Erle Stanley Gardner | Gardner as Experimental Writer
A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection Home Page
Dead Men's Letters
The Case of the Murderer's Bride
The Case of the Crimson Kiss
The Case of the Irate Witness
Sheriff Bill Eldon stories
Jerry Bane stories
Perry Mason novels:
The Case of the Substitute Face (1938)
The Case of the Shoplifter's Shoe (1938)
The Case of the Perjured Parrot (1939) (Chapters 1-5, 12-14)
The Case of the Baited Hook (1940) (Chapters 1-6, 10)
The Case of the Empty Tin (1941)
The Case of the Careless Kitten (1942)
The Case of the Drowning Duck (1942) (Chapters 1, 2 3, end of 5, 6, 7, 9, 15)
The Case of the Borrowed Brunette (1946)
The Case of the Lonely Heiress (1948) (Chapters 1-7)
The Case of the Grinning Gorilla (1952) (Chapters 1-7, first part of 9, 11, 13, 18, 19)
The Case of the Hesitant Hostess (1953)
The Case of the Runaway Corpse (1954)
The Case of the Glamorous Ghost (1955)
The Case of the Terrified Typist (1956)
The Case of the Singing Skirt (1959) (Chapters 1-3, 5, 6)
The Case of the Bigamous Spouse (1961)
The D.A. (Doug Selby) novels:
The D.A. Calls it Murder (1936-1937) (Chapters 1 - 6, 10)
The D.A. Draws a Circle (1939) (Chapters 1-8, 15)
The D.A. Cooks a Goose (1941 - 1942)
The D.A. Breaks a Seal (1945 - 1946)
The D.A. Takes a Chance (1948) (Chapters 1 - 15, 18)
The Bertha Cool and Donald Lam novels:
The Bigger They Come (1939)
Turn On the Heat (1940) (Chapters 1-4, 10, 12)
Owls Don't Blink (1942) (Chapters 1-6)
Bats Fly at Dusk (1942)
Crows Can't Count (1946)
The Count of Nine (1958) (Chapters 1-8)
Pass the Gravy (1961) (Chapters 1-7, 15-16)
Fish or Cut Bait (1963)
Up for Grabs (1964)
The above list contains my favorite Erle Stanley Gardner stories, the ones I personally enjoyed, and recommend reading. They are only a portion of his vast output.
Several collections of Gardner's pulp magazine short stories are available from their publisher Crippen & Landru.
One might note that the "little guys" helped by Jenkins and Leith tend to be women; so are many of Mason's clients. Since pulp readers were stereotypically male, this can hardly be to promote reader identification. It is part of a general "female orientation" in Gardner's work, a consistent sympathy and respect for women. Most of the women in the Leith tales are working women of one sort or another, and anticipate Della Street and her classically sympathetic working woman. Women in the Jenkins tales are often either flappers or their mothers, in keeping with the F. Scott Fitzgerald atmosphere of these stories. In The D.A. Holds a Candle (1938), the heroine Sylvia Martin is a reporter with a brilliant mind and a devotion to success in her job, facts mentioned twice as Gardner's main characterization of her (Chapters 3 and 7). Her rival for the D.A.'s affection, rich Inez Stapleton, leaves at the end of the book to go to law school and make something of herself.
Gardner's fiction is a vast ocean, most of it completely unexplored. Only a relatively few of his pulp tales have been reprinted (eleven volumes to date, plus some tales in anthologies), although many of those that have been are of high quality. He also wrote a vast number of novels, which are much more obtainable. Many of these novels are very mediocre. They are morally wholesome and unobjectionable, but lack all plotting inspiration. Unlike Carr, Christie or Queen, he was not a consistent producer of high quality fiction. Gardner at his best, however, was a much more interesting author. Here we survey some of the major trends of his career.
Gardner's best works tend to fall into certain chronological periods: 1926, 1930-1933, 1938-1942, 1946, 1948-1949, 1952-1956 and 1961. Books and short stories from these years tend to have Gardner's richest plots. It is possible that Gardner put more interest in and attention to plotting in these years. It is also possible that his inspiration grew larger in general during these periods. The 1938-1942 era is especially rich in important Gardner works, and might be the peak of his career.
However, not all pulp fiction is tough or hard-boiled, at least not to the extent found in Hammett, Nebel's Dick Donovan tales, Paul Cain, Todhunter Ballard, Forrest Rosaire, Lester Dent's Oscar Sail stories, or Raymond Chandler. These writers represent an extremely hard-boiled tradition, but a great deal of pulp fiction is not especially like this. Much instead involves mystery stories in what might be called the "pulp adventure" tradition. This tradition found its greatest outlet in Dime Detective magazine from 1931 to 1945, but it appeared in many other pulps of the 1930's and 1940's as well. While this tradition peaked in the pulps, it also influenced some mystery books of the era, such as Bengal Fire (1937) by Lawrence G. Blochman.
The stories of this tradition were what many people think of when they think of a typical pulp detective story. They involve a complex, imaginative, well constructed plot, lots of action, breezy dialogue and story telling, and courageous, adventurous lead characters. There is often a great deal of humor, and an atmosphere of pleasant escapism. There is a lot of action, but not the emphasis on shocking, raw brutality often found in the hard-boiled tales. Nor is there so much emphasis on stylistically creative description, as there is in Hammett and Chandler and Dent. The prose is much simpler.
Gardner's work seems poised between these two poles. Some of it seems hard-boiled - but much it is closer to "pulp adventure".
Another important example of the early "pulp style of plotting" is the title tale in Dead Men's Letters, a collection of stories published in Black Mask in 1926 - 1927 by Erle Stanley Gardner. These stories all feature Ed Jenkins, a.k.a. The Phantom Crook. The title story "Dead Men's Letters" has features in common with the pulp style of plotting, and is the second earliest example of this kind of fiction known to me.
In some examples of the "pulp style of plotting", when a mysterious action occurs, we readers don't know which of the many characters performed it. However, in "Dead Men's Letters" we and Ed Jenkins always know who is exactly doing what. What we don't know is their motivation, or the underlying story-lines, how such events fit into a big picture. Trying to figure out these underlying motives and stories forms the puzzle in "Dead Men's Letters".
Daly's tale, and presumably some of his other uncollected early work, clearly served as a model for Erle Stanley Gardner. Gardner's Ed Jenkins tales bear a family resemblance to Daly's work, features in common including:
The first three tales in Dead Men's Letters are the best. Oddly, there is a distinct sign of influence by F. Scott Fitzgerald at work in the first two of these tales, "Dead Men's Letters" and "Laugh That Off". These are set in a world of debutante flappers and their romances, exactly the characters and setting of Fitzgerald's immensely popular Saturday Evening Post tales of the period.
Eventually, the underlying hidden framework of the characters' relationships and actions is revealed by the end of "Dead Men's Letters". In a previous Ed Jenkins tale, "Laugh That Off" (1926), a quite similar framework is used for the characters and their relationships. But in "Laugh That Off", this framework is shared with the readers immediately, and there is nothing hidden about it. "Laugh That Off" has no mystery elements - instead it is a thriller without mystery. "Laugh That Off" appears after in "Dead Men's Letters" in the collection Dead Men's Letters, although it was published in magazine form a few months before. It is just as well that "Laugh That Off" appears later in the book: if it appeared earlier, it might "spoil" the mystery of the hidden relations in "Dead Men's Letters".
SPOILERS. "The Cat-Woman" (1927) shows a structure that will recur in some of Gardner's novels, such as The D.A. Draws a Circle and The D.A. Breaks a Seal: a crime in the past with a surprize solution, affecting a more thriller-like situation in the present. The mere fact that there is any sort of crime or mystery in the past, in "The Cat-Woman", is a carefully hidden feature, though. In The D.A. Draws a Circle the crime in the past is a full puzzle plot; the past crime in "The Cat-Woman" comes close to being a puzzle plot, with some hints to the solution scattered in the story.
A somewhat similar game plan will be found later in many Perry Mason tales. Perry interferes with the police, and with evidence left behind by his clients. He lays elaborate schemes to interfere with this reality, and make it look completely different. While the motives are different, the same plotting imagination is behind both the "good crooks" of the pulps and Perry Mason.
In both cases the violence is associated in the stories with, but not caused by, China and the Chinese. Gardner was at one time lawyer for most of a Chinese community in California, and was very sympathetic to their problems and concerns.
Gardner's women are often at the center of both the mystery and the violence of his plots. Many of these women are willful and sexual, including both gangster's molls, and the adulterous women who show up so regularly in the Perry Mason tales. Gardner's portrait of women seems to draw on commonly held beliefs that women are a source of repressed energy in society, one that can come to the fore in many explosive ways.
More comically, Lena's sarcastic, earthy dialogue during her first visit with the hero, anticipates Bertha Cool.
"Hell's Kettle" is a thriller, not a mystery. But it does show structural features related to "the pulp style of plotting". There are a number of independent actors: the Kid, Lena, the mysterious night club woman, policeman Clancy. We don't always know how some of these characters are aligned, or opposed, especially the night club woman and Clancy. We usually know their actions - but not always why they are doing it, or whose side they are on. Further, a mysterious unseen person with a machine gun appears late in the tale, whose motives are also obscure. Oddly, we don't learn the answers to these riddles, rather, their solution is seemingly postponed to the tale's sequel.
The hero rents a house with two apartments in it. This anticipates a bit the "two neighboring households" tales Gardner would write later in his career. However, while it resembles such tales in architectural layout, "Hell's Kettle" does not actually people the apartments with separate households.
There are over sixty Lester Leith short stories (1929-1943). Leith never appeared in novels. The tales mainly appeared in the pulp magazine Detective Fiction Weekly. There are two collections of Leith tales:
Mystery Plots. Gardner's Lester Leith stories contain mystery puzzle plots. At least 4 of the 5 that have been reprinted in The Amazing Adventures of Lester Leith.
The puzzle plotsare usually fairly well done; in and of themselves, they could support a 15 page story of the kind Agatha Christie was so good at. On top of this, Gardner consistently adds another feature: the development of an elaborate con by Lester Leith, designed to both solve the crime, and steal the ill gotten gains of the criminal. This con job is full of surreal and baroque elements; it tends to be wild, comic and bizarre. This con job is very different from the-interfere-in-the-criminals'-scheme approach that Gardner used in his Ed Jenkins tales, or in the Patent Leather Kid story, "The Kid Clips a Coupon" (1934). Rather, it is a full fledge con. The reader is privy to elements Leith will use in the scheme, but not the scheme itself, and now has a second puzzle to unravel: what is Leith up to? These two puzzles interact in interesting ways, as they are both gradually unraveled by the story. Leith often explains the deductive logic he used to deduce the criminal and understand his crime. This deduction seems almost as relentlessly logical as Sherlock Holmes or Ellery Queen, and shows a surprising commitment by Gardner to the full paradigm of the puzzle plot, not just a mystery, but also its fair play solution through deduction from clues. While there is a detective (Leith) solving the first crime; there is no detective figure solving the mystery of Leith's activities. These activities simply unroll in front of the reader's eyes.
"In Round Figures", "The Bird in the Hand", and "A Thousand to One" are constructed according to similar templates. Puzzle plot ingenuity occurs in most of these tales, around a whole series of puzzling kinds of mysteries:
In Round Figures. Of the stories in The Amazing Adventures of Lester Leith, one of the weaker is the first, "In Round Figures" (1930). It does have a colorful con, and serves to familiarize readers with the complex Leith formula. The figure of the sympathetic fat woman in this tale anticipates Bertha Cool, Gardner's gargantuan female private eye.
A Thousand to One. "A Thousand to One" (1939) has the best puzzle plot of the five stories in The Amazing Adventures of Lester Leith. We are getting close in time to The Case of the Careless Kitten (1942), Gardner's masterpiece in the puzzle plot novel.
