The Fatal Bullet

"Lawyers can be pests and often are."

- Archie Goodwin (Rex Stout's A Right to Die, 1964)

Erle Stanley Gardner was a prolific and consistent mystery writers, who churned out books and short stories faster than a Gatling machine gun can spit out bullets, which included over eighty (!) novels about his most famous creation, Perry Mason – a courtroom wizard who often took gross liberties with the law. However, Mason was not the only the character Gardner created.

Gardner penned three, novel-length mystery series with a relatively long and not entirely unsuccessful run. One of these series was published under a pseudonym, namely "A.A. Fair," which covered thirty books about the Nero Wolfean Bertha Cool and her legman, Donald Lam. A third series counted only nine titles and were originally serialized in slick magazines, such as The Country Gentleman and The Saturday Evening Post, before they were published as books. And this particular series has long held my interest as they seemed to offer a delicious slice of small town Americana.

The series in question is set in the fictional county of Madison City, California, which had been under the control of a political organization for fifteen years, but the then district attorney got careless and "the sheriff was crooked" - giving rise to a populist uprising against the political establishment of Madison City. Doug Selby and Rex Brandon "furnished the spearhead of a political ticket" that "swept the machine aside."

So Selby was sworn in as the new district attorney of the county and Brandon became the newly elected sheriff, but both men still have to content with the remnants of the old political structure. A structure that stills seems to work as a opposition power in the third book of the series. There is, however, another problem slinking into Selby's district.

The D.A. Draws a Circle (1939) introduces a dangerous and cunning antagonist for the district attorney, Alphonse Baker Carr, who is a well-known, unscrupulous criminal lawyer with notorious underworld figures as clients – which does not sit well with his new neighbors of the swanky neighborhood of Orange Heights. Mrs. Rita Artrim believes Carr has nothing to contribute to the community that's "either desirable or healthy," but Selby can't stop the lawyer from buying property in the county.

Nevertheless, the moment "old A.B.C." sets foot in his district the problems begin for the newly elected D.A. and sheriff: a bail-jumper from Los Angeles, Peter C. Ribber, is picked up by a patrol car and accidentally released again. A dry cleaner finds a brown suit in his truck, on which a "sinister red stain had encrusted into stiffness," with a powder-burned hole in the center. A resident of Orange Heights called the police to report a naked man, who was seen running around, which is followed by the report of a gunshot.

On the following morning, the body of a naked man is discovered with a fatal gunshot wound. However, the single gunshot wound has two bullets in them and "the second bullet almost paralleled the course of the first bullet." So the question is not only who fired the fatal shot, but also why anyone would toss a slug into a dead body.

The victim is identified as Morton Taleman, a criminal associate of Ribber, who is a client of A.B. Carr. As to be expected, Ribber immediately engages Carr upon his arrest, but Selby and Brandon have another problem on their plate. One of the previously mentioned characters, Mrs. Altrim, became a widow when she lost her husband in a roadside accident, which left her elderly father-in-law a cripple with amnesia. However, Selby learns from their live-in nurse, Miss Anne Saxe, that employer and patient may have designs on one another, because she believes Mrs. Altrim had a hand in the accident – which tosses a double-edged motive for murder into the household.

On the one hand, you have to old man who is slowly regaining his memory, as well as his mobility, while on the other you have someone afraid of being found out. This problems comes to a head when one of them goes missing and only leaves a blood-covered liquor closet behind. And this is also the plot-thread that gives the book its title, because Selby, based on the mileage on a speedometer, draws a circle on a map of the vicinity in which the body must have been hidden. On the last pages, the book-title gets an additional and delightful meaning.

So, that makes for a pretty bundle of trouble, but The D.A. Draws a Circle is not really about who did what and why, but how Selby navigates a treacherous maze of petty power politics and deceit. You can label the book as a strategic detective and the approach recalls that of an inverted mystery (e.g. Columbo), in which the primary question is how the detective will checkmate his opponents and in this instance it's a two-on-one match. The (interlocking) solutions to the aforementioned problems are merely the cherry on top.

I mentioned earlier how the political landscape of Madison City contains remnants of the previous regime, which are actively working against Selby and Brandon. You get a front-row seat to their scheming in the sixth chapter when the editor of the Blade, Frank Grierson, has a closed-door meeting with the dull-witted Chief of Police, Otto Larking. Grierson cooks up a plan ensuring Selby loses both face and political capital, which is done by making sure the man arrested by Larking is exonerated by Carr in court. Before the trail, the Blade is going to publish editorials minimizing the difficulties of the case and suggesting to the public that getting a conviction is a mere formality.

So that would make Selby look very bad, if he fails to secure a conviction, while the Blade and Larking come out of it smelling like a rose garden. There are only two routes that could upset this plan: beat the famous criminal lawyer in court or find a complete solution to the problems, which are both easier said than done.

