubt, and the limits of human ambition.

Perry Mason 167: Pass the Gravy

Note: I like the Cool & Lam series and this 1959 outing is one of Gardner’s sturdier contraptions, the kind that looks at first like two unrelated annoyances and then reveals itself to be one of those infernal little boxes where every side folds into the next. 

Pass the Gravy – Erle Stanley Gardner writing as A. A. Fair

Pass the Gravy (and you can already hear Bertha Cool snort at the title) is Gardner nudging a mess of details until they cry uncle and confess.

We begin, as usual, with PI Donald Lam being handed two problems that he is explicitly directed by partner Bertha not to combine. First: a fifteen‑year‑old girl with more anxiety than cash wants her Uncle Amos retrieved from his latest alcoholic orbit - except this time the orbit has widened past what the family can endure. Second: a far more remunerative proposition, courtesy of a sleek wife whose missing salesman husband has vanished into exactly the sort of fog Gardner enjoys. Bertha Cool, patron saint of billable hours, votes decisively for glamour over pathos. Lam, professionally a risk-taker all the way, declines to choose.

The miracle (or the trick, depending on your tolerance) is a pair of postcards from the same nowhere gas station, which Lam seizes on like a man on a mission. Off he goes, ricocheting through Sierras, Reno, and a parade of low‑rent America - hitchhikers, ex-cons, predators - each one offering a clue that mostly serves to make the previous clue look stupid. Gardner keeps the tone breezy, but the method is almost scientific: accumulate detail, distrust it, repeat.

Meanwhile Bertha looms - half partner, half thrower of Lam under busses - coiled like that famous spool of barbed wire, measuring morality in invoices. Lam, no one’s idea of a saint, nevertheless insists on helping the broke kid, as if he’s dimly aware that a detective who ignores the poor stops being a detective and turns into furniture. Secretary Elsie Brand thinks dark thoughts, looking askance at Lam's desire to assist a teenage girl - it was an age when literally millions of sixteen-year-old girls got married every year.

It is here that Lam can be read in light of Seneca’s observation that “the wise man is fortified against all inroads.” Lam is no Stoic adept - he is too ironic, too improvisational, too entangled in contingency - but he approximates Stoic flexibility and resilience in practice. He does not retreat before uncertainty, financial pressure, or physical danger; nor does he allow Bertha’s mercenary calculus to wholly dictate his course. Poverty (his own professional precarity), sorrow (the girl’s desperation), disgrace (his disbarred past), and pain, disability, and disfigurement (the ever-present threat of bodily harm to his small frame) all press upon him. Yet Lam persists, not with serene detachment, but with a dogged alertness and dedication that mirror Seneca’s ideal in a compromised, modern form.

In the end, the puzzle snaps shut neatly, Gardner having tidied the room with efficiency. But the aftertaste is better than that: beneath the wisecracks and coincidences, a faint, unfashionable idea - that decency may be impractical, but is nonetheless binding. Lam doesn’t win because he’s invulnerable. He wins because he refuses to take the sensible exit and he does not like seeing vulnerable people abused.

The Nones of Crime: Mystery House

Note: As for the connection with the classic TV series Perry Mason, Sheila Bromley was both a goody and a baddy in five episodes. Her most outstanding performance was in TCOT Nervous Neighbor in which she had amnesia, one of the very few credible instances I’ve seen of that “convenient for the script” condition. 

Mystery House
1938 / 56 minutes
Tagline: “A piece of wire...a toupee...a rifled safe..3 CLUES! 3 MURDERS! 3 TIMES The Thrills of Any Other Mystery Hit!”
[internet archive]

This Warner Brothers B-movie begins at an autopsy hearing where Gwen (Anne Nagel) insists her father was murdered - after all, he’d accused his business partners of shady dealings. But the evidence points to suicide: a locked room, a gun, and no sign of foul play. 

Gwen, unconvinced, vows to hire a private detective. Enter Sara (Ann Sheridan), nurse to Gwen’s cranky Aunt Lucy (Elspeth Dudgeon), who recommends her boyfriend, PI Lance O’Leary (Dick Purcell).