Lester Leith, Magician. "Lester Leith, Magician" (1939) has lively storytelling centering around magic; the puzzle plot elements are close to zero here, however. The thief does have a clever hiding place for his loot.
The tale is the closest among the five stories to the "pulp style of plotting", in which different groups of characters are all competing at cross purposes, here to obtain a necklace of pearls.
This story shows Gardner's sympathies with the Chinese.
A sociological note: a dropped and shattered plate in Leith's magic act is said by Gardner to be noteworthy to women in the audience because they regard such an event as a "domestic tragedy". That was true for the poor people who were Gardner's main readers in the pulps, but not at all for the rich socialites on the cruise ship in the story who were Leith's fictional audience. Here the mask of luxury that permeates the Leith stories slips, revealing the reality of hard times beneath.
The Bird in the Hand. "The Bird in the Hand" (1932) is a nicely done piece of storytelling. It deals with two impossible thefts, one committed by the crooks, and another a theft of sorts committed by Lester Leith at the end of the tale.
SPOILERS. Architecture plays a role in the main mystery's story and solution. Architecture was often important in traditional mysteries.
"The Bird in the Hand" is closest to the "hard-boiled" world of any of the 5 tales. This era of the early 1930's was the depth of the Depression, and the hard-boiled world seemed to "fit" many readers experience. Also, the hard-boiled style was "spreading" in this period, to a new generation of writers in Black Mask, and to magazines such as Dime Detective and Detective Fiction Weekly here, through the defection of Black Mask writers such as Gardner.
Something Like a Pelican. "Something Like a Pelican" (1943) is in Gardner's miscellaneous collection, The Case of the Irate Witness. It seems to be the last Lester Leith story to be published.
It has a simple but satisfying borderline-impossible crime plot, about some stolen blueprints, plus lots of pleasant storytelling. Its impossible theft is in the same general category as the mysteries in "The Bird in the Hand". Gardner would return to this kind of impossible theft story in the opening section (Chapters 1-8) of the Bertha Cool - Donald Lam novel, The Count of Nine (1958). In all of these, Gardner introduces lots of plot complexities surrounding the central theft. The impossible crimes in these tales have structural similarities with the puzzle plot in the Paul Pry story, "Dressed to Kill" (1933), although that is not an impossible crime. There are also some relationships with the mystery of the hidden money in the Sidney Zoom tale "Lifted Bait" (1933). Many of these stories involve the complex architecture sometimes found in Golden Age books. In a number of the tales, such as "The Bird in the Hand" and The Count of Nine, someone has to smuggle a stolen object out of a building, past the watchful eyes of searchers, a seeming impossibility.
"Something Like a Pelican" has some brief but intelligent comments on film directors, that seem more sophisticated than most other writing by non-film people in that era. Gardner would later function with effectiveness in the television industry, involved with the Perry Mason TV show.
Leith and one of the characters share an interest in deluxe guns, which recalls Sidney Zoom and his policeman friend in "The Green Door".
The Sergeant talks about pelicans used for fishing in "The Bird in the Hand".
The Candy Kid. Another Leith story available today is "The Candy Kid" (1931), reprinted in both The Case of the Murderer's Bride and The Case of the Crying Swallow, two different Gardner collections.
Neither its puzzle plot, nor Leith's scheme to recover some stolen rubies, is as clever as the best tales in the EQ collection. But it is full of colorful events, and makes pleasant reading.
At first, the story looks as if it will be one of Gardner's tales of impossible theft, and it includes some fairly clever ideas about how such a theft might have taken place. But it soon veers into a different direction.
Cold Clews. "Cold Clews" (1931) is not an impossible crime tale. But it does have some good mystery plot features:
Thieves' Kitchen. "Thieves' Kitchen" (1932) involves a full-fledged murder mystery, unlike some of the other purely theft Lester Leith tales. The murder mystery has good features:
The series police villain of the Leith tales, the always repulsive Sgt. Ackley, hits a moral low with his plan to plant phony evidence on a suspect (Chapter 5). Ackley is also willing to ruin an innocent woman's reputation, to get himself newspaper publicity. Ackley also planned to frame Leith in "The Bird in the Hand". Sgt. Ackley anticipates the dishonest cop Sgt. Holcomb, a series character in the early Perry Mason novels. Both men exemplify dishonest policing. The two men are clearly Gardner's social commentary on and condemnation of bad policing.
Lester Leith makes sympathetic remarks about the ex-cons (Chapter 9). Leith mentions how hungry they are, and how they can't get work. SPOILERS. I was hoping the "thieves' kitchen" would prove a permanent institution. And that the ex-cons would reform. Unfortunately, none of this happens.
Put It in Writing!. "Put It in Writing!" (1930) is atypical of the Leith tales, in that it does not involve theft. Instead it is a whodunit mystery. The complex mystery plot is the tale's main asset. It comes to an original solution. The startling solution is unlike any other mystery tale of which I know.
However, aside from its solution, "Put It in Writing!" has problems as a detective story:
Worst of all, Leith's action at the tale's finale ruins the story. The finale is repulsive, morally and otherwise.
Hot Cash. "Hot Cash" (1931) has an structure not typical for the Lester Leith tales:
In later novels, Perry Mason would sometimes hide suspects or witnesses from the police, in private hospitals or sanitariums. "Hot Cash" uses the same gambit, at an early date in Gardner's career. We learn more about how such hospitals are run, however, in "Hot Cash", than we do in the later Perry Mason books. "Hot Cash" takes us inside such a hospital, showing it to us in detail.
The opening crime in "Hot Cash" involves a fake robbery. This supposedly takes place while the "victims" are driving in their car. The situation resembles the fake "traffic accidents" that sometimes appear in later Gardner novels. Both the "robbery" in "Hot Cash" and the later fake "traffic accidents" are ingenious. One difference: the fake "traffic accidents" are usually presented as mystery puzzles for the sleuth and reader to solve. They are NOT set up as inverted mysteries, the was the "robbery" in "Hot Cash" is.
Mystery Traditions. The Lester Leith (and closely related Paul Pry) tales are different from anything I know of, inside or outside of pulp fiction. But one can find a few comparisons:
Links to the Patent Leather Kid. Aspects of the Paul Pry tales anticipate Gardner's somewhat later hero, the Patent Leather Kid.
Paul Pry's assistant Mugs Magoo has expert knowledge of all aspects of the underworld. This expertise will be repeated in The Patent Leather Kid's assistant Bill Brakey. Both characters share their information with the hero, and the reader. Among other things, this speeds the narration along: we instantly get a flood of information about any underworld character that appears in the story.
Paul Pry has steel doors protecting him in his apartment hotel home: see "A Double Deal in Diamonds". This too anticipates the Patent Leather Kid.
At the end of "The Racket Buster" Paul Pry tells Mugs to get him some clothes so Paul Pry can impersonate a truck driver. Paul mentions a leather jacket as a possibility: leather jackets were indeed commonly worn by truck drivers in that era. This anticipates a bit the Patent Leather Kid and his fondness for leather clothes. Paul Pry also wears a helmet and goggles when flying in "A Double Deal in Diamonds".
Mugs' Disability. Continuing character Mugs Magoo works as Paul Pry's assistant. Mugs' extraordinary ability is remembering faces of criminals, a subject on which former policeman Mugs has total recall. He used to specialize in this with the police. Mugs also has only one arm. Mugs' back-story is in "The Crime Juggler" and "Slick and Clean" (Chapter 2). Politics led to Mugs and others being dismissed from the police. Mugs was unemployed, and became an alcoholic. Then Mugs' life turned around when Paul Pry hired him, and put his facial recognition abilities to work.
The Paul Pry tales were written before the modern disability movement. There are things that today's readers won't like, such as Mugs' alcoholism. But the tales get one thing profoundly right. Mugs is devastated to lose his police job, and thrilled to be back employed with Pry, and using his facial recognition talents. Mugs, like everyone, wants to work and contribute to the world.
Drums and Native Americans. Paul Pry's hobby is collecting and playing drums. He gets drums from many parts of the world. But he seems especially interested in Native American drums:
Navajo drums in "The Crime Juggler" are linked to the desert. Gardner had a life-long enthusiasm for the desert, that shows up in more detail in his Whispering Sands stories and related works.
Drumming helps Paul Pry think. He concentrates and thinks deeply, coming up with his ideas. Sherlock Holmes was shown thinking with deep concentration in "The Man with the Twisted Lip" (1891), by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Influence from Anderson?. In Frederick Irving Anderson's "The House of Many Mansions" (1928) and other tales, policeman Deputy Commissioner Parr walks the streets of Manhattan, with one of his officers Pelts nearby. Policeman Pelts is dressed, as always, as the shabbiest of tramps. Parr examines passerby, and compares them to his "mental rogues' gallery" of crooks. When Parr finds a crook, he sends Pelts to investigate.
The Paul Pry tales have a little of the same feel. Pry walks big city streets, with Mugs nearby disguised as a shabby beggar. However, it is Mugs who recognizes crooks among the passerby, not Pry himself.
Anderson was a famous writer at the time, with tales appearing in that most popular magazine, The Saturday Evening Post. Gardner might well have read him.
Stories. In such works as "The Racket Buster" (1930) and "The Daisy-Pusher" (1930), the initial scheme of the crook, and Paul Pry's countering scheme, have little to do with each other. Each scheme shows entertaining plot ingenuity, however, and the stories have pep and bounce.
"A Double Deal in Diamonds" (1931) shows Paul Pry flying from one city to another, as part of his scheme. This anticipates the flying in several Perry Mason novels. Paul Pry also takes an interurban, one of the fascinating forms of public travel in that era.
"Hell's Danger Signal" (1932) shows Gardner moving away from the Lester Leith like plot and counterplot format, and towards a close approximation to the "pulp style of plotting". Lola Beeker in this story is one of Gardner's strong independent women. It is a kind of personality towards which he had much affection, but also one which he exploited for comedy. Such characters are always doing things that no "conventional" woman of the day would do, and the narration is always pointing this fact up. Lola Beeker is remarkably beautiful, but a later incarnation of the type will be the decidedly unglamorous private eye Bertha Cool. Her introduction in her first novel The Bigger They Come (1939), is one of Gardner's best character sketches.
"Dressed to Kill" (1933) introduces a puzzle plot into the Paul Pry stories. Simpler than those in the Lester Leith tales, the puzzle is still nicely done. The plot shows misdirection based on "zones of storytelling", also a feature of some later Perry Mason novels. Here, while the reader is following the thriller aspects of the tale, Gardner is also sneaking in clues to the puzzle plot - an unexpected effect. The whole story is one of the pleasantest pieces of escapism in the series. Pry shows gallantry towards an older woman in the tale; Gardner clearly admired and liked women.
This tale and the other Paul Pry stories show a lot of metaphors based on fishing; Gardner loved this in real life.
The scheme/counter-scheme approach of the Paul Pry tales began before the series began, and survived its demise:
Bane himself is subtly different from Gardner's pre-war characters like Leith and Pry. He is younger, or at least more naive acting, more middle class, more ordinarily respectable, and with less elegance or panache. A returning war veteran, Bane is a handsome young man who disdains work and wants to have fun. He resembles in a comic way many similar good looking young men who don't want to work in Gardner's novels. These novel characters tend to have moralistic fingers wagged at them by older authority figures, who urge them to repent and get jobs. They often tend to get into deep trouble in the books, especially through gambling or embezzlement, although they are rarely the murderer or chief villains of the stories. In "The Affair of the Reluctant Witness" all this is burlesqued; the older authority figure chews Bane out in the same way, but he is presented as a joyless fogey who gets his comic comeuppance at the end, while Bane is seen sympathetically. Gardner clearly was of two minds about these young men characters.
For examples of moralism directed against young men who don't want to work, see The D.A. Holds a Candle (Chapter 1).