In my (far from humble) opinion, the way in which Selby outwitted his reluctant prisoner and "a big-time, crooked shyster," simultaneously circumventing the schemes of his political opposition, is what made The D.A. Draws a Circle a tremendous read reminiscent of the best inverted detectives with a cleverly worked out, double-pronged (murder) plot on top of that.

So, I really should return to Gardner's work more often, because they always deliver in one way or another. Maybe I should try one of his Gramps Wiggins novels next. You know, for, uhm, obvious reasons. ;)

Post Mortem

"The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic."

- Aristide Valentin (G.K. Chesterton's The Innocence of Father Brown, 1911)

Ever since its inception, The London-based Detection Club produced some interesting and experimental volumes of collaborative detective fiction, which consists mainly of round-robin novels (e.g. The Floating Admiral, 1932), but The Anatomy of Murder (1936) took a break from fictional crimes with plots constructed like an obstacle course. 

The Anatomy of Murder is a collection of true crime articles and cast the contributors in the role of armchair criminologists. It's a short who's who of the early Detection Club: Dorothy L. Sayers, E.R. Punshon, Helen Simpson, Margaret Cole and Anthony Berkeley – appearing here under his penname of "Francis Iles."

They're tasked with re-examining five infamous cases from the late 1800s and early twentieth century, but these literary exhumations consist mainly of going over the facts and consider their implications. So don't expect any mind-blowing, alternative explanations being spun from the giving facts. It's a dry and factual collection, but interesting from a historical perspective and a particular item of interest for avid consumers of true crime stories.

Note that I'll be keeping the case descriptions as short and summary as possible, because murderers operating outside of the printed page are generally unconcerned with creating a clear, straightforward and clue-filled plot – unlike their fictional counterparts. 

Helen Simpson wrote the first chapter, "Death of Henry Kinder," which could also have been titled "Crime in Australia" and is a textbook example of "an unsatisfactory crime" from "the point of view of a reader of detection stories."

Henry Kinder was a chief teller in the City Bank of Sydney and appeared respectable, but was very fond of hard liquor and his drinking habits had began to affect his health in the months preceding his death. On October 2nd, 1865, the news of Kinder's suicide startled many of his respectable friends in the city and a jury brought in a verdict death "by the discharge of a pistol with his own hand," but by that time the rumor mill had started – with subsequent events revealing Kinder may have been polished off with a dose of poison by his wife's lover. Henry Louis Bernard was put on trial and Simpson's report, peppered with diary entrants, letters and pieces of court transcripts, shows how the chain of events clanked "to a madman’s fandango," which lead to a very unsatisfactory conclusion.

Well, unsatisfactory if this had been a piece of fiction, but, as a criminal case from history, it demonstrated that even if the perceptive story book detectives had existed their singular talents be rendered pretty much useless in cases lacking their own clarity of mind. You can read an extensive description of the case here. 

Margaret Cole's penned the second chapter and deals with "The Case of Adelaide Bartlett," which is better known as the "Pimlico Mystery" and shares some similarities with the previous case: in both cases a spouse is fatally poisoned after a previous incident relegated them to a sick bed. In the case of Henry Kinder, it was an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, but in the 1886 death of Thomas Edwin Bartlett it was mercurial poisoning – which he claimed was self-ingested. However, it was not the poison that would end up killing him.

A month later, Bartlett passed away and a post-mortem examination revealed a fatal quantity of chloroform in his stomach. The inquest yielded a verdict of willful murder and Adeleide Bartlett was indicted, but acquitted under "immense cheering" in the courtroom. As Cole noted, it was one of the most interesting trials of its day, because it was not "a tale of horror or brutality." None of the people, however odd or foolish, were monsters and tried "to be as nice as impossible under rather difficult circumstances." It was an interesting study in characters and motives that were somewhat ahead of their time.

However, it must be noted as well that one of the main reason for acquittal was failing in providing an answer how the poison could've been administrated without a struggle, since chloroform burns, but Cole makes a valid suggestion based on the characteristics of the people involved – and had the jury considered this possibility "she would have never gone free." A very odd case to say the least.

Interestingly, Cole's account includes a list of nineteenth century medicines and remedies given to Thomas Bartlett after his mercurial poisoning, which did not sound very appetizing.

For the third chapter, E.R. Punshon gives "An Impression of the Landru Case," which deals with the "incredible reincarnation of the Bluebeard of the nursery tales." Henri Désiré Landru was one of the neatest and charming serial killers who ever stalked the European continent. Known as "The Bluebeard of Gambais," Landru operated "during that four-year feast of horror and of terror we remember as the war" and responsible for the complete disappearance of eleven people in such a manner "that nothing can be declared with certainty" – concluding that "no jury" would've brought in "a verdict of guilty" had "each case stood alone." It's an accumulation of those eleven disappearances in close proximity of Landru, a methodical kept notebook and a storage room with a "strange collection" of items "once the property of a woman who once had known Landru and now was known to none" that became his undoing.