Gwen’s own beau is played by William Hopper - yes, Paul Drake from Perry Mason. Here he’s a society fop with an insipid smile and enough makeup to suggest he wandered in from a silent film. His main talent? Looking game for gin rummy even after a supposed suicide.

At Lance’s urging, Gwen gathers suspects for a weekend hunt at her country estate.

Tension simmers; secrets hover. One guest hints at explosive knowledge - then turns up dead, another “suicide.” The police? Never summoned. Lance inspects the body, pockets evidence, and deduces strangulation by a wire from the now-broken radio.

Purcell brings expected vigor to the role, his athletic ease lending the PI some presence. Sheridan, known as “The Oomph Girl,” does what she can with thin dialogue - though one longs for Technicolor to revel in her red hair. Ben Welden, in a toupee, plays against his usual lug type as a respectable if pushy exec.

Based on a mystery by Mignon Eberhart - once dubbed the “American Agatha Christie” - the film offers locked-room intrigue, country-house tension, and a dash of pulp charm. Forgotten today, it’s still a curious relic for fans of B-movie sleuthing.

As for clothes, the mystery is set in winter so the fur-trimmed coats are pretty nice. The cars are swanky; that might be a cool 1938 Ford Deluxe Tudor Sedan.  At only an hour, this works for a Saturday evening in winter.

Perry Mason 166: Respectability on Trial

Note: Erle Stanley Gardner came to Perry Mason with two useful educations. One was acquired in the small mining towns of his youth, where power rarely showcased itself but was understood through money, reputation, and long acquaintance. The other came from legal practice, where he saw how such informal arrangements could shape formal outcomes, particularly for outsiders. Together they help explain a recurring pattern in the Mason novels: tightly knit local elites, suspicion directed toward the socially vulnerable, and justice arriving only when an outsider breaks the circle.

Respectability on Trial: How the Rural Elite Rig the Game (Until Mason Shows Up)

Gardner's small towns often resemble a miniature version of what C. Wright Mills would later describe as a power elite. Property owners, professionals, and established families do more than possess wealth; they help determine what counts as common sense. Influence accumulates into networks. Families, attorneys, business associates, and dependents form interlocking circles whose judgments have a curious habit of aligning with their interests.

In The Case of the Golddigger's Purse (1945) and The Case of the Cautious Coquette (1949), reputation is a form of capital guarded as jealously as any stash of undeclared income. When scandal threatens, suspicion drifts toward those at the margins, often women whose social standing is uncertain. The machinery of law initially serves as a social reflex: protect the inner ring and export blame. Facts are smothered beneath more convenient interpretations.

The Case of the Lame Canary (1937) shows the same dynamic in a harsher key. Divorce law, social standing, and the threat of public scandal become tools of domination. The resulting violence grows from unequal power, while the impostures and misdirections that follow reveal how confidently privileged figures assume they can avoid scrutiny.

In The Case of the Screaming Woman (1958), Gardner examines power at its most subtle. Credibility attaches itself to status before evidence has even entered the room. Property owners and professionals are presumed truthful; the lone dissenter is treated as suspect. Persistence itself becomes evidence of instability. Disbelief functions as social control.

Running through these novels is a quieter but revealing pattern. Trust circulates within a closed circuit. Legal representation, financial oversight, guardianship, and family interests often occupy the same social orbit. No grand conspiracy is necessary. Familiarity provides its own protection.

This is where Perry Mason becomes important. He acts as a detective who is a disruptive force. He insists that claims be tested by evidence rather than station, and he breaks the tacit agreements that shield respectable people from uncomfortable questions. His real offense is treating respectability not as proof but as background.

The larger implication of Gardner's fiction is that injustice rarely presents itself wearing a villain's cape. More often it arrives in a clean suit, sits on the chamber-of-commerce board, and speaks confidently about community standards. Wherever a cohesive local elite dominates the landscape, the danger is not merely corruption but a narrowing of perception itself. Truth becomes filtered through status. It takes an outsider, or at least an outsider's method, to pry it loose.

The Kalends of Crime: The Maltese Falcon

Note: Don't get your feathers up, as Sam Spade warns, but you won’t find comparisons with the John Huston’s 1941 version in this review of the 1931 version. Comparisons are odious  - they obscure a film’s own merits. Refusing to compare demands discipline: to judge a work on its own terms. I assume, despite industry pressures, the filmmakers aimed in good faith to make a solid movie. Besides, Una Merkel, Thelma Todd, and Bebe Daniels all turn up in the same movie. At that point, everything else is merely a formality.