The opposite approach is for a mystery writer to establish links and references between one series and another, so that the writer's series are all set in one shared "universe". This is the approach used by Freeman Wills Crofts, R. A. J. Walling, and Frances and Richard Lockridge.
Suspects and witnesses also have such names in Gardner. Favorites: Harley Marigold and his wife Margy Marigold in "Put It in Writing!".
The Hero. The Patent Leather Kid bears a resemblance to Lester Leith, Paul Pry and Jerry Bane. He is (in part) a member of the underworld who preys on other crooks. However the Patent Leather Kid is the secret identity of an apparently wealthy socialite named Dan Seller, and his activities seem to be committed out of both a need for excitement and a desire to right wrongs. And the stories point out that while the Kid acts like a crook, and hangs out with the underworld, that he never actually commits any crimes.
We never learn much about Dan Seller's background - which is typical of Golden Age mystery fiction. The first tale "The Kid Stacks a Deck" (1932) says "That he was of the finest stock, without a blemish upon his record, was evidenced by the fact he had been admitted to the club at all". There is perhaps subtle ambiguity here: Is he really from a "good family", or has he deluded everyone at his exclusive upper crust club into thinking so?
Frank L. Packard's The Adventures of Jimmie Dale (1914-1915) is about an upper class man with a secret identity as the underworld denizen the Gray Seal.
Changing Identities. The Patent Leather Kid regularly goes through a three-stage process, whenever he changes into his secret identity:
Although Gardner does not explicitly note it, each stage of the process has the hero a member of a different social class: Dan Seller is a wealthy member of the upper crust, Rodney Stone is a middle class businessman, the Patent Leather Kid is a member of the underworld, with a flashy style of dress. It is a steady journey from the top down through the class system, each transformation taking the hero a step lower.
The Kid's apparent membership in many different classes is perhaps a metaphor for Gardner himself. Gardner met a wide variety of people as a lawyer, and wrote sympathetically about many classes in his fiction.
Changing Identities: Other Gardner Tales. Using back stairs or service elevators in hotels or apartments is a regular feature in Gardner. Perry Mason does it to do detective work in The Case of the Glamorous Ghost (first half of Chapter 5), for example. In The Case of the Glamorous Ghost, Perry temporarily adopts a new identity (of sorts) while traveling this back way. It recalls (in a small way) the Kid's multiple identities. Perry's new identity also involves a change of social class.
In The D.A. Calls it Murder:
Nice Digs. It is clear that in all three identities, the Kid has nice places to stay. This was a pleasant fantasy for many poor readers in the Depression, who were "ill-housed" as President Roosevelt put it: "I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished."
Commissioner vs Inspector. Monte Herridge at Mystery*File says that Inspector Brame was originally known as Commissioner Brame in the first Kid story. But that his title was later changed to Inspector. (In the recent paperback, Brame is largely referred to as Inspector throughout, although there are a few references to him as Commissioner.)
Commissioner makes more sense, though. Brame is a member of the same exclusive upper crust club as wealthy hero Dan Seller and explorer Bill Pope. Police Commissioners in the 1930's at least sometimes were members of the social elite, and could plausibly belong to such clubs. An Inspector, making a modest salary and coming from a working man background, would be far less likely to be admitted.
Brame often worries about the reputation of the police as a whole. It is the job of a Commissioner to be concerned with the whole police force. An Inspector would care less.
And a Commissioner is a major authority figure. The hero's taunting of Brame has more of an anti-authoritarian feel, with a Commissioner as its target.
Detective Assistants. Some of the Kid tales are thrillers, without real elements of mystery. But "The Kid Throws a Stone" has genuine elements of detection used to solve a mystery. In this story, the Kid has two people helping him in his detective work, who anticipate Perry Mason's helpers to come:
Mirroring Plot. In some Kid tales, the Kid's actions imitate the previous actions of the bad guys. It is not a straightforward echo, but often comes with a twist, to advance the Kid's goals.
In "The Kid Throws a Stone" (SPOILERS):
In "The Kid Cooks a Goose" (SPOILERS):
Counter Schemes: The Kid Steals a Star. Some Kid tales show the familiar Gardner pattern of scheme by bad guys / counter-scheme by good guys designed to interfere with bad guys' scheme. In the final Kid tale "The Kid Steals a Star" (1934) the bad guys have a con-job scheme to rob jewelry stores. During their next attempt, the Kid, Bill and Gertie interpose themselves and sabotage the thieves' plans. There is one of Gardner's large floods of plot.
Gertie's bigger role is appealing. Her main scene has her dressed up and visiting a night club: something all Americans were supposed to want deeply in that era. Gertie is delighted with her chance to do this. It's all part of the Kid's counter-scheme. Also: We learn her full name: Gertie Straub. Gertie Straub is also the name of a character briefly seen in James Thurber's humorous book My Life and Hard Times (1933) (start of Chapter 6).
Leather. It was standard for men in tuxedos to wear black patent leather evening shoes. The Kid wears these along with his tux. Far more unusually, he often dons a black patent leather mask to conceal his identity.
Jeffrey Marks' informative book Pulp Icons: Erle Stanley Gardner and His Pulp Magazine Characters (2013) claims that "The Patent Leather Kid was unique in fiction as the only character in literature clad in glossy leather." Marks' insight is a good one. As best I can tell, Marks is correct - I don't know of any other systematically leather-clad heroes in prose fiction before the Kid, with the exception of airplane pilots.
Early movies had a number of characters in black leather clothes. See this discussion in my article on Fritz Lang. These movies appeared before the Kid was created in 1932. And after the Kid, in the 1940's, leather jackets became popular in the movies. See my list of Leather Jackets in Film, and look at the Influence of "The Wild One".
However, the Patent Leather Kid has an identity based on leather. By contrast none of these early film characters do. They are simply men wearing leather clothes.
The Kid also wears patent leather shoes with loud flashy, but well-tailored suits: see "The Kid Throws a Stone" (1932), "The Kid Takes a Cut" (1933). Other detectives sometimes wore patent leather shoes, such as Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot. However Poirot wears such shoes because he is a Continental dandy, while the Kid is dressing like what Americans of the era called a "sporting" type.
In "The Kid Clears a Crook" we learn that Dan Seller sits in a "huge black leather chair" at the club.
Leather in Other Gardner Stories. In "A Fair Reward" (1930) (Chapter 1) sly, manipulative psychologist-detective Clint Kale carries a leather-bound notebook, while the Governor has a swiveling executive chair.
In The Case of the Drowning Duck (Chapter 1), Perry Mason notices that a wealthy client wears "expensive black kid dress shoes" with his evening wear. Soon, Della Street is urging Perry to put on his leather jacket and riding boots to go horseback riding, which Perry does (Chapter 3). Della finds the boots and jacket in Perry's closet, and hands them to him. As elsewhere in Gardner, there is a sense of one person providing leather clothes for another - see:
Suspect Harry Drummond in "The Case of the Crying Swallow" (1947) (Chapter 7) wears a leather jacket, high heeled cowboy boots and a five-gallon hat. The outfit helps Drummond to be remembered by a woman witness (especially the boots). Drummond is an unsympathetic character, and with a sense of sexual menace about him. Drummond is unusual as a sinister Gardner man wearing leather: usually leather clothes in Gardner are worn by Good Guys. Drummond's outfit also contrasts him with the tale's other male suspect, upper crust Man of Distinction Claude L. Winnett. Both men are associated with large vehicles: Drummond drives a car with a very long trailer, Winnett had been a heroic airplane pilot in World War II. And although it is not mentioned explicitly, readers in 1947 would know that pilot Winnett would have spent the war glamorously uniformed in leather. Major Winnett has "patrician bearing" (Chapter 1).
Masks and Evening Clothes: Predecessors. While the Kid wearing a patent leather mask is new, men wearing regular masks with evening clothes are not. They are especially found in the films of Louis Feuillade, a famous French director of crime thrillers. In Le Trust, ou les batailles de l'argent (1911) ("The Trust, or the battles of money") villains wear strange black face masks with their black tuxedos.
A famous portrait of the prose villain Fantômas shows a giant Fantômas astride the city of Paris, a glamorous, good-looking man dressed up to the max in top hat, white tie and tails, wearing the sort of mask associated with burglars. Feuillade partially recreates this image at the end of his first Fantômas film Fantômas - A l'ombre de la guillotine (1913). Fantômas wears a burglar's mask along with white tie and tails. The mask is not shiny or made of leather. Instead the viewer's attention is drawn to Fantômas's huge shiny black silk top hat.
Both Le Trust and Feuillade's Fantômas films are available on DVD. Fantômas imagery is also available on the scholarly blog The Cine-Tourist. The illustration of Fantômas astride the city of Paris appears immediately. To see Feuillade's portrait of Fantômas in mask and evening clothes, scroll around half way down.
British writers also depicted crooks in masks and white tie and tails. Dornford Yates wrote about a gang of sophisticated crooks who dressed this way in his short story "A Trick of Memory" (1921). The article on Yates tells how to find the story and a contemporary illustration of the masked crooks.
The King is a 1940's American comic book detective, who uses his mastery of disguise to fight crime. Unlike Fantômas, the King is a 100% good guy. The King is a sophisticate. He is shown in white tie and tails, and in a mask, on the cover of Flash Comics #5, May 1940: art by Jon L. Blummer. The cover is reproduced at the Grand Comics Database. Also, please see my list of comic book Heroes in White Tie and Tails, although very few of these heroes also wear masks with their tails. As the list documents, a remarkable number of comic book detectives and super-heroes donned tails. People wanted to see their heroes dressed up.
The Name. As Jeffrey Marks points out, the name "The Patent Leather Kid" was used before Gardner, as the title of a hit 1927 movie. Gardner likely got the name from this earlier movie. The hero of the film The Patent Leather Kid is a boxer, and I agree with Jeffrey Marks that, title aside, the film has nothing to do with Gardner's plots or rogue hero.
Rupert Hughes published a short story "The Patent Leather Kid" (Cosmopolitan magazine, February 1926). This in turn became the film The Patent Leather Kid (directed by Alfred Santell, 1927). The film was a huge box-office hit, and star Richard Barthelmess was nominated for an Oscar. The "patent leather" in the title mainly refers to the hero's slicked-down, shiny black hair, a fashion of the era. It's not a reference to the hero's clothes. However, the hero does wear a spectacular black leather coat in one scene, where he romances the heroine. See 14 minutes through 19 minutes in the film. Photo. Illustrations of Barthelmess in the coat were used in ads for the film. The long shiny coat is double-breasted and belted. Barthelmess strikes aggressive poses while wearing it in ads. Ad.
I am NOT recommending the film The Patent Leather Kid. It is often pedestrian and mediocre. And it contains material sure to offend contemporary audiences.
"Early Birds" (1933) is a simple but satisfying tale. It shows Stanwell executing one such con job, targeting a rich, vicious jeweler. The story is of this clever con - pure and simple. It is NOT a tale of Stanwell executing a counter-scheme to someone else's scheme. And there is NO mystery or detective work.
"Early Birds" shows Stanwell operating within strict restrictions. The tale makes clear from the start that Stanwell does not use many of the approaches used by, say, the Patent Leather Kid. The reader wonders, "How will Stanwell pull this off? Can Stanwell execute a con under these retractions and limitations?" Gardner then shows Stanwell doing precisely that.
The restrictions are a kind of "meta-fiction". They describe the plot of the story as a whole.
"Early Birds" is short and tightly focused on its con job plot. But it is richly detailed. It shows Gardner's ability to create plot.
The best subplot in The Case of the Drowning Duck is also about a leak of information. There are differences:
Empty Tin. The Perry Mason novel The Case of the Empty Tin has some inventive mystery subplots, centering around communication. These especially involve the tin can of the title. These puzzles are not linked to impossible crime techniques. Gardner also includes several ingenious ideas about which of the suspects might be using the strange communication system, and why.