Punshon sketches an interesting, but unsettling, picture of charming confidence man with the predatory nature of "Jack the Ripper," but with more self-control and enjoyed to play the game until the very end – which in Landru's instance was up to the moment he was lead to the guillotines. You almost have to admire the guts and brawn of such an imperturbable character, but I’m sure France could've used such talents elsewhere at that specific point in time.

Dorothy L. Sayers goes over one of the England's most infamous "unsolved" murder cases in it's criminal history, "The Murder of Julia Wallace," which has captured the imagination of several post-WWII crime-writers – including a couple of Golden Agers. The books it has inspired include George Goodchild and C.E. Bechhofer's The Jury Disagree (1934), Winifred Duke's Skin for Skin (1935), John Rhode's The Telephone Call (1948) and P.D. James' The Skull Beneath the Skin (1982).

You can understand why mystery writers tend to be intrigued, because if William Wallace was guilty of bludgeoning his wife to death "he was the classic contriver and alibi-monger that adorns the pages of a thousand mystery novels," but if he was innocent "then the real murderer was still more typically of the classic villain of fiction." Where do you begin to describe a case that includes all of the classic ingredients of a detective story: a blood-stained mackintosh, a mysterious phone call from a non-existent person calling himself "R.M. Qualtrough" and an apparent contrived alibi. Then there are the conflicting witness statements: such as a constable who assumed he saw Wallace crying in the streets, but the clients he met after this apparent encounter with the policeman reported he was his usual self.

It was a dark, murky and muddled case, but despite every scrap of evidence against Wallace being circumstantial, which included an exonerating testimony from the local milk delivery boy, he was found guilty and sentenced to death. However, Court of Criminal appeal quashed the verdict in what was at the time an unprecedented move, which left open that intriguing question: who killed Julia Wallace? This was easily my favorite chapter from the book.

Finally, Anthony Berkeley, writing as "Francis Iles," delivers the longest-written chapter from the book as he rides his hobbyhorse, called criminal psychology, across a hundred pages describing the sordid mess known as "The Rattenbury Case." I did not find the case as interesting as Berkeley, but I can understand why people interesting psychological crimes can rattle on about it for page-after-page: a middle-aged woman, Mrs. Rattenbury, living together with her much older husband and her very young lover in a villa, which leads to battering-death with a mallet. Probably not the best chapter to end the book on, but I'm sure there are readers out there, especially readers of psychological thrillers, who'll be as intrigued by chapter as I was by Wallace chapter.

Well, there you have it: five cases re-examined by members of the Detection Club. The cases have something of interest to offer, one way or another, but I think the main draw is that the articles/chapters were written by famous mystery writers from the Golden Age – rather than for the cases themselves. I think it would've been better if they re-examined unsolved cases and provided a possible solution, which was, after all, their job.

However, it was a good, historically interesting diversion from the fictional murders the authors usually reveled in, but I'll be returning to those fictional murders for the next review.

Gasping for Breath

"They're queer-looking things... some of 'em look like sea-monsters that haven't grown up."

 - Sgt. Heath (S.S. van Dine's The Dragon Murder Case, 1934) 

The Case of the Gold-digger's Purse (1942) is the twenty-sixth entry in Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason series and the opening of the story enmeshed the cunning defense-attorney in a tangle of extortion, theft and murder – which began with a seemingly uninteresting and innocent consultation on gold fish.

Harrington Faulkner is in the real-estate business, where he amassed a king's ransom, but only cultivated a single passion to spend his dollars on: breeding gold fish.

Faulkner raised a particular strain of Veiltail Moor Telescopes, a gold fish completely cloaked in funeral black and often referred to as the "Fish of Death," but this school of rare fish are suffering from a deadly decease known as gill fever. A young, poor chemist and pet shop employee, Tom Gridley, developed a formula that cures gill fever. However, Gridley is suffering from tuberculoses and should take a break from work to recover, but he can't afford to leave his job and now his beautiful girlfriend, Sally Madison, is extorting thousands of dollars from Faulkner – in exchange for the formula.

A gold-digging extortionist and a bout of gill fever aren't the only plagues pestering the aquarist. Faulkner has had a fall-out with his business partner, Elmer Carson, who slapped a restraining order on Faulkner, which forbids him from removing the aquarium and its content from their shared office.

Mason is reluctant to get involved, but curiosity keeps getting the best of him until he and Della Street are in legitimate danger of becoming accessories after the fact in the murder of Harrington Faulkner. It begins when the office is burgled and the aquarium looted, which gives Mason an opportunity to make some astute deduction about the soup ladle, the pole it was mounted on and the size of the room. By the way, the theft was briefly teased as a locked room mystery. 