The Maltese Falcon
1931 / 1:18
Tagline: “Hard as nails, leader of a crime ring, but still a woman.”
[internet archive]

This Pre-Code version of the Dashiell Hammett’s 1929 novel kicks off with the implication that private detective Sam Spade (Ricardo Cortez) has just had intimate congress with a woman in his office. During working hours, no less. Spade and his secretary Effie (Una Merkel) exchange knowing looks as the woman leaves the office after adjusting her hosiery.

That the Spade character is quite the ladies’ man is confirmed as his partner Miles Archer (Walter Long) listens in on the extension to gather that Spade and his wife Iva Archer (Thelma Todd) are having an affair. The new client, a worried Ruth Wonderly (Bebe Daniels), in a fur trimmed outfit, hires the two detectives to locate her missing sister.

In a beautifully filmed scene, a dark bedroom with the breeze blowing in the curtains, Spade is woken by his ringing telephone. The police inform him that apparently while on the job, Miles Archer was murdered, shot to death in an alley.  Near the scene of the crime, Spade speaks in Cantonese with a Chinese-American merchant. The police learn of Spade and Iva’s affair so they figure Spade as the perp.  The only way for Spade to get out from under police suspicion and scrutiny is to find the real killer, but his meeting with three manic collectors looking for the statuette of a black bird impedes his efforts to clear himself.

Near the beginning of the movie the lines are delivered in a kind of stagey way, as if they are being declaimed rather than spoken in a natural way. The delivery gets better as the movie unfolds. Bebe Daniels has limpid lamps, as wide and wet as the eyes of a Dandie Dinmont Terrier. Her femme fatale is persuasive: attractive and “using her charms to her great advantage.” “Don't you ever get lonesome” she asks Spade as if she could something about that. Daniels in the bubble bath is Pre-Code as is her being strip searched in the kitchen. Also, in Pre-Code fashion, it’s obvious that Spade and Wonderly sleep together.

Ricardo Cortez puts in a good, not great, performance as the satanic PI who only seems to be looking out for himself. Spade’s goat-like lechery is a creepy act to make people let down their guard by underestimating him. Robert Elliott and J. Farrell MacDonald as San Francisco police detectives are both excellent: tough as nails but too middle-aged weary to employ the rubber hose.

Dudley Digges (the heavy in Condemned) plays the Guttman character as jumpy on the outside but bleak on the inside. In Pre-Code fashion, it’s evident that Guttman and Wilmer (Dwight Frye, looking psycho) sleep together when Guttman strokes Frye’s cheek. Guttman sincerely regrets sending Wilmer over as the fall guy.

Spade becomes rather a flat character because his self-revealing monologue at the end of the novel is not persuasive. At least he says, “I'll get over it in time” which shows he’s philosopher enough to take the long view, which helps in run of the mill dilemmas like handing over to the law somebody one has slept with.

This picture has a final scene in which Spade visits Wonderly in jail. I thought it worked because the cell block was dismal beyond words, the incarcerated women deserted and hopeless. Just an amateur critic, I’m easy-going enough to march where the director points.

European Reading Challenge #8

I read this for the European Reading Challenge 2026.

A Voice in the Night – Andrea Camilleri

Inspector Salvo Montalbano works in Vigata, Scility, where the sun bakes the streets and the rot runs centuries deep. He’s got two cases on his desk: a supermarket manager found dead by his own hand, and a young woman butchered in her apartment. The supermarket’s owned by the Cuffaro crime family. The girl’s boyfriend is the son of the provincial president - a spoiled brat with too much money and too little conscience.

Montalbano’s used to this kind of mess. The criminals are predictably stupid and ferocious. The politicians are worse. His bosses are scared of stepping on the wrong toes, and the mafia has its fingers in every pie. So Montalbano does what he always does: he digs with his bare hands when there’s no shovel in sight.