Zoom is the kind of person comedian Crazy Guggenheim (on The Jackie Gleason Show) called "a rich millionaire with lots of money". He uses his wealth to defend the innocent and weak against powerful crooks who prey on them. Many of the Zoom stories, like "Willie the Weeper" (1930), "My Name Is Zoom!" (1930) and "Inside Job" (1933) are biter-bit tales, like the Paul Pry stories. In these, Zoom beats crooks through conman-like schemes of his own. However, Zoom is honest, and does not make money off of crooks for himself. Zoom is a pure good guy: he is not any sort of criminal. Zoom is characterized as a "fighter", like Perry Mason to come. The tales have a more somber mood than the light-hearted Lester Leith and Paul Pry stories, with Zoom battling for the rights of ordinary people who have been stomped on by the rich during the Depression.
Other Zoom tales are detective stories, in which Zoom solves murders. These include "Higher Up" (1931) and "Cheating the Chair" (1932). Both of these stories have some creative mystery ideas, although neither is in the first rank of Gardner puzzle plot tales. Both also have some stinging social criticism of civic corruption. They are among the most explicit tales Gardner wrote attacking social oppression, with "Cheating the Chair" being especially left-wing. These are some of the earliest actual puzzle plot detective tales by Gardner available today. The civic corruption is not just a thematic element in these tales: it is also worked into the puzzle plots of the stories. In "Higher Up" this leads to a complicating of the narrative, in that what seems like detection is also unexpectedly harboring mystery. This is an early example of an approach that Gardner will use in some of his novels, of mixing the apparent "zones" of his storytelling, and having "detection" sections actually include hidden "mystery" elements.
These detection-mystery ideas are not the only mystery aspects of these tales. In "Higher Up", the subplot about the fingerprints involves questions of access to the house.
And the solution at the end of who has stolen the diamonds, involves knowledge about the victim's activities. This anticipates a bit the non-series mystery "A Logical Ending" (1933). These are both plots in which Gardner uses clues to identify a criminal. Mysteries in which only one suspect has knowledge to commit a crime are associated with Ellery Queen, as in his The French Powder Mystery (1930).
Other Zoom stories mix modes, involving both biter-bit con games with which Zoom defeats criminals, and genuine detection. "Lifted Bait" (1933), one of the most satisfying Zoom tales, contains both elements. When a woman is framed for murder, Zoom has to first reconstruct the true history of the crime: a detective element. Then he uses his knowledge of the crime to destroy the frame, and bring the crime home to its real perpetrator: a con game. Such mixing of approaches shows Gardner experimenting with the forms of crime fiction. The reconstruction of the crime is a variation on the mystery elements in "Cheating the Chair".
Links to the Patent Leather Kid. In "Willie the Weeper" Zoom disguises himself as a lower class member of the underworld, moving from one hotel to another as he does so. This is a one time event in "Willie the Weeper". But it resembles the way the Patent Leather Kid regularly disguises and transforms himself, something that occurs in most of the Kid stories as part of the Kid's standard modus operandi. The Kid moves from a room in one hotel to another room in another hotel, with each change involving disguising himself as a man of a lower social class. This is exactly what Zoom does in "Willie the Weeper".
A difference: the Kid regularly moves through three hotel rooms, while Zoom moves through only two.
"Willie the Weeper" (1930) appeared two years before the first Kid tale "The Kid Stacks a Deck" (1932), which creates both the Kid and his multiple hotel rooms / transformations of appearance. It thus seems likely that "The Kid Stacks a Deck" drew on, and made more complex, ideas first presented in "Willie the Weeper".
An Attack on Individuality. In "Willie the Weeper" (1930) Zoom says civilization is trying to turn people into standardized cogs, both destroying their individuality and wearing them out.
The next year in Murder in the Mews (1931) (Chapter 1) Helen Reilly complained that the modern machine age was standardizing life. This is a different but perhaps related view.
Hawkman. "Willie the Weeper" briefly refers to Zoom as a "hawkman", to emphasize his ferocity and wildness. Ten years later in 1940, the comic book super-hero Hawkman would be created. Please also see my article on the 1960's version of Hawkman.
An Influence on Merle Constiner?. The setting and cast of characters in "Higher Up" anticipates Merle Constiner's short stories of the 1940's. We have a small mansion on the outskirts of town, home to an eccentric rich person who is pursuing a hobby in a non-standard fashion, one that involves a lot of strange financial transactions and eccentric visitors to the home. There are also strange servants, and a long history of events building up to the crime. The pawn shop opening anticipates the seedy small businesses in Constiner's work.
Grinning Gorilla. Imagery in "Higher Up" anticipates that in a key episode of Gardner's The Case of the Grinning Gorilla (1952) (Chapter 4):
Sidney Zoom's present to the police Sergeant in "The Green Door" includes a leather gun belt that matches his own. Similarly charged: the scene where the Patent Leather Kid hands his bodyguard-assistant Bill Brakey black patent leather clothes, to wear as part of a scheme. The clothes are duplicates of the Kid's own leather outfit. See "The Kid Throws a Stone" (1932). "The Kid Throws a Stone" was published just two months after "The Green Door".
"The Kid Throws a Stone" also emphasizes the Kid's close relationship with macho explorer Bill Pope. The two men lock eyes in an intense mutual gaze, twice in the story.
Early Birds. "Early Birds" (1933) has its conman hero Arthur Stanwell pulling a swindle on a rich vicious jeweler. Stanwell winds up completely dominating the jeweler. The way the well-dressed Stanwell lures the local Police Chief to his side is especially clever. The jeweler has to face not only Stanwell's brains, but the Police Chief's power.
Hot Cash. The Lester Leith short story "Hot Cash" (1931) (Chapters 1-3) has a mob lawyer manipulating a gullible mobster, to sinister effect. The climax (Chapter 3) emphasizes how shiny a policeman's badge is. The uniformed policeman works for the mob lawyer.
Novels. The Case of the Drowning Duck (Chapter 9) has Perry Mason simultaneously helping and manipulating a mainly friendly police officer. The story mentions how shiny the officer's badge and brass buttons on his uniform are. The opening (Chapter 1) shows Perry manipulating a client, a well-dressed man with fancy leather evening shoes. Perry is seated in a leather easy chair during this encounter.
The Case of the Terrified Typist (Chapter 3) has a love letter from a woman to a man, where she imagines him as Prince Charming. She tells about how handsome he looks in his shiny armor. Although the letter is from a woman, in practice it extols a man's attractiveness.
The Case of the Negligent Nymph (Chapter 7) has Perry using the deliberately tricky leather clients' chair in his office as "one of Mason's most subtle psychological weapons." Perry uses it both for the manipulation of clients, and to test their personalities. The client seen in this episode is male. This is an example of the deep chairs that pop up in accounts. Paul Drake's office has its own deliberately uncomfortable chair in The Case of the Nervous Accomplice (Chapter 6).
The Case of the Lonely Heiress (Chapters 3-5) has Perry Mason crafting an image for a male private investigator that will have a maximum sexual appeal. The investigator is straight (he likes Della Street) and the appeal is directed towards women. Still there are gay undertones in men like Perry and the agent collaborating on the image. Later a crook impersonates a chauffeur, complete with uniform (end of Chapter 6).
"The Case of the Crying Swallow" (Chapter 11) has Perry dominating a police Sergeant. Perry Mason skillfully puts the Sergeant in a position where he has few options. The Sergeant's final summary of his awkward position, emphasizes how the Sergeant stands in the police Chain of Command. The Sergeant then gives an order to a police subordinate, which embodies Perry's goal.
The Case of the Grinning Gorilla (Chapter 9) has Perry put through a police interrogation. Here Perry is on the receiving end of schemes and mind games, rather than the instigator. The all-male police are dominating. A wife's account of control by her hypnotist husband also involves a dominating man (Chapter 13).
The macho butler in The D.A. Calls it Murder (Chapter 14) perhaps has gay undertones. The butler is a variant on the menacing chauffeurs popular in mystery fiction by Los Angeles pulp fiction writers. Please see my article on Chauffeurs in Mystery Fiction for a discussion.
The Bertha Cool - Donald Lam novel Top of the Heap has gay undertones, explored in detail in the section on that novel.
Two male prospectors are seen as sharing an ideal life in the desert in The Case of the Drowsy Mosquito. Their heterosexual relationships with women are seen as a threat to this life. However at the tale's end, one of the prospectors marries his girlfriend, and the novel also sees this as good.
Death Rides a Boxcar. The novella "Death Rides a Boxcar" (1944) features a pair of young Army buddies as sleuths. Both are strongly attracted to the women in the tale. But both also have an idealized buddy relationship. The two men share a hotel room, and carry on a conversation while one is taking a bath. Also, when one of the men is sweet-talking what he thinks is a girlfriend through the door, the object of his address suddenly morphs into a tough, athletic police inspector. The soldier and the inspector go on to develop an unusual relationship.
Inspector Fanston is one of the few well-dressed men in Gardner, with "a gray suit, a gray hat to match". Soldier "Gabby" Hilman has a phallic last name Hilman.
Gramps Wiggins. Senior male sleuth Gramps Wiggins appears in two novels. A whole chapter in The Case of the Turning Tide (Chapter 24) establishes that beautiful Joan Harpler looks great in her swim suit. And that the suit is highly erotic: made of rubber, skin tight, showing off her curves, and filled with sexy imagery. SPOILERS. Then Gramps Wiggins wears it for the whole finale of the novel, including the solution! He's testing a clue about the swim suit. But he manages to get arrested by the police for wearing it. This is perhaps the only Golden Age mystery whose hero solves the case while in drag.
Earlier, while Joan is modeling the swim suit, Gramps notices a clue about it, while the heterosexual District Attorney can only see how sexy Joan looks in it (Chapters 24, 25). This sort of contrast appears in some writers, to suggest that men like Gramps have a different experience than heterosexual men. For other examples, see the articles on Agatha Christie, Helen Reilly.
A.B. Carr. A perhaps similar character to Sidney Zoom in Gardner's later novels is attorney A.B. Carr, who views highly the handsome young D.A. Doug Selby: see The D.A. Breaks a Seal (Chapter 3). Although Carr is a major character in six novels, Gardner never actually specifies a sexual orientation for Carr, telling us whether Carr is gay or straight. Zoom and Carr are both strong, strong-willed and domineering genius men of great practical effectiveness. Both are laws unto themselves, and distinctly social outsiders. Both men have elements of pathos, along with great success. But both are such high energy figures that it is clear that they have hope for the future.
Please see the section on Gay Characters, for a discussion of a queer dimension to Gramps Wiggins.
The Case of the Turning Tide. Gramps Wiggins first appears in The Case of the Turning Tide (1941), a novel in which he only gradually emerges as the detective, from among a large cast of characters. Gramps does declare his interest in working on the case right away, however.
Gardner's Foreword to this book explicitly marks it out as an experimental mystery, one in which he tries out new techniques of narration. Gardner has often been an experimental writer. But this is one of the few times in which he openly described one of his own books as being a non-traditional mystery story.
Unfortunately, I think The Case of the Turning Tide is only partially successful. The plot of the book never attains plausibility or true logical coherence. And Gramps' character is rougher and less appealing here than in his second case.
The book also shares a problem with some other minor Gardner novels: it starts out by introducing us to a likable young man whose business problems we care about, then pushes him into the background for much of the rest of the novel. Salesman Ted Shale in The Case of the Turning Tide (Chapters 1-4), inexperienced young lawyer Frank Neely being helped out by Perry Mason in The Case of the Restless Redhead (1954) (Chapters 1-3), and financial consultant Kerry Dutton in The Case of the Troubled Trustee (1965) (Chapter 1) all share this fate. All of these books decline after their openings. Young attorney James Etna who Perry helps in The Case of the Grinning Gorilla (1952) (Chapters 3,5,6) is a related figure. If these young men don't have much to do with the mysteries they open, they at least show Gardner's abiding interest in people and their work. Gardner relished the complexities of people's jobs.