The gold fish are eventually found, alongside Faulkner's body, on the bloodstained bathroom floor of his home and Mason's typical, almost routine manipulation in murder cases has now dug him a hole for two. 

One of the most attractive aspects of the Perry Mason series, as an unabashed neo-classicist, is how densely plotted each novel is. There's barely any fat on the bone, so to speak. The multitude of cross-and hidden relationships and the motives that drives those relationships are often complex, which is exactly the case here, but there's also the physical evidence and how you can play around with that. There's a missing bullet from a previous murder attempt on Faulkner, a half dead gold fish that could indicate the time of death, fooling around with fingerprints and cheque stubs – and the titular purse stuffed with damning evidence.

Mason has to play a tight game of bluff poker and live up to his name as a courtroom magician in a preliminary hearing to prevent a murder trial for the wrong person. The courtroom chapters tended to drag on a bit, but you can't blame craftsmen, Gardner and Mason, for taking the time to work their magic.

In short: a good mystery from a solid series. Hopefully, the next review/blog-post will be substantially better written than this one.

The previous Perry Mason novels I have reviewed:

The Case of the Baited Hook  (1940)

The Case of the Empty Tin (1941)
The Case of the Drowning Duck (1942)

The Case of the Gold-digger's Purse (1942)
The Case of the Drowsy Mosquito (1943)
The Case of the Lonely Heiress (1948)

Death of a Whistleblower

"And there's no doubt he has fifteen or twenty pasts; I know that much about him."

-  Archie Goodwin ("Cordially Invited to Meet Death," collected in Black Orchids, 1941)

Last month, Curt Evans posted a notice on The Passing Tramp, "Stout Reads: See What Rex Read and How He Rated It," informing us there were books for sale once owned by Rex Stout and some were rated. The highest ranking mystery novel from the lot was George Harmon Coxe's Murder for Two (1943), which was awarded with an A-minus by Stout and that was enough to pique my interest.

Jack "Flashgun" Casey is a journalist/photographer of the hardboiled kind and began his career in a series of short stories, published in Black Mask, followed by a handful of novels, radio plays, movies, a TV-series and even a short lived comic book incarnation – on which Stan Lee was an editor.

Murder for Two begins with Casey returning to the office building of the Express, after being rejected by the Army on account of a bum knee, when the managing editor has a surprise for him: he has take Karen Harding, whose father is a major stockholder in the newspaper, along on assignments to show her the fieldwork of reporting. And their first stop is Rosalind Taylor. Taylor is a nationally syndicated writer of columns crusading "against industrialists who would not co-operate with labor unions, and against the unions themselves when run by unscrupulous leaders" as the "public champion of the under-dog" and has had Matt Lawson in her crosshairs for a while. Lawson is as unscrupulous as they come, but as of late, he has been reinventing himself as a patriot with war contracts and new inventions like Everflow – a new compound that makes oils flow at low temperatures. A young man, John Perry, who was swindled out of his rights by Lawson and, as a bonus, pressed charges against Perry for assault, invented the compound.

As Rosalind Taylor remarks, "he and his kind do more to hurt the war effort than any other single class," but as perfectly cliché as Lawson is for the role of corpse, it's Taylor who's found inside her own car – shot through the back of her head.

Here's where the pace of the story begins to pick-up and, while you keep reading, there were portions of the story that simply went through the motions of a hardboiled detective story. Casey is struggling through out the book with two musclemen, in pursuit of photographic evidence snapped by Karen Harding, and they regularly poke a gun in the photographer's face. Of course, this eventually results in old-fashioned fisticuffs. The policemen in Murder for Two, Lt. Logan and Sgt. Manahan, are of the friendly variety, however, search warrants aren't always a necessary tool of their trade. At one point in the story, Lt. Logan opens a door with a skeleton key and answers Casey's comment on the obvious illegality of the act with a dry "so they tell me." If the story had been written today, I'm sure Logan would've been a suspect on account of a past Taylor column highlighting his unconstitutional police methods.

Throw in a murdered witness, an attempted murder and several stand-offs/kidnappings at gunpoint and you've got yourself a pulpy, hardboiled mystery within the sleazy newspaper-and racketeering business. However, there's something genuinely clever about the solution. I would even say that the relationship between the murderer and victim, in combination with the motive, is an original take on the racketeering angle and probably enough to warrant Stout's admiration – especially from an author's point-of-view. And I guess Stout found some of the aspects in Murder for Two reflective of his own work, such as a hardboiled flavor with a whodunit angle and running after evidence secured in then modern recording equipment (e.g. Alphabet Hicks, 1941 & The Silent Speaker, 1946), which could explain why Stout slapped an A-minus on it (the minus symbolizes objectivity) where someone else would've probably rated it a bit lower than that. But it's still a good, fun and fast-paced mystery that's worth your time if you have a copy knocking about or come across one. Especially if you like Rex Stout and Erle Stanley Gardner.

