Perry Mason 179: TCOT Reluctant Model

Note: In the 66^th Mason novel from 1962, an anxious world finally learns Della Street’s address - the Crittmore Apartments on West Selig Avenue. The novel is dripping with mid-century cool: Drake records a phone call and casually kills the legal beep, credit cards are the new craze (though Mason’s client is strictly cash-only), and Drake name-drops the dye-transfer color photo process like a hipster flex. Gardner even unveils a cutting-edge way to peg time of death - blood-cooling rates. The term “Lushbaugh method” is still used today because Gardner coined the name in this novel.

The Case of the Reluctant Model - Erle Stanley Gardner

It begins with something trivial, as these things often do: a question about a painting. Lattimer Rankin, an art expert, comes to Perry Mason with a grievance. Another expert, Collin Durant, has cast doubt on a canvas Rankin sold to Otto Olney. A model, Maxine Lindsay, claims it’s a fake. Rankin wants to sue. Mason advises restraint - better to secure Maxine’s sworn statement and let Olney handle the matter. Sensible, measured. But sense rarely prevails.

Maxine testifies. Olney makes a statement to the press, all bravado and polish. That evening, Durant appears at Mason’s office, demanding to be heard. Mason refuses. Then Maxine calls, her voice taut, saying she’s leaving town. No explanation. Mason sends Paul Drake to follow her. The next day, Durant is found dead - in Maxine’s apartment. She has vanished.

From here, the story coils tighter. Mason informs Tragg, but soon finds himself in another city, speaking to Maxine, only to be caught by Tragg again. Rankin’s lawsuit fades; Mason now defends Maxine, who is drowning in circumstantial evidence. Durant had leverage -knowledge of secrets surrounding Maxine’s sister and her husband - and he used it. He also commissioned fake portraits of Maxine, a grotesque echo of her beauty.

The preliminary hearing is a parade of damning fragments. A woman saw Maxine at a bus station phone booth; her gun was found in a locker there. That gun killed Durant. A neighbor glimpsed her near the apartment at the time of death. Canary has disappeared. The artist produces the disputed portrait. The judge listens, impassive, as witnesses file past. The case seems airtight. Is it? Who placed the gun in the locker? Who pocketed the $2,000 for the forgery? And why does every answer feel like a door opening onto another, darker room?

Gardner’s ending strains credulity. Coincidence piles upon coincidence: an unlocked door, a conveniently found gun, a victim oblivious to an intruder’s presence. The killer discards the weapon where Maxine had been, sealing her fate. It feels hurried, as if Gardner, weary of wandering in his own topiary labyrinth, chose escape with a trimmer shearing through the nearest hedge.

Still, the novel fascinates. It breaks Mason’s usual pattern, revealing his stoic philosophy and Tragg’s authoritarian fairness. And those antique Americanisms - “as dead as a mackerel,” “take a powder” - linger like ghosts of another age. These idioms seep into my vocabulary and make 50-something women at work say softly, wonderingly to me, “You sound like my dad.”