I also like the illustration of Ted Shale rescuing a drowning woman on the cover of the old Pocket Book paperback (1948). Art: Stanley Dersh.
The two yachts (the Gypsy Queen II, the Albatross) recall the paired houses that run through several Gardner mysteries. You can spy on one yacht from another with binoculars, just as you can spy on one home from another in "The Case of the Crying Swallow", The Case of the Nervous Accomplice.
Gardner liked to write about life "on the road". Gramps moving around the country in his trailer, is an example of this. A trailer plays a role in "The Case of the Crying Swallow". Ted Shale's skills with swimming and small boats (Chapter 1) might also be linked to tourism, although this is a more tenuous connection.
The mystery puzzle of "which of two murder victims died first?" has earlier examples. See The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928) by Dorothy L. Sayers.
Attorney George V. Hazlit, his legal secretary Ethel Dunn, and his private investigator Parker Gibbs have the same professions as Perry Mason, Della Street and Paul Drake (Chapter 5). These are tacky, comic people however. Low-paid Ethel Dunn hasn't been given a raise in years, and doesn't want to help Hazlit at all: a burlesque of the loyal Perry-Della relationship.
The Case of the Smoking Chimney. Gramps Wiggins' second and last book The Case of the Smoking Chimney (1943) is entertaining throughout, but awfully thin as a mystery. Gardner's murder plot is easily guessed. The story is best in the early chapters (1 - 11), which describe the events leading up to the murder. These deal with a real estate scam. In classical detective novel fashion, each character is given a motive for the crime. It is not the sort of complex cat's cradle of The D.A. Draws a Circle, or the mini-mystery opening of Owls Don't Blink (1942). Instead, it sets up links among a group of very disparate characters, eventually showing how information flows among them. Gardner shows storytelling inventiveness here.
The Case of the Smoking Chimney has much in common in setting and approach with Gardner's novels about Doug Selby, the D.A.:
This book also has some of the most detailed look at food and cooking in any Gardner novel, in keeping with its comic tone. Gardner's characters like plain food, such as pancakes and bacon for breakfast, steaks and potatoes for dinner. Despite this lack of gourmet tastes, especially compared with someone like Rex Stout, it is clear that his characters really enjoy eating. There is often a feeling of social defiance to eating in Gardner. It seems to occur when his legal characters are pulling off some scheme in defiance of authority, and they take a break from their labors to go out and eat. Food in Gardner tends to be fried. He also likes sweet toppings on desserts such as syrup on pancakes or whipped cream on strawberry shortcakes. There are many men who tend to cook for themselves in Western cabins: the cowboy Buck Hoxey in "Flight into Disaster", the ex-prospector in Chimney. Gramps Wiggins likes to cook for himself in his trailer. Gramps tends to cook in a pan over heat. He likes to fuss with the pan while it's cooking. The description of the cook in Chapter 2 of The Case of the Empty Tin (1941) says that she does more baking than frying - the two types of cooking in which Gardner takes interest.
A woman has always been impressed with her glamorous boyfriend, a successful young accountant. SPOILERS. Then she learns he's actually an embezzler (Chapter 6). A similar gambit opens The Case of the Foot-Loose Doll (1958). In both books the boyfriend had always treated the woman with an air of superiority, dominating her, before the revelation.
Castle shows both intelligence and determination in her detective work. The tale has feminist elements: people keep telling her that showing all this brain power is no way to get a man, but she perseveres with her detection anyway, keeping true to her sensible convictions throughout. The story looks as if it were designed to be the start of a series, but Gardner apparently wrote just this one novella, unfortunately.
The story is not "fair play": there is no way a reader could logically guess its solution, since Gardner keeps introducing new facts, characters and situations as the story goes along. There are other aspects of the mystery solution that rely on coincidence, also a technical flaw. This is too bad, because otherwise it is a fun piece of storytelling, with Gardner's usual flood of plot detail.
Like the Gramps Wiggins novel The Case of the Smoking Chimney (1943), this tale is a bit racier than most of Gardner's other work.
Reed Sampsel solved mysteries (in Dime Detective) that came to him in his business as a palmist. His talents as a palmist are treated as "genuine": he can look at the lines in someone's hand, and make accurate deductions about their character and life history. "The Hand of Horror" suggests that palmistry is based on a sound scientific foundation. It also claims, that other psychic abilities are real. And shows Sampsel getting an accurate "feeling" about the contents of an unopened box. I find all of this dubious in the extreme. Gardner uses Sampsel's palmistry ability to allow him to make detective discoveries. As best as I can tell, neither palmistry nor psychic powers play much role in most of Gardner's other detective tales - and a good thing too!
Both palmistry and psychic powers are depicted by Gardner as firmly based in science (rather than magic or the supernatural). Therefore Reed Sampsel and his adventures should be regarded as science fiction.
Sampsel has an office and a loyal secretary; as a character he reminds one of Perry Mason. He is a high powered business man, and something of a know it all, always pontificating about what makes for success in life, just like Mason. Such high toned sermonizing was very big in 1930's mainstream fiction, reaching a peak of sorts in the novels of Lloyd C. Douglas.
"The Hand of Horror" (1933), the only short story available today, is full of gruesome horror effects. The tale might be "sick", but it is not boring.
The best part of the story is Chapter 1; it has good storytelling, and a tabloid reporter who talks entirely in headlines; this is quite funny and clever.
The scenes in a sinister doctor's office anticipate those in "The Hand of Horror" (1933).
There is perhaps something autobiographical in this tale of speeded up time. It occurs in the story by speeding up an individual's metabolism. Gardner himself seemed to live at a much faster pace and get far more done per hour than the average person. The story perhaps shows in an exaggerated way his own perceptions of rapid living. It also reflects the perennial anxiety of his characters to make the most of their time, to be efficient.
Civic Corruption. A distinguishing feature of the Corning tales is that they take place in "York City", a town run by a corrupt political machine and its crooked cops and D.A's office. So Corning is constantly fighting both rich powerful people and their police stooges. His character has as many run-ins with the police as Gardner's crook characters, such as Ed Jenkins and Lester Leith.
Civic corruption was a persistent theme in Black Mask in 1932. For example, see Ed Lybeck's "Kick-Back" (January 1932) and Raoul Whitfield's "Inside Job" (February 1932). The magazine showed real guts taking on this theme, and clearly felt that it was doing a public service by discussing this issue.
Detection and Plot. The Corning tales all show him investigating some mystery. The mystery usually comes to some sort of ingenious solution, although the stories are not quite fair play puzzle plots. The greatest emphasis is on Corning's detective work, vigorous, well done attempts to solve the crimes. This detective work is in the classic mystery tradition, one that ultimately goes back to Anna Katherine Green, although Gardner was probably not directly influenced by her.
"The Top Comes Off" (1932) and "Close Call" (1933) share a simple mystery plot pattern:
"Making the Breaks" (1933) mainly sticks to the above paradigm - but with some pleasant extras. It has more real mystery: there are several mysterious characters whose actions and motives the detective (and the reader) have to decipher. These make the frame more puzzling. And Corning has to figure things out more by determined investigation, and following up some clues, rather than by simply finding a witness. All of these things probably make it the richest of the Corning stories.
A Predecessor to Perry Mason. Corning has been seen by some critics as a dry run for Perry Mason. There is certainly some truth to this. Both:
Leg Man. "Leg Man" (1938), is a tale with some decent plot twists. It is notable for its extreme cynicism of tone, especially about marriage and divorce. It contrasts with the pious tone of moral uplift which dominates the Perry Mason tales (after the first few hard-boiled ones), many of which contain little mini-sermonettes on the proper attitudes needed for making it as a businessman and being a success in life. Gardner explores in depth complicated scenarios involving divorce and blackmail, back before the age of no-fault divorce.
Gardner then has Wennick intervene with a Rogue-like scheme, to stop the blackmail.
So far, none of this has involved any mystery. But Gardner then adds a murder mystery puzzle, that takes up the last section of the tale. It builds on everything that has gone before.
An idea about matches found in the non-series tale "Snowy Ducks for Cover" (1931) is turned into a full, fair play clue in "Leg Man". There are also two other indications of the killer.
"Leg Man" includes bugging equipment, used to listen in on an adjoining room. This will return in the non-series tale "Death Rides a Boxcar" (1944). In both stories, the equipment is part of the story-telling, rather than a component of the mystery puzzle.
Take It or Leave It. The Pete Wennick tale "Take It or Leave It" (1939) shows Gardner's gifts for intricate plot construction. (SPOILERS AHEAD) Like some other Gardner mysteries, it legitimately gulls readers, by mixing "zones of storytelling". In "Take It or Leave It", what looks like an attempt by quasi-detective figures to cover up the crime, actually contains clues to the murder mystery and how it was done.
"Take It or Leave It" is also a Gardner tale, in which a frame is so convincing, that it looks as if one suspect must be guilty. Such an iron-clad frame, exposed at the end, has borderline links to the impossible crime. Something that doesn't look possible - that anyone else could be guilty - is shown at the end to be in fact the truth.
Related Gardner works:
Laying the groundwork for Cool & Lam. The Pete Wennick stories lay the groundwork for the Bertha Cool-Donald Lam novels, which begin with The Bigger They Come (1939). Wennick anticipates Donald Lam:
The Bigger They Come has a plot construction somewhat like "Leg Man", with the first half being a nonviolent tale of Wennick or Lam's counter-scheme, and the second half being a murder mystery built on top of it.
Perry likes:
The book also has a Brigid O'Shaughnessy character, in Eva Griffin, who lies, bats her blue eyes at men to manipulate them, and has aliases. Like Spade, Perry puts her off, and is on to her scheming. Perry's secretary Della even chews him out for his lack of loyalty to Eva, just as Spade's secretary does her boss at the end of Falcon. After the serious appearance of Brigid throughout Falcon, Gardner plainly felt readers were familiar with such a character, because Eva and her escapades are played at least a little bit for laughs throughout Claws. Later filmmakers have also felt Brigid was humorous: such diverse actresses as Bette Davis (Satan Met A Lady - William Dieterle, 1936), Barbara Bain (Goodnight, My Love - Peter Hyams, 1972), and Stephane Audran (The Black Bird - David Giler, 1975) have had a field day spoofing her. In fact, there is a surprising amount of humor in this first Perry Mason novel, unlike the largely serious later books of the series. Some of the satire about politics seems more timely than ever.
One might point out that when Hammett and Gardner were both writing for Black Mask in the 1920's, their stories did not seem especially similar, aside from their hard-boiled milieu. But when Gardner started writing books in the 1930's, he seemed sometimes to be influenced by such later Hammett novels as The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man.
The Opening. The best parts of this book are the pre-murder portions (the first six chapters), which form a pretty good hard-boiled story, gripping and fast moving. They are also the parts that most resemble The Maltese Falcon. The rest of the book is one of Gardner's flatly plotted murder mysteries. Already, here in 1933, Gardner has "perfected" his laborious Mason novel plotting technique. All too many of the Mason books will be written in this style. Mason becomes much less hard-boiled in these chapters, and more just a routine sleuth.
This treatment of the events leading up to a murder as a separate story is not unique to this novel. The opening of Owls Don't Blink (1942) is a well done missing persons case, with some good sleuthing by Donald Lam tracking down a missing woman. There are also some ingenious plot complications. After the first murder, the book becomes much more routine.