Shreds of Evidence

"Minutes may mean the difference between a good defense and a verdict of first-degree murder."

- Perry Mason 

The Case of the Baited Hook (1940) marked the sixteenth appearance by Erle Stanley Gardner's scheming and manipulative defense attorney, the inimitable Perry Mason, since the series' inception in 1933 and begins when Mason is summoned back to the office by a late-night phone call.

Perry Mason is soon joined by Robert Peltham and a masked woman, completely garbed in an omnipresent, buttoned up raincoat, and Peltham wants her protected from a problem that will probably be all over the news papers the following day – without revealing any vital details of the case. For example: the identity of the masked woman. However, Mason takes the unknown case with an anonymous co-client and receives one-half of a severed $10.000 bill, which he'll receive in full when the woman reveals herself to him by giving the other half of the bill.

Meanwhile, there's another, more assertive, clientele waiting for Mason and Mrs. Trump's problem concerns the welfare of a now grown orphan, named Byrl Gailord, who lost her parents, Russian refugees, when the boat they were on was torpedoed in 1918. Mrs. Trump whisked the girl away and funded her stay in an orphanage home, but they sold Byrl regardless of the funding that was still coming in. Byrl's "mother" remarried after the death of her "father" and when her "mother" passed away, the trustee became her stepfather, Albert Tidings, which doesn't sit well with Mrs. Trump – and not without reason. Tidings' body is found in the bedroom of his bungalow, shot in the chest, without his shoes and lipstick smudges on his face. And thus the plot-threads begin to converge.

I guess one of the allures of the Perry Mason series, outside of the courtroom antics and shenanigans, remains the involvement of Mason himself in the cases and actively trying to influence the course of events – instead of just following them to their conclusion. Mason is always up to something and the reader is (usually) right there to witness it. The first thing Mason does after the phone call in the opening was getting in contact with his private-eye friend/business associate, Paul Drake, to call in a stake out of the street and trace license plates, but Mason really shines when he's treading on thin ice. In one instance, Mason resorts to purse snatching and turns the table on the poor woman when a police officer tries to intervene or when's putting the legal screws on an unwilling witness. There was also a collision between the scheming lawyer and the buffoonish Sgt. Holcombe, in which Mason is threatened to be arrested on the moment The Clarion is about to come with breaking news. Mason's commentary on possible headlines and editorial comments on his arrest were amusing, to say the least, and were reminiscent of the some of the verbal exchanges between Nero Wolfe and the always fuming Inspector Cramer.

As par of the course, The Case of the Baited Hook is a densely plotted affair and I have noted before that lesser, second-string mystery writers could probably have padded several novels with the amount of material Gardner packs into a single story. Interestingly, the manipulation of time was a recurring motif in The Case of the Baited Hook and surfaced in several of the plot-threads – hence the opening quote. Only downside was that there were perhaps too many fingers in the pie to create the kind of case that baffled even Mason for a large segment of the story.

It is, nevertheless, admirable that Gardner's name on a book cover is almost a hallmark guarantee of quality that the detective story you're about to read has an actual plot. Even if it makes those cursed things sometimes difficult to review. 

Previously reviewed in this series: 

The Case of the Baited Hook (1940)
The Case of the Empty Tin (1941)
The Case of the Drowning Duck (1942)
The Case of the Drowsy Mosquito (1943)
The Case of the Lonely Heiress (1948) 

A Matter of Wills

"A murder case is simply a jigsaw puzzle, a lot of things to be put together. If you have the right solution, all the parts fits into the picture. If some of the parts don't seem to fit, it's a pretty good indication you haven't the right solution."

- Perry Mason 

Some words before delving into Erle Stanley Gardner's The Case of the Lonely Heiress (1948) on my previous post, "Scattershot: Hoch, Line and Sinker," in which I discussed three short-shorts by Edward D. Hoch and another small nugget from Richard Curtis – whom I presumed was Richard Deming. I received a few emails from former Jury Box reviewer Jon L. Breen pointing out that the attribution of the Odds Bodkin stories to Deming is probably incorrect:

"As for Richard Curtis's stories for EQMM in the 1970s, the first one (not an Odds Bodkins) from the November 1961 issue has a bio that makes clear this is the young literary agent, just starting his writing career. Thus, I doubt they'd have another writer using the same byline after that, leaving only the possibility that Deming became a ghost for Curtis, which seems highly unlikely, besides which there's no evidence for it."

So there you have it. In a age where High-Definition snapshots of the surface of Mars can be conjured up with a simple click or a swipe the internet is still about as useful as a self-inflicted gunshot wound, if you happen to be looking around for scraps of background information on a little-known magazine writer from the 70s. Welcome to the niche corner! Oh, well, I want to thank Jon Breen for rectifying this mistake and I'll correct my post in regards to that short story as soon as possible with a link back to this explanation.

