Perry Mason 129: TCOT Grinning Gorilla

Note: Mason and Street’s romance? Always a non-starter - thanks to Della, the ultimate realist. Her logic? ‘If I marry him, I lose all the fun of speeding, committing B and E, and letting the air out of Paul Drake’ So, she’s kept it strictly professional … until now. Cut to Della, blushing like a teenager because her fortune cookie just declared, ‘You’re about to fall for someone in a snazzy suit.’ Cue Mason smirking, cue audience laughter.

The Case of the Grinning Gorilla - Erle Stanley Gardner

In 1952, Perry Mason acquires - mindfully - the diaries of Helen Cadmus. She is either dead or missing, either drowned or vanished, either tragic or up to something. The authorities, as usual, are plodding. Mason is not.

The diaries, bought for five dollars at auction, are immediately contested. A man named Nathan Fallon appears. He is a cousin, allegedly. He is also, unmistakably, a crook. His sponsor is Benjamin Addicks, a millionaire with interests in gorilla neurology. Addicks offers money. Mason declines. It is not about money. He doesn’t like being lied to and taken for a chump.

Paul Drake, who is Mason’s investigator and cultivates the bland facelessness of a politician afraid of his own opinions, discovers that Addicks is the poster boy for the eccentricity of the rich. The mansion is fortified. The gorillas are real. The science is speculative bordering on Boris Karloff in The Ape. Mason and Della Street, who is always present, visit the crazy old house. There is a confrontation. There is a gorilla. There is a murder.

Addicks is found dead. The weapon is sharp.

The accused is Josephine Kempton, a housekeeper with an aptitude for being economical with the truth. She withholds facts. She calls it discretion. Mason calls it usual for a client who is scared and not about to talk of intimate matters and bad choices to strangers.

The case feels pulpy, but not quite. It is noir, but not entirely. It is existential, in the way that only stories involving gorilla brains and mad scientist millionaires can be. Mason is nearly killed - twice. The city vibrates, quaking at the uncharacteristic violence. The truth is elusive and slightly absurd.

This is a weird Perry Mason novel. Unique in the canon.