Kitten is helped by several factors. The plot is much more unified than in many Gardner novels. All the action relates to a single underlying plot, instead of the endless disconnected subplots of so many Perry Mason novels. So the reader is following a unified story, and an interesting one at that. The characters are all members of a single household, which aids the effect of unity. There are also many likable characters, and a pleasant romantic thread in the story, which gives the book a warm feel. In some of Gardner's poorer books, all the characters are no good criminal scum. Here, even the police have their warm side, even the usually ferocious Lt. Tragg.
In 1940, Gardner wrote two novels that were influenced by Freeman Wills Crofts. The second, The Case of the Silent Partner (1940), is a straightforward imitation of Crofts' The Cask (1920). It is smoothly written, but a very minor book in Gardner's canon. (Gardner's early The Case of the Lucky Legs (1934) is another routine imitation of Crofts' novel.)
Much more creative is the first, The Case of the Baited Hook (1940). Gardner solves most of the case half way through (Chapter 6). There are a few more interesting revelations in Chapter 10, but the end of the novel where the identity of the killer is revealed has little ingenuity. Gardner shows originality in the strange construction of the story, and in the puzzle plot itself. This Gardner book, and several other novels, deals with unexpected, hidden connections between disparate "zones" of storytelling.
The Lam-Cool novel Turn On the Heat (1940), also mixes modes between "mystery" sections and "detection" sections, but in a way less involved in mis-directing the reader. See the detailed discussion of this book, in another section.
The later parts of this book are a murder mystery, somewhat in the same tradition as The Case of the Baited Hook (1940). These sections are too drawn out for the puzzle contained in them. But they do offer an ingenious puzzle plot with a solution that surprised me.
The mystery is given a solution, at the end of this section (Chapter 7). The solution is workable enough, and entertaining to think about. It is good to see the mystery solved, and the solution is fun. However, a nit-picker could point out flaws: the heiress' goals for her actions might not work - the man she finds might not be as malleable as she hopes. And also, that her scheme is awfully elaborate for its hoped-for results. However, this is indeed nit-picking for a story that delivers entertainment and a constant flow of plot inventiveness.
Perry's detective work figures out who the heiress is, and the core facts about what she is up to. However the heiress' motives and ultimate plans are only revealed when she herself tells them to Perry (Chapter 7).
Not Quite a Counter-Scheme. Gardner's pulp stories sometimes have a "scheme / counter-scheme" structure. In these a crook does a scheme, but the hero activates a counter-scheme designed to interfere with the crook's actions. Such pulp heroes generally know all about the crook's scheme, and thus can come up with a clever plan to counter it.
The early sections of The Case of the Lonely Heiress are both related to this, and subtly different from this. The heiress in The Case of the Lonely Heiress definitely launches a scheme, just as in the pulp tales. And Perry offers an elaborate counter-action. However, Perry's counter-action is detection: it is designed to uncover the mysterious true facts about the heiress' scheme. Perry is NOT trying to interfere with the heiress' actions: Perry doesn't understand these actions well enough to interfere with them or alter their outcome. So Perry's counter-action is not quite a counter-scheme in the traditional sense.
Influence from Anderson?. The elaborate, comically extravagant surveillance (Chapter 4) recalls the super-production police stake-outs in Frederick Irving Anderson. Both have good guys agents in disguise.
See also the endless number of undercover police in varied roles, in Gardner's comic Lester Leith tale "The Bird in the Hand" (1932). It too has an Anderson feel.
Repetition. Gardner finds a way to re-play the entire station surveillance (Chapter 6). Ellery Queen and Craig Rice sometimes featured a repeated second scene which surrealistically echoes the first. The Case of the Lonely Heiress has a little of the same feel.
The Magazine. The Lonely Hearts magazine is part of a trend examining Alternative Media in 1940's American Mysteries.
Gardner likes "business processes". We get a detailed and interesting account of the magazine's business processes (Chapter 1).
Country and City. The early sections look at the cliche of country folk not being as sophisticated as city folk. Perry doesn't believe this is true at all anymore (end of Chapter 3). The story has some raucous fun satirizing this stereotype. It definitely suggests that this stereotype is no longer true.
George Bagby's Coffin Corner (1949) (start of Chapter 7) briefly but emphatically makes the same point. In both Gardner and Bagby, a man from the country turns out to be very well-dressed. He is wearing the sharp suits one associates with the 1940's film noir era. Both Gardner and Bagby are explicitly trying to explode stereotypes about people from rural areas.
"Tune of Terror" (1948), a comic book tale about The Black Canary, shows a country boy coming to the big city. The subject has a long history. See the silent films The Busher (Jerome Storm, 1919), Girl Shy (Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor, 1924).
World Food. Perry and Della make dinner plans, first for cocktails at a Hispanic restaurant, then Chinese food. We learn about their menu in detail (start of Chapter 6). This makes a welcome change from the "steak and baked potato and salad" that is the most typical meal in Gardner. It also suggests an openness to different cultures.
The Chinese man who runs the restaurant is Perry's friend. This is typical of the respect in which Gardner held Chinese people.
A woman's photo album plays a role. A woman's album previously was important in the Patent Leather Kid tale "The Kid Throws a Stone".
Links to Painting. A mysterious woman is named Helen Cadmus. One wonders if this is a tribute to artist Paul Cadmus. There are occasional signs in Gardner novels, that he was inspired by contemporary American art.
Paul Cadmus liked to explore racy scenes at the boundaries of sexuality. So does Helen Cadmus, who likes to wear skimpy homemade bikinis, and get photographed in them.
Comedy. A number of scenes are played for rather kinky comedy:
Comedy: The Police. The best comedy scene involves the police (Chapter 9).
Perry is made to wait in an unpleasant police interrogation room He has to sit in one of those uncomfortable chairs (my linked article shows this is a Gardner specialty).
Perry is guarded by a uniformed cop, who seems to be a low-grade working stiff. The cop's conversation moves from one police-ideological subject to another. He constantly celebrates power, precision, hierarchy, letting your superiors do your thinking for you, and control. He does all this while smoking a phallic cigar. He is casually dominating in his behavior: giving Perry orders, lecturing him, walking in on Perry unannounced. He acts as if he has a right to do all those things. The reader gradually realizes that this "regular guy" officer is likely a well-trained ringer, placed there to play mind games with Perry. However, this is never made explicit, and maybe I'm reading this interpretation into the story.
Eventually Perry meets the policeman behind all this. His identity is a surprise. The policeman seems well capable of masterminding this treatment.
The policeman recalls Gardner trickster characters of the pulps, like Lester Leith or the Patent Leather Kid. However, they were loners who liked to bedevil the police. Here it is a tricky policeman who likes to go after Perry. It's an unexpected switch.
Against Groupthink. The evocation of team discipline and precision by the cop is entertaining. But it is not effective in generating real-world results. The police don't gain anything by it in The Case of the Grinning Gorilla. In other words, police "groupthink" fails.
The next year Gardner published the only Perry Mason short story "The Case of the Irate Witness" (1953). It opens with a negative look at a company town, which the tale compares to an anthill. The loss of individuality in the town is linked to a lack of effectiveness.
Both works take a negative attitude to "groupthink", implicitly showing the loss of individuality leads to failure, in practical actions or results.
Paired Buildings. The millionaire has an elaborate compound called Stonehenge. Perry only goes into it three times, each visit dramatic and important to the mystery.
Stonehenge is one of the most elaborate architecural environments in Gardner. We see both its interior, and the landscape around it.
Stonehenge consists of two joined buildings. One is the millionaire's mansion. The other is a building housing his apes and monkeys, where he and his staff do research. At first this recalls the "two neighboring houses" paradigm that recurs in many Gardner works. But those books are about two contrasting groups or families, each in a neighboring house. Stonehenge contains one group, the millionaire and his staff, spread out into two buildings. It's a different approach.
Other similarities:
Back Door. Perry enters the Stonehenge compound through the back door, and makes his way through the building (Chapter 7).
This recalls a bit the Patent Leather Kid sneaking out of hotels by the back stairs and a back door, after he changes his identity. However, Perry is NOT changing his identity or status in this scene. So it is very different from the Kid tales.
Mystery Plot: The Theft. The opening (Chapters 1-6) has a nice comic mystery about a theft. SPOILERS. It echoes the plot of the opera La gazza ladra / The Thieving Magpie (1817).
The opening has a wide variety of characters, some obviously up to no good. Everyone is given excellent dialogue, vivid and often comic. Perry is often engaged in antagonistic negotiation with these characters: also well done.
Mystery Plot: Helen Cadmus. The key mysterious event in the Helen Cadmus plot takes place on a yacht. This is yet another example of Gardner's interest in ships and boats.
This plot comes to a clever solution.
Mystery Plot. The Case of the Terrified Typist is another book in which perspectives on what we have been reading shift in the final sections. It is far less unified in plot, however, than The Case of The Careless Kitten.
Many subplots of The Case of the Terrified Typist resemble the pulp stories Gardner wrote about rogues and their ingenious schemes. The valuable jewels that run through the book are the sort of MacGuffins big in rogue tales.
Working Women. Gardner's fiction is notable for its sympathy with working women. The title heroine is an example: she enters the novel as an office typist. She's immediately involved in a mysterious incident (Chapters 1 - 3). Four of the five witnesses to this episode are also working women: legal secretary Della Street, switchboard operator Gertie, the cigar stand owner, and the stenographer. The only male witness is the building manager.
Perry Mason is in his private office during the incident, so he witnesses nothing. Instead he functions as a pure detective, trying to investigate the incident. Similarly Paul Drake is a detective-not-a-witness after the incident.
Della as Detective. At Perry Mason's suggestion, Della conducts two searches for objects after the incident (Chapter 3). She is highly effective during both searches, finding objects. She also goes beyond Perry's ideas, to make an important discovery of her own about one of the objects. She explains her reasoning from a clue: always important in detective fiction.
Della is almost always successful at her endeavors in the novels.
Looking for Objects Along a Trail. This detection by Perry and Della can be characterized as "looking for objects left behind along a mysterious person's trail". This recalls a similar search by Perry for such objects in "The Case of the Crying Swallow" (Chapter 5). In both cases, the search is successful - and leads to both a document and physical objects.
Mystery Plot. As a puzzle plot tale, this story is just about perfect. As in The Case of the Careless Kitten, Gardner shows he knows full well what a good puzzle plot story is, and how to deliver it. I hope there are more works of this quality in Gardner's immense oeuvre.
Subjects. The title witness lives out in the desert by himself, and is fiercely independent, like the desert characters in Whispering Sands. He hoards money in cans, like the rural hermit in The D.A. Cooks a Goose.
"The Case of the Irate Witness" offers social commentary, all the more potent for not being spelled out, criticizing a company town where everything is owned by one corporation.
Perry Mason. "The Case of the Irate Witness" offers vivid characterization of Perry Mason. Please see the section Perry Mason: Characterization for details.
A few of the Whispering Sands stories are detective tales, as well as being Westerns. "Law of the Rope" (1933) and "Carved in Sand" (1933) mix mystery puzzle plot elements, with Zane's reconstruction of events during a crime by tracking trails left in the desert. This sort of reading of physical trails and evidence at a crime scene goes back to Gaboriau in mystery fiction. Gardner gives it a unique twist by having all the trails, footprints, horse tracks and clues be Western desert based. The puzzle plot ideas are also based on desert lore. The Whispering Sands tales as a whole seem pretty minor, but "Carved in Sand" especially, winds up being a satisfying tale.
"Written in Sand" (1930), an intricately plotted thriller with elements of mystery and desert tracking, is unusual in Gardner's work, in that it gives a detailed picture of a particular geographical region, here the South-East corner of California near Yuma.
Oddly enough, the work by another author that seems closest in approach to Whispering Sands is a science fiction novella, Clifford D. Simak's The Trouble with Tycho (1961), which deals with prospectors in the "desert" of the Moon's barren landscape. Simak's short story "Mirage" (1950) in Strangers in the Universe deals similarly with the Martian desert.