The Case of the Lonely Heiress opens with a visit from Robert Caddo, driving force behind an irregular published pamphlet, circulated for twenty-five cents per copy under the title Lonely Hearts Are Calling, who has come under scrutiny after accusations of placing false ads to boost sales. One ad in particular stands out, "Miss Box 96," a self-described heiress and that's not the type of person that usually subscribes to these kinds of services – especially in those days. Perry Mason and Della Street begin to compose love letters to the mysterious heiress, while their private-eye chum Paul Drake provides a detective to play the part of a lonely country boy looking for companionship in the big city.

This is a Gardner novel, however, and if you think this was going to be story about Mason and Della Street stalking a "Black Widow" in the Lonely Heart columns of an obscure city rag, while trying to unsnarl her web of lies – than you're dead wrong. Mason does bait a trap for Marilyn Marlow, but she ends up being his client after explaining her reasons involving a disputed will that made her an heiress. I have to point out here that this portion of the story describes something that’s known today as Cat Fishing: "It's quite the thing for pranksters to buy copies of the magazine, write that they're lonely widowers with large fortunes and good automobiles and things of that sort, and build up a correspondence with some of these women, simply for the purpose of a practical joke." If this line is actually an unedifying tidbit of digested history, instead of something Gardner made up to flesh out the story, there's a chance that there are still old prank letters out there fooling people who read them into thinking they stumbled to their grandmothers embarassing secret ("Mom mentioned Granma had a pep in her step a year after Granpa died.") It's also an iron-glad argument that computers surpassed us the moment we plugged the cord of the first prototype into a wall socket.  
 

Anyway, the second half is a cat-and-mouse game between Mason and Lieutenant Tragg of Homicide, who becomes involved after one of the witnesses to the contested will is stabbed to death, and fancies Marlow as his #1 suspect – which Mason has no shortage of objections to! Mason and Tragg try to score one of each other until they appear in court and while Mason sometimes (read: standard practice) takes liberties with the law, it's the Tragg who goes into the deep end by participating in "third-degreeing" Marlow with a nasty play on the good cop/bad cop routine. I think this is what makes Mason's behavior much more acceptable to readers than Tragg's, because the former doesn't pretend to be charming, straight-laced cop sneakily measuring someone's neck for a noose – based on an incorrect interpretation of the evidence. 

In summation, The Case of the Lonely Heiress was as readable and well plotted as the other Perry Mason cases previously discussed on here, which were not landmark works in the genre, but I never put one back on the shelf feeling disappointed or cheated. They are what they profess to be: detective stories.

On a final note: I picked this opening quote from the end of the book because it happened to be so similar to something Mason said in the previous story I read, and used it to start of that review with.

Undermining the Law

"Sometimes we have to stand on our heads in order to see things the right-side up."

- Hadji (The Alchemist)

The last time I attempted to critique a Perry Mason mystery, The Case of the Empty Tin (1941), I ended up churning out an elongated synopsis of the plot, but only because they’re complex, plot-driven stories and discussing them past the first quarter of the book without giving anything away is very difficult. No – it's nigh impossible to do!

The Case of the Drowsy Mosquito (1943) poses a similar problem, in which Perry Mason takes on a case with enough angles to fill a small, bedside book stand – except that it's crammed between the covers of a single paperback. It all begins when "Salty" Bowers, who has the appearance of a distinguished tramp in a sun-faded suit, asks Mason to meet his long-time friend and mining partner, Banning Clarke, who was physically unable to come himself after suffering a heart attack. Upon meeting Clarke, the plot thickens... considerably!

Living and recuperating on the stretch of land behind his house, amidst the cactuses and shrubs, the mining engineer asks Mason to intervene in a scheme involving his mining company (and a legendary gold mine lost in the mists of time) and take on a fraud case that he's bound to lose, but these are just but a few threads in the rich tapestry of this plot.

Clark's in-laws, Lillian and her son James Bradisson, a cocksure and conceited president of the mining corporation, who fancies himself a business genius, become sick from arsenic poisoning. Live-in nurse Velma Starler is shot at by a prowler and hears the drowsy mosquito. Even Mason and his secretary Della Street are poisoned! The poisoning subplot is worked out alongside the other problems, intertwining here and there, showing that Agatha Christie wasn't the only name in the game that knew how to properly utilize that stuff. As a matter of fact, these poisonings could've easily been presented as impossible situations to beef up the plot even further, but then again, that might have been overdoing it just a bit. But it's cleverly done and even provides an interesting legal problem when Banning Clarke is murdered when he was already minutes, perhaps even seconds, away from succumbing to a lethal dose of arsenic poison. So who do you charge with murder? The person who administrated the arsenic or the person who pulled the trigger?

