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.
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