Desert. The Case of the Drowsy Mosquito is Gardner's attempt to integrate his desert mythology with the Perry Mason series. The book gets off to an amusing start (Chapters 1-3), with a desert ecosystem being recreated in one corner of a lavish estate. This symbolically combines his gruff prospectors, with a mansion full of rich, litigating suspects in the Perry Mason tradition.
A Link to Modern Art?. The recreated ecosystem / cactus garden might be seen as an example of what in Art History is called an "Environment": artworks that create a whole elaborate space, in which people can enter and wander around. This was decades before Allan Kaprow's pioneering art-book Assemblage, Environments & Happenings (1966). All of this underscores once again what an experimental writer Gardner is.
The Case of the Glamorous Ghost (1955) will include events that (I've argued) can be seen as echoing contemporary movements in Abstract Painting. These are my interpretations: nothing in The Case of the Drowsy Mosquito or The Case of the Glamorous Ghost makes any explicit links to the world of Modern Art. Gardner was an avid photographer, and photography regularly appears in his books. But otherwise, there are few explicit links to the Art World in Gardner mysteries.
No Floor Plan. Neither here in The Case of the Drowsy Mosquito nor elsewhere does Gardner provide a map or floor plan. Nor does the text specify the exact geometrical layout of the recreated ecosystem / cactus garden. Gardner differs from many Golden Age mystery writers in his lack of interest in such precise layouts or floor plans.
The Town. The estate is in the (fictitious) upscale town of San Roberto, an oceanside town around 100 miles from Los Angeles. It resembles the real life Santa Barbara. Lavish estates of the wealthy are in the hills above town (start of Chapter 2). (Santa Delbarra in Gardner's Gramps Wiggins novels also recalls Santa Barbara.)
Left Wing Politics. A look at an idealistic nurse (Chapter 4) extends the philosophizing mood of this opening. Gardner suggests a interest in left wing politics in this section, something that will briefly return in The D.A. Breaks a Seal (1945 - 1946).
The Housekeeper and her Proverbs. The eccentric housekeeper Nell Sims (Chapter 3) is another of Gardner's sympathetic working women (so is the nurse). Nell Sims' garbled, altered proverbs recall those of the parrot Static in the Air Wave comic book tales (1942-1948). Both Static and Nell Sims often have interesting things to say, with their proverbs. It takes literary creativity to come up with these altered gems.
Mystery Plot. Unfortunately, the novel's puzzle plot develops into one of those complex affairs in which several different groups of crooks are all up to different schemes. This coincidence sinks any logical unity the book's mystery plot might have.
Best mystery idea: an interesting explanation about the drowsy mosquito (set forth: Chapter 4; explained: end of Chapter 19, start of Chapter 20). In its own way, this extends the idea that the recreated ecosystem is an "Environment" in the Art History sense.
SPOILERS. Also good: the mystery about how the poisoning was done (set forth and solved right away in Chapter 4). This perhaps has a relationship to the Impossible Crime: at first it looks as if the poisoning is impossible. In some ways this section (Chapter 4) is like a high quality short-story embedded in the novel.
Discovery of the Murder. The discovery of the murder (Chapter 9) is a vivid, atmospheric episode. It includes intricate plotting. The plot is integrated with the architecture of the crime scene. This is part of the Golden Age interest in architecture.
Perry shows con man like qualities as he manipulates a policeman. Perry's opening interview with a client also shows Perry a bit like a skilled con man (start of Chapter 1).
This "discovery" episode begins and ends with Perry on the road, a nice piece of parallelism. Perry has car trouble at the start, but zooms away at the end: symbolizing his successful achievement of his mission in the intervening events at the crime scene. There is a bit of car culture and road culture in the chapter, something Perry likes.
Mystery Subplot: the Leaks. The best mystery subplot in The Case of the Drowning Duck concerns the Hollywood gossip sheet, and the mystery of who is leaking to it (Chapters 6, 7, 15). Both Della Street and Paul Drake have information that contributes toward the solution (Chapter 7). Perry is the one who ultimately solves the mystery (Chapter 15). Also notable: Perry's stubborn logical analysis shows that the most "obvious" solution to the mystery does not really fit the facts (Chapter 7).
This scandal sheet is part of a trend examining Alternative Media in 1940's American Mysteries.
Social Commentary. Perry talks about the life to come after World War II, which had just started (Chapter 1). Unlike some other passages in Gardner, this talk seems conservative. It mainly looks forward to people creating wealth. And disparages the emphasis on "sharing wealth" in the 1930's: perhaps a criticism of the New Deal. By contrast the novel repeatedly criticizes rich man Witherspoon for his overweening pride in his possessions.
The D.A. Holds a Candle (1938) (Chapter 1) had drawn a negative picture of American youth. They were depicted as lazy and lacking get up and go, the energetic D.A. Selby excepted. "Complete Designs" (1936) also depicts a youth (the office boy) as lazy and rude. The Case of the Drowning Duck takes exactly the opposite tack, showing young people as a dynamic force who are going to make great positive changes when they return from World War II. Although those changes are viewed as mainly creating wealth, at least this is a positive view of American young people. (Young businessman Ted Shale in The Case of the Turning Tide (1941) is also shown as dynamic, if not very successful.)
A different vision of life after World War II is offered in The D.A. Breaks a Seal (start of Chapter 12). While vague, it urges people to look beyond making money as a goal, and to do something bigger.
Color. A character is an enthusiast for color photography (Chapter 4). In 1942 this was still something of a well-to-do man's hobby.
Color is also mentioned briefly with an unusual fact about how Chinese farmers identify ducks (middle of Chapter 10). This is another example of Gardner's sympathetic interest in the Chinese.
The horse wrangler, Buck Kramer, is an especially nicely developed character. There is quite a lot of horse information in Up for Grabs, more than I remember in the Whispering Sands stories. The funny gambit with the horse (end of Chapter 13) recalls the horse finale of the Western thriller "Flight into Disaster" (1952). Buck Kramer's name also recalls cowboy Buck Hoxey in "Flight into Disaster".
The painter who takes photos at the ranch, Faith Callison, is also well-done. The book reminds one that Gardner was an avid photographer in real life, often of desert scenes. (A woman photographer with a very different personality appears in The Case of the Empty Tin).
The light-hearted Up for Grabs focuses less on murder than on clever scams. In this it recalls Gardner's 1930's pulp stories about con-men Lester Leith and Paul Pry. Just about everyone in this novel is working some angle or hustle, some harmless and legal, others definitely crooked. These little scams and schemes furnish a continuous flow of ingenious plot in the book. The story also recalls the D.A. series of the 1930's and 1940's, with a sneaky, not-quite-honest criminal attorney called A.B. Melvin, who recalls the great A.B. Carr of the D.A. books. Both Carr and Melvin are also in this Rogue, con-man tradition. There is something endearing about seeing Gardner revive the ancient traditions of his storytelling.
Both of the main mystery plots in Up for Grabs are riddles about traffic accidents, also the subject of The D.A. Cooks a Goose (1941 - 1942), which has a completely different puzzle plot, dealing with such accidents. Gardner shows plenty of ingenuity in both novels. A third kind of puzzle plot about accidents, different from the other two, is found in a small subplot in The D.A. Takes a Chance (1948). Gardner re-used the plot of The D.A. Takes a Chance in the Perry Mason novel The Case of the Cautious Coquette (1949) and in The D.A. Breaks an Egg (1949), where it plays a more central role in both novels.
Nature. "The Clue of the Screaming Woman" (1949) has a mountain setting, rather than the desert. But it resembles Gardner's early desert mysteries, in centering its plot around tracking trails left by suspects and victims. The story is loaded with vivid detail, with the mountain setting and tracks done well. There is also more romance than in many Gardner tales.
"The Clue of the Screaming Woman" is one of Gardner's best works. Among other things, it has achievement as a work of "serious literature". Specifically it recalls poetry and fiction of the Romantic Era, in its focus on nature writing. "The Clue of the Screaming Woman" should be much better known.
Like many Gardner works, "The Clue of the Screaming Woman" focuses relentlessly on plot. Each sentence advances the plot of the story. But in "The Clue of the Screaming Woman", the "plot" includes the nature settings of the tale. So all the nature writing in the tale is part of the plot. This gives the tale an unusual structure.
Social Commentary. "The Clue of the Screaming Woman" explores social class. It gives a negative view of the rich. Like "The Case of the Irate Witness", it includes a powerful businessman who has too much control over other people. In both works this is seen negatively.
The tale also looks at agism, and prejudice against older people such as Sheriff Bill Eldon.
Characterization. We learn a great deal about how the hero Frank Ames conducts his life in the mountains, and his work there. And about his attitudes to the Nature around him, and different kinds of people. This look at a "man's work and attitudes about his work" recalls the characterization of Perry Mason in Gardner's tales. Perry Mason is also seen in terms of his "work and attitudes". The two men's specific work activities are very different: Perry is a lawyer and detective; Frank is a trapper and fisherman in the mountains. But the structure of what is covered is similar, concentrating on the men's current work.
The long opening (Chapters 1-5) tells a pleasantly elaborate tale, with a great flow of story and several nice twists and turns. The solution (Chapters 12-14) is none too surprising, and the novel does not excel therefore as a puzzle plot mystery. Still, the solution's twists are decent, and continue both the deductions from crime scene clues and the book's pleasing flood of story.
The Case of the Perjured Parrot consists of one long murder investigation, of a single murder. It is more unified than many Gardner books. There is no preliminary mystery subplot in the opening chapters either: Perry Mason starts investigating the murder in the first chapter. Perry works less to defend a single client in this tale, and more purely as a detective, as well.
The Case of the Grinning Gorilla doesn't have nature settings. But it does have a research lab full of monkeys and apes. It also looks at science and technology involving blood stains (Chapter 17).
The Case of the Drowning Duck, The Case of the Perjured Parrot, The Case of the Drowsy Mosquito, and The Case of the Grinning Gorilla all have animals as their title characters.
Mystery Plot. The D.A. Calls it Murder is at its best in its opening section (Chapters 1 - 6), which sets up the murder mystery, and which contains some nicely surrealistic plot twists. However, after this the mystery plot is mainly a complete botch, with endless subplots coincidentally piled up, and implausible behavior for most of the suspects. (There is a good later section about a minister (Chapter 10), but this has little to do with the mystery plot, strictly speaking.)
An Origin Story. The opening chapters also describe the immediate aftermath of the election that swept Doug Selby and his friend Sheriff Rex Brandon to power, so they do have an introductory role to play for the entire series of books. They also mark the first appearance of Selby's reporter friend Sylvia Martin. Some other series characters debut too: chief of police Otto Larkin, and coroner Harry Perkins.
However, we learn little about the earlier lives of any of these characters. Golden Age mysteries often lack the elaborate "back stories" that are fashionable in contemporary crime fiction. Instead, they concentrate on showing their heroes operating as detectives in the Present.
We do learn that Selby had been a boxing champion in college (Chapter 14). Gardner himself had been a boxer in his youth. Even here, however, one suspects that Gardner is more interested in establishing Selby's fighting ability in the Present, rather than telling us anything about Selby's Past.
Madison County doesn't really come alive, as it does in many later D.A. books. Many of the characters are from out of town, civic issues are downplayed, and the county and its society don't play much role in the mystery. Much of the action takes place at a generic hotel, that could be anywhere. It is possible that at this stage Gardner was not really thinking of making Madison and its politics a key part of the series.
A Fighter Hero. Selby is described as a "fighter" (Chapters 1, start of 3). This recalls those other Gardner lawyers, Perry Mason and his predecessor Ken Corning. It also recalls Sidney Zoom. All of these men are honest characters conspicuously on the side of right - unlike some of Gardner's Rogue characters like Lester Leith.