His crew is the usual cast. Fazio takes notes like he’s building a case against time and space. Catarella mangles names and addresses with comic precision. Dr. Pasquano curses like a sailor and pokes at Montalbano’s creeping fear that age is catching up with him. The inspector feels it in his bones - he’s not as sharp as he used to be, and the world isn’t getting any cleaner.

Camilleri’s prose moves fast, like a car chase through narrow alleys. Dialogue drives the story, and the scenes play out like a stage drama - misunderstandings, interrogations, midnight break-ins. Montalbano lies when he has to, manipulates when he must. He knows when to wait and when to strike, even if it means flushing out the guilty with a TV interview or a voice in the dark.

There’s no hottie love interest half his age this time, thank the stars. Just Montalbano, aging, stubborn, and still trying to hold the line in a country sleepwalking through corruption. Camilleri’s voice is clear and skeptical, like a man who’s seen too much and still cares. The crimes are brutal, the politics worse, but Montalbano keeps going. Someone has to.

Perry Mason 165: TCOT Caretaker’s Cat

Note. The year 1932 was the worst year of the Depression in the USA. Many adult men (i.e. the readers of pulp mysteries) were feeling demoralized by long-term under- or unemployment and difficulties supporting a family. So in digressions in the novels Erle Stanley Gardner sometimes donned his life coach hat.

Perryisms to Live By:  “What the hell can a man lose? He can't lose his life because he doesn't own that anyway. He has only a lease on life. He can lose money and money doesn't mean one damn thing as compared with character. All that really counts is a man's ability to live life, to get the most out of it as he goes through it, and he gets the most kick out of it by playing a no-limit game.”

The Case of the Caretaker’s Cat – Erle Stanley Gardner

So dig this: 1935, the Great Depression still doing its slow grind, and here comes a Perry Mason yarn that kicks off with Karl Jackson, Mason’s short-lived assistant, laying out the Laxter family soap opera with the clarity of a bookie reading off odds. Old Peter Laxter croaks in a house fire, leaves his grandsons Sam and Frank sitting pretty, while granddaughter Winifred gets the royal shaft. The caretaker, Ashton - crippled, cranky, and living in a basement with his Persian cat named Clinker (named after the coal furnace crud, for you non-stokers) - gets a job for life. Cozy, right?

Except Sam hates the cat. Claims Clinker’s a bed-muddying menace, running up laundry bills like a Beverly Hills princess. Threatens to poison the poor beast. Ashton, who’s got a bankroll fat enough to choke a horse, stomps into Mason’s office, waving his wad but balking at a $500 retainer. Settles for $250 to keep Clinker breathing. Mason, cool as a gin fizz, dictates a letter to Della Street warning Sam he’ll lose his inheritance if he so much as looks at the cat cross-eyed. Ashton exits, and Della spots him being tailed by a guy in a green Packard - because of course.

Cue Nathaniel Shuster, bargain-basement shyster with a rep for jury bribing, barging in with Sam and Frank in tow. Wants to settle Winifred’s beef out of court. Mason says he’s only in it for the cat, tosses them out like yesterday’s racing form. Then tells Paul Drake they’re gonna challenge the will “over a cat.” Drake’s assignment: find Winifred, dig dirt on the grandsons, and sniff out the truth about Peter’s crispy demise.

Winifred turns up flipping waffles at a joint called Winnie’s Waffles - because nothing says American grit like syrup and batter. She’s signed away her rights thanks to Shuster’s sweet talk, but doesn’t care. She’s hell-bent on making it solo in the cold, hard world. Mason, digging her style, drops a line fit for a motivational poster: “It’s not the future that matters; it’s the present. It’s not what you save, but what you make and how you make it.” Heavy, man. Then he mentions the cat, and good-hearted Winifred’s all in. Her boyfriend Doug Keene tosses Edith DeVoe, Peter’s nurse, into the mix, and suddenly the plot’s got more twists than a pretzel factory.

From there, it’s pure pulp fireworks: Edith spins a lurid yarn, Mason huddles with DA Hamilton Burger, they dig up Peter’s charred remains, and then - bang! - a strangulation murder, a blunt-instrument murder, missing diamonds, Holcomb slamming desks and chasing streetcars like a Keystone Cop on Benzedrine. Della breaks speed limits, Perry plays square-shooter hero, and the courtroom finale rocks harder than a Chick Webb set at the Savoy Ballroom. All this, and we’re still sweating bullets over that damn cat.