Like in the previous case I reviewed, Perry Mason functions more as a slick, manipulative private detective than as a crafty attorney with a penchant for courtroom theatrics, however, we do get a glimpse of the courtroom technician in the fraud case – turning the tables on everyone and takes James Bradisson and his lawyer down a peg or two.

But the most notable aspect of The Case of the Drowsy Mosquito is the desert setting and how the plot is build upon it. Somehow, it reminded me of one of Gardner's Sheriff Bill Eldon stories, "The Case of the Runaway Blonde," collected in Two Clues (1947), set outdoors and the vast expanse of ground are very important to the plot, but for completely different reasons. In another way, it also reminded me Clyde B. Clason's Blind Drifts (1937), which also involves "shenanigans" within a gold mining company, but where Clason was interested in technical side of the business, Gardner only concerned himself with the legal aspects of it.

All in all, an excellent read and The Passing Tramp should consider packing a few Perry Masons in that red handkerchief of his, because they've got enough plot on their spines to keep any mystery fan from feeling hungry.

"Like a rollin' thunder chasing the wind"

"As an ex-detective you know how to deal with problems... you know the ropes... the meshes of the law."

- Inspector DeKok (Bullets for a Bride, 1993)

Ellery Queen deserves wider recognition among the members that make up today's reading audience, if not for their imaginative and inventive plots than for their willingness to adjust themselves to the movement prevalent at the time they were writing in, spawning a multiverse of crime that has something to offer for nearly everyone.

Personally, I prefer the earlier, puzzle-oriented novels from the international series, the marvels of the Ellery in Wonderland tales, crammed with zany architectural buildings, eccentric characters and dysfunctional families, the short stories (of which they didn't wrote nearly enough) and some of the anomalous books – like Cat of Many Tails (1949) and And on the Eight Day (1964). By the way, has anyone ever noticed how similar the plots of The Village (2004) and And on the Eight Day are, if you cut out the creatures? Of course, Queen's twist was better and it's one of the few mysteries were I hated the detective interruptions, which were weak and uninspired, and the plot would have, IMHO, worked better as a human problem. 

But that aside, I'm less than enthusiastic about the Wrightsville and Hollywood sagas, focusing more on character than plot, but I never thought them to be any more or less realistic than their plot driven stories – and having just read Inspector Queen's Own Case (1956) makes me disliked them even more. Calamity Town (1942) is one of the books that's often cited as an example of a good, character-driven EQ novel, but it left me unimpressed and a diminished interest in plotting didn't exactly help either. And having burned through most of the series, years ago, I had given up hope to find an EQ novel that invested in characters and still felt like you were reading a proper detective story, but Inspector Queen's Own Case did it for me.

Richard Queen has been feeling doleful ever since his mandatory retirement from the police force, finding it difficult to come to terms with his new status as a retiree and an "old man," and with his son Ellery abroad, he came to the Connecticut shore to stay with Abe Pearl, Chief of the Taugus Police Department, and his wife Becky – where he bumps into Jessie Sherwood.

Jessie Sherwood is a well preserved woman in her late forties, whose experience as a pediatric and maternity nurse brought her to Nair Island, a fortified recluse for the rich, where she's taking care of the newest addition to the Humffrey family, baby Michael, whose adoption was a shady affair to say the least, and before long, the house is rocking with more than just the wailing of a crying baby. And who would've thought that a creepy, late-night intruder in the nursery would've been the least of their problems.

Alton K. Humffrey's nephew, Ronald Frost, was relieved from duty as his uncle’s heir in favor of Michael, making him the only person with a motive for hurting a baby, but when Michael is eventually found dead in his crib, Frost’s also the only one in possession of an unshakable alibi. Sherwood remains convinced that the baby was murdered, based on a pillowcase with a dirty handprint that disappeared afterwards, but Richard Queen is the only one who believes her and together they begin to pry into the case – assisted by an Old Boys’ Network of retired colleagues from the force. Not an easy job, if your key witnesses are bumped off in front of you.

David Wayne as Inspector Queen (Ellery Queen, 1975-76)

Two observations: Richard mentions in the story that Ellery is traveling for inspiration for his detective novels, which could mean that this book and the stories collected in Ellery Queen's International Case Book (1964), originally written and published between 1954 and 1955, took place around the same time. The second observation may be an original one, because I never seen it mentioned before and that while it's a typical piece of EQ symbolism. On the one hand we have Michael, smothered at infancy, and on the other Richard, a (re)tired police officer of 63, who finds a completely new life in the home were a very young life was cut short. Or am I over thinking this? 

