Note: From Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, "The Combine" is a term Chief Bromden uses in his "delusions" to represent a vast, oppressive, and mechanical force that controls society, with the psychiatric hospital acting as a "factory" to "fix" people into conformist, machine-like workers. Chief Bromden, a tall Native American patient who pretends to be deaf and mute, sees Nurse Ratched and the orderlies as agents of The Combine.
Perry Mason: Novels versus TeeVee
Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason novels are precision machines, engineered to deliver models of legal suspense with the efficiency of a pulp assembly line. Each begins with a client in extremis - bewildered, imperiled, and anxious - wandering into Mason’s office like a refugee from a film noir backlot. What follows is a procedural ballet: murder, investigation, confrontation, and the inevitable courtroom climax, where Mason’s logic pins the culprit and the innocent walks free. Gardner, a lawyer turned pulp impresario, revels in evidentiary reversals and clipped dialogue, trusting readers to navigate a maze of legal minutiae and fill in exposition and business as they like. These are not whodunits but howdunits, their pleasures rooted in the mechanics of fraud and the thrill of watching The Combine outfoxed.
Television, from 1957 adapting the novels, streamlines this intricate machinery for the small screen. The hour-long format demands compression: subplots vanish, pacing accelerates, and the narrative arc - client, killing, investigation, trial - becomes a metronome. Gardner’s labyrinthine plotting gives way to clarity; crimes are staged early, investigations truncated, and courtroom theatrics foregrounded, with the mute defendant wedged between Perry and Della like a prop. The result is sleek reassurance, calibrated for mid-century living rooms. Accessibility triumphs over complexity. Where Gardner traffics in nuance, the series offers closure - a world where truth emerges on cue. No wonder Neil Postman and every smart-aleck sophomore in the Seventies (like me!) called teevee The Boob Tube.
Characterization undergoes similar sanding-down. Gardner’s Mason is a trickster in pinstripes, a gambler who thrives in gray zones. His moral compass points toward justice, but the route is circuitous, and the novels occasionally wink at his appetite for risky misdemeanors. Della Street, far from a stenographic ornament, is Mason’s co-conspirator - breaking and entering, impersonating gold diggers, and piloting getaway cars with pulp élan. Paul Drake, amiable and perpetually harried, rounds out a trio that calls to mind Nervous Overheated Ron, Brainy Cool Hermoine, and Wise Mind Harry.
Television domesticates this trio. Raymond Burr’s Mason radiates gravitas and ethical rectitude, a figure of calm authority in a universe of moral certainties. Della becomes a note-taker; Paul morphs into comic relief. Hamilton Burger, Gardner’s snarling prosecutor, is softened into genial foil, his vendetta ritualized into courtroom banter. The novels’ simmering antagonisms – graceless Burger stamping off as cross as a frog in a sock - are replaced by post-verdict bonhomie. Gardner approved the scripts, but one suspects he muttered “like hell” under his breath.
Tone is the final transmutation. Gardner writes in a brisk, not-quite-hard-boiled register, his dialogue clipped, his atmosphere tense with disquiet. Wartime shadows and cultural tremors haunt the margins, and the novels inhabit a world where the policeman is not your friend.
The TV series bathes Mason in the glow of Eisenhower-era optimism. Courtrooms gleam with California sheen; decorum reigns; law becomes sanctuary. Gardner’s recurring cautionary motif - never talk to the authorities without your lawyer - vanishes, along with his warnings about improper police procedures, misidentifications by witnesses and misconstrued circumstantial evidence. The show offers reassurance; the books, a lingering unease that instead of presuming innocence, The Combine thinks "horses" when it hears hooves, given circumstantial evidence, a plausible motive, and a lack of an airtight alibi.
In short: Gardner’s Mason prowls a morally ambiguous landscape, improvising justice in a flawed system. The televised Mason presides over a universe of order, where truth is punctual and the good guys always win. One is pulp with a purpose; the other, prime-time anesthesia.
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