The Thirties Mason? He’s less buttoned-down barrister, more two-fisted adventurer, grousing to Della about paperwork while dodging death and dishing Stoicism. Sure, the cars have running boards and California still hangs its killers, but the vibe? Timeless. Cool as a cat named Clinker.

Perry Mason 164: The Mean Girl Rewrites the Script

Note: Gail Patrick left law school to become a movie actress. Often cast as the bad girl or the other woman, she appeared in more than 60 feature films between 1932 and 1948, notably Stage Door and My Favorite Wife. Retirement bored her so she created her job as executive producer for the hit TV show Perry Mason from 1957 to 1966.

The Mean Girl Rewrites the Script (and Wins the Case)

It is hardly a contradiction, though it can appear that way at first glance. Gail Patrick, cool, lacquered, bored, amused, built an acting career on surfaces that concealed intent. She played the socialite, the interloper, the mean girl, the woman lingering just beyond the boundaries of propriety and therefore exercising influence over them. In My Man Godfrey among others, she embodied something subtler than chaos. She was an arrangement of tone, posture, and advantage. Of self-knowledge as well: social butterfly Cornelia understood perfectly that she was squandering her time, energy, and talent; super-thief Myra possessed the icy confidence required to match wits with the cunning George Sanders in Quiet Please: Murder.

Then came television. Executive producer of Perry Mason. Less performance than stewardship of performance. Something carries across. As producer, Patrick favored scripts and characterizations that rewarded intelligence, discipline, and competence, particularly in the portrayal of Della Street.

The look of the series, its restraint, polish, and almost chilly cleanliness, feels more like an insistence than an aesthetic preference. Nothing extraneous. Every gesture purposeful. One can hear the echo of those earlier roles: the woman who knew exactly when to speak, when to hold back, how to allow silence to accomplish its work.

Many of Patrick's screen roles centered on social performance and concealed motives. As producer, she showed a similar sensitivity to credibility, helping maintain Perry Mason's disciplined tone and avoiding the melodramatic excess common in contemporary television.

And the women, often relegated to the margins in comparable series, are altered here, quietly but decisively. Della Street neither flutters nor waits. She anticipates, investigates, and verifies. Her work functions less as secretarial support than as a parallel enterprise. She is competent without fanfare, and because the series treats that competence as routine rather than remarkable, it becomes all the more convincing.

This matters, if only because the period so reliably preferred the opposite. The endangered woman, the nosy neighbor, the childlike witness, the decorative secretary still appear in Perry Mason, yet they are displaced, or more accurately, balanced by another possibility. Della, and often other women* moving through the show's tight architecture, possess a self-command that resists easy categorizing. Rescue never enters the equation; they are already in motion, solving, adjusting, correcting.

Whether this emphasis originated directly with Patrick or emerged from a broader creative collaboration is difficult to determine. Nevertheless, the show's treatment of Della Street reflects qualities associated with Patrick's best screen performances: intelligence, composure, and self-possession.

So the irony, villainess turned arbiter of truth, dissolves somewhat. Villainy was never the essence of those performances. What mattered was expertise in appearances: understanding how deception settles into the body, how it sounds when it speaks. Repurposed, that knowledge becomes vigilance. The architect of duplicity becomes, quite plausibly, its most efficient detector.

The skills that made Patrick effective as an actress - discipline, observation, and control - appear in a different form in the series she helped produce. Patrick spent much of her acting career portraying women whose intelligence carried a hint of menace. On Perry Mason, that intelligence loses its threatening quality and becomes professional competence. Della Street and many of the series' female characters are neither ornaments nor victims. They are people with work to do, and the show takes that work seriously. If Patrick helped shape that perspective, her most lasting role may have taken place behind the camera rather than in front of it.

Links to Gail Patrick movies and my reviews can be found here.

* Amazing actresses such as Constance Ford, Audrey Totter, Frances Reid, Joyce Meadows, Marie Windsor, Katherine Squire, Geraldine Wall, Lurene Tuttle, Sheila Bromley, Louise Latham, and Jeanne Cooper, to name only a few. They all played women with souls – and elbows.