Inspector Queen's Own Case may not be the best title from the EQ catalogue, but it has a pleasant balance between its characters and plot, and besides, I’ve always liked Richard Queen and it was good to see him reach the end of a case without the assistance of his son (he was an inspector for a reason) and getting a bit of luck in his private life. The only real drawback is that, once you have figured out the solution, the story inevitable becomes too long and you can solve it before the halfway mark. I hope that in my defense of this novel, I have not divulged too much of the plot, but I think this is a far, far cry from Ellery Queen's worst mystery novels and stories (e.g. The Door Between, 1937).  

Oh, and I will be honest, the dead baby can be considered as over doing the "let's go with the times" mindset and it also forced me to cut out a joke that probably would've ended up costing me readers.

I was thinking of following this post up with a review of Appie Baantjer’s DeKok en kogels voor een bruid (DeKok and Bullets for a Bride, 1993), which was the source from which I drew the opening quote, and Baantjer’s roman policier shares some interesting parallels with Inspector Queen’s Own Case... but it's one of his untranslated stories and I'm aware that not everyone likes to read reviews of books that they can't read. So, we'll see.

A Jury of Her Peers

"Trial by twelve good men and true... is a sound system."

- Colonel Arbuthnott (Murder on the Orient-Express, 1974, the movie adaptation)

Raymond Postgate (1896-1971) was from what I gathered a man of many talents when it came to wielding a pen, with an editorship and books on a wide variety of subjects adorning his résumé, including three full-length detective novels – of which Verdict of Twelve (1940) is a minor masterpiece.

As a committed socialist, Postgate was obviously using the popular detective story as a vehicle to examine human nature and voice social criticism, however, he did not completely abandon the detective story format in favor of characterization and you'll find at the core of this book a genuine mystery. The framing of this story is the trial of the draconian Mrs. Rosalie van Beer, who stands trial for the alleged poisoning of her 11-year-old ward, Philip Arkwright, with ivy dust and we witness this trial from the perspective of the twelve men and women of the jury who have to decide whether she's guilty of innocent.

Verdict of Twelve even begins with a series of character sketches of the jury members and this is a triumph of characterization, especially the one of Miss V.M. Atkins, who has a successful murder to her credit and her introduction is an inverted detective story within a mystery novel. You could easily lift this chapter from the book and it would stand on its own as a short story. It's also a delightful and fantastic departure from the more serious and soberly handled murder trial, in which Miss Atkins sets-up an ingenious and elaborate alibi-trick that could've been lifted from the pages of a Detective Conan story – and this is what made me instantly like Postgate as a mystery writer. I mean, here's a man who tried to write a detective story in a more serious vein by putting more emphasis on characterization, but nonetheless wedged a little side-puzzle between the pages that would have kept the likes Lt. Columbo busy for the better part of an hour.

However, the snapshots of Mrs. Morris, a Jewish woman whose husband was killed in the streets by racists, and the secretly gay Dr. Percival Holmes, a fat and eccentric scholar, who impressed me, at first sight, as a parody of the story book detective (not entirely unlike Dr. Bottwink from Cyril Hare's An English Murder, 1951), were far more impressive and disquieting. But perhaps I should give a short overview of the jury members as they were introduced to the reader in the dramatis personae:

Miss V.M. Atkins, crippled and malicious, with an undiscovered crime on her conscience.

A.G. Popesgrove, Thessalian foreman of the jury, who took his name from the telephone directory.

Dr. Percival Holmes, elderly, ill-mannered Greek scholar.

Mr. J.A. Stannard, a philosophical publican.

Mr. Edward Bryan, shop assistant and religious fanatic.

Mrs. Morris, a bitter victim of persecution.

Mr. E.O. George, the impatient Secretary of the National Union of Plasterers’ Labourers.

Mr. F.A.H. Allen, the most restless and happiest man on the jury.

Mr. D. Elliston Smith, a dull young man with misty thoughts or orgies.

Mr. Ivor. W. Drake, a second-rate actor.

Mr. G. Parham Groves, a gentleman traveling salesman.

Mr. H. Wilson, complacent editor of a small publication.

A nice lot, eh? These are the men and women who have decide over the fate of Mrs. Rosalie van Beer, but their backgrounds and personal prejudices makes it everything but an impartial jury and the fact that Van Beer is a thoroughly unlikable creature gives Sir Isambard Burns, leading Counsel for the Defense, quite a job in presenting a different picture of his client. After all, this is a woman who took pleasure in thwarting and embarrassing her ward, even brutally murdering his rabbit in the gas oven of the kitchen, which was for some jurors enough to mark her as a murderess. But the representatives of the Crown and Defense manage to present two conflicting, but convincing, stories of what really happened and it's up to jury to decide who's the closest to the truth.

The final postscript gives us an account of what actually happened and it's a surprising one, even if it's a bit commonplace and unexciting – almost a deliberate letdown but it perfectly fits everything we have previously learned of the case. Postgate setout to write a detective story about real people and he succeeded without forgetting that he was also penning a detective story. The result is a very unusual, but satisfying, mystery novel which I recommend without hesitation.