Detection. Gardner's short story "Complete Designs" (1936) has a psychologist character who offers psychological profiles of employees. Selby and Brandon do something similar in a small way, when they create a profile of the minister (end of Chapter 1).
Selby looks for inconsistencies in the crime scene. He gives a speech about making facts "balance", like figures in bookkeeping (Chapter 5). SPOILERS. These facts include:
Photography. A character has photography as a hobby (Chapters 2, 10). Gardner himself was an enthusiastic photographer, and the subject regularly pops up in his work. The book stresses the emotional importance of photography to the character, and his willingness to pursue it despite his poverty.
The character takes up photography because he lacks the skill to paint (Chapter 10).
A Minister and Ethics. A Methodist minister helps another character reform, and start living a worthwhile life (Chapter 18). This subplot reflects the Mainline Protestantism's centuries-old emphasis on character and ethical behavior. See the phrase "The Protestant Ethic" and all it implies.
The minister is always wanting to help "the unfortunate" (Chapter 10). This section advocates for the idea that a minister's chief job is to help the unfortunate.
In a more realistic way, the minister recalls Gardner's hero Sydney Zoom. He looks utterly unlike the imposing Zoom, and he is poor while Zoom is rich. But both specialize in helping the unfortunate.
The same section (Chapter 10) looks at how churches are funded. First we get Sylvia Martin's views on how funding should work, then later Mrs. Larrabie tells us about the unpleasant reality.
SPOILERS. The character being a minister also has a legal role in the mystery plot, based on a minister's legal right to perform marriages (Chapter 20). Such a legal point of view is typical of Gardner's fiction, which often centers on lawyers and the law.
The D.A. Holds a Candle has an unusually large cast of characters. It takes over two pages to list them all in the paperback.
Mystery Plot. Gardner gets mystery puzzles going right away (Chapter 1). SPOILERS:
A decent plot development: the mysterious hitchhiker who shows up (first part of Chapter 2). This is an example of Gardner "thickening the plot": usually a positive development in his works. The puzzle of the hitchhiker is mainly one of motive: what is he doing and why?
Soon a corpse is discovered (Chapter 4). At the book's solution, a not-bad surprise develops this plot.
A mysterious phone call offers insight about the corpse (last part of Chapter 6). (It turns out unsurprisingly that the call is from a drug store. In that era, drug stores always had phones the public could use: one of the main reasons people went to drug stores.)
How good are the mystery plot aspects of The D.A. Holds a Candle? I'd rank the plot as mid-level. The ideas are not classic. Still, they are all real mystery plot ideas. They show Gardner in there trying, making a determined effort to create mystery puzzles.
Two Crimes. Like some other Gardner tales, The D.A. Holds a Candle has both a crime in the past and a crime in the present. The past here is a fairly recent past.
Two Cabins. The suspects rent two cabins at the Auto Camp, one for the two women, the other next door for the two men. This is a bit like the "two neighboring houses" approach found in the series of Gardner tales starting with The D.A. Draws a Circle. The two cabins are far less central to the story, though, than the paired houses in the later series.
On the Road. The motor court or motel, Keystone Auto Camp (Chapter 4) is an early example of "road culture" in Gardner, something that runs through many of his works. Later parts of the plot also have automotive aspects.
The Locale. There is some good descriptive writing, in two passages showing atypically inclement weather in the area (start of Chapter 1; start of Chapter 4). The second passage has a brief but vivid portrayal of the D.A. series' town Madison City.
The city is depicted in almost toy-like fashion. It could be considered as an "Environment" in the Art History sense.
We learn the city has interurban tracks (start of Chapter 4). In Gardner's "A Double Deal in Diamonds" (1931) hero Paul Pry takes an interurban.
Color. The rich kid has a spectacular car, "bright red, trimmed with white" (Chapter 1). The car's color is seen as part of its appeal.
Working Women. The two women Audrey and Monette, become more sympathetic when a third woman points out that they are secretaries, and exhausted from their jobs (last part of Chapter 5). This is typical of Gardner's sympathies for working women.
At the book's end well-to-do young woman Inez Stapleton expresses contempt for the "social activities" in which women-from-rich-families of the era were expected to spend their lives. Inez Stapleton decides to get a profession, instead.
The D.A. Draws a Circle (1939) has an interestingly plotted first half (Chapters 1 - 8). Gardner keeps putting his plot pieces together in the most unexpected ways. The various fragments keep joining up out of left field. After this opening, the book becomes less and less interesting, and gradually turns into a scheme to get a suspect to confess. Its opening is most unusual, however. The D.A. Draws a Circle is one of the most creative of the D.A. books.
In addition to its many other virtues, it is the debut novel of Doug Selby's perennial antagonist, the wily criminal attorney A. B. Carr. Carr is intellectually brilliant, slick, crooked as a snake, and a richly comic figure. He is related to the Rogue figures such as Lester Leith who showed up in Gardner's pulp fiction. However, he is older, more socially sophisticated, and a clever attorney to boot, like Perry Mason. Carr is one of Gardner's best characters.
Gardner often connected up the most disparate characters possible to make a story. In Circle, he keeps coming up with strange links between the people in the novel. The book opens one of the characters moving in next to another. This encounter sets up the start of his design pattern in Circle, and is the central link around which all others grow. The later developments in the story keep coming back to this first link in unexpected ways. It is a recurring base throughout the whole story. We are not used to this sort of thematic circularity in a novel. It is like a composer introducing his main melody at the start of a symphony, and then having it regularly repeat with variations throughout. Or Homer declaring at the start of the Iliad, "The wrath of Achilles is my theme". Gardner's design winds up becoming impressively imaginative. It is not quite a pure puzzle plot - it is hard to see how a reader could predict all these links based on clues Gardner provides - but it does develop into an interesting pattern of relations.
Gardner used the common mystery approach of the crime in the past and the crime in the present. Both here and in The D.A. Breaks a Seal, the past crime gets a puzzle plot treatment, whereas the present crime is used to make a complex design of relationships. This is similar to his two part construction in the Lester Leith tales, where there is both a crime and a later intervention by other characters. Here in Circle, the second crime consists of interventions in response to the first. These interventions are done by criminals in Circle, not by the protagonist as in the Lester Leith stories. As in the Leith tales, only the first of the crimes has a puzzle plot.
Film Version. I saw the dull and none too faithful film version of The D.A. Draws a Circle, the made for TV movie They Call It Murder (1971), which uses the title of the series' original novel. The film maintains the names of the book's characters, but does little to convey their personality.
The opening of the book has some vivid writing (Chapters 1-4, first half of 5). After this the pace slackens and the story is duller.
Rural Life. The novel, like a number of Doug Selby tales, begins with a passage showing rural life in Madison County (Chapter 1). It depicts subjects found in other Selby novels:
Processes. The opening shows Gardner's interest in standard processes (Chapter 2). We learn the standard process Selby has put into place for handling fingerprints. Such processes interestingly add to the plot. See also the hotel's "breakfast ordering" process in The D.A. Breaks a Seal (start of Chapter 8). And the way the coroner in The D.A. Holds a Candle (first part of Chapter 6) always puts everything from a corpse's pockets into a lock-box, to prevent evidence tampering.
In real life standard processes were associated with Frederick Winslow Taylor and his famous book The Principles of Scientific Management (1911). Standard processes are a key part of modern business, non-profits and government.
Self Education. Madison County can't afford to hire an outside fingerprint expert. So instead it hires a young man, who trains himself in fingerprints and photography by reading books (Chapter 2). This self-education is seen as both practical and admirable.
Gardner's pulp magazine series hero Speed Dash trained himself to have a photographic memory.
The opening of "The Case of the Crying Swallow" (1947) has hero Perry Mason keeping up with his profession by reading a recent state supreme court legal decision. This too is seen as admirable.
A. B. Carr. This story marks the return of lawyer A. B. Carr, who becomes a series character here; Gardner originally seems to have planned him as a one-shot in The D.A. Draws a Circle, but he appears in this and all subsequent Selby books.
Gardner manages to turn the entrance of A. B. Carr in the story into an exciting event. His entrance, often unexpected, will have a similar excitement in later books, at once thickening the plot, and suggesting to readers that events are much more complex than they first appear: always a delightful development for mystery fans. He tends to show up initially, not as an antagonist for Doug Selby, but in connection with the mystery plot itself.
Titles. The titles of the D.A. series follow a pattern Gardner previously established for the Patent Leather Kid: "The hero verbs a noun". The D.A. Cooks a Goose actually reuses the title of a Kid story: "The Kid Cooks a Goose" (1934).
The opening chapter, which equates an ultra-conventional family with all that is good, and a working woman with sophisticated corruption, is also hard to accept. One doubts if Gardner really believed this himself. He usually associated virtue with feistiness and get up and go, not with conventionality.
The book does score some points for the sheer complexity of its plotting. Some of the more believable plot twists hearken back to Gardner's earlier non-series newspaper mystery, The Clue of the Forgotten Murder (1934), which did them better.
A. B. Carr. Also on the plus side are the appearances of A. B. Carr here - I especially enjoyed the visit to his house in Chapter 16. Gardner shows a flair for Carr's sophisticated comic dialogue, and his high tech devices. One wonders if Carr's name is a homage to the great John Dickson Carr. Carr certainly likes Selby personally, even if they are determined legal antagonists.
Political Idealism. The opening of Chapter 12 contains an unusual passage in which the heroine speculates about the hero's future. It shows both political idealism, and romantic yearning. One wishes Gardner had followed up on his ideas here, in later novels about the D.A. ("The Case of the Crying Swallow" (1947) (Chapter 1) has a returning war hero condemn "class distinctions" as "old-fashioned": also an idealistic political passage.)
Mystery Plot. The mystery subplot about a will is well done.
But the murder itself does not achieve puzzle plot brilliance. The few clues to the identity of the killer (set forth at the book's end) are vague and inconclusive - many people could have committed the crime.
The subplot about the breakfast is simple but clever (set forth end of Chapter 7 and start of Chapter 8, solved Chapter 20). Gardner incorporates the hotel's process for ordering and delivering breakfasts, a nice complication (start of Chapter 8).
Selby's tracking down information on the victim is a sound piece of detective work (end of Chapter 8, Chapter 9).
The D.A. Breaks a Seal starts off right away with a mystery: the identity and purpose of the lady who arrives by train (start of Chapter 1). It takes a long time to figure out how she is connected to the rest of the story. Such novels as The D.A. Draws a Circle feature odd, unexpected connections between characters. In The D.A. Breaks a Seal the connection between one character (the lady) and the rest is a baffling, long-standing mystery.
Links to The D.A. Calls it Murder. The D.A. Breaks a Seal contains plot elements that recall the opening of the first Doug Selby book The D.A. Calls it Murder. SPOILERS:
Earlier "Death Rides a Boxcar" (1944) showed its Army hero Gabby Hilman doing actual work for Intelligence.
Up to Date. Smugly provincial small town lawyer W. Barclay Stanton is criticized for failing to "keep pace with the times" (first part of Chapter 10). This is seen as laziness on his part: always a deadly sin for the work-obsessed Gardner. This recalls The D.A. Goes to Trial (Chapter 2), where Selby is praised for keeping law practices in Madison County "up-to-date". As that book points out, people there "like to feel they're modern and up-to-date, even if it is a rural community."
The novel makes use of a common Gardner approach, the "mystery plot whose events occur in two cities". Gardner makes much use of the shuttling back and forth of the characters between the two towns. This eventually builds up into elaborate, intricate patterns. There is perhaps some formal similarity between this "two city" construction, and the "two house" construction found in The D.A. Draws a Circle and other Gardner books.
Another Gardner formal device is seen in this story: the inter-blending of "detective storytelling" with "mystery storytelling". In these chapters, the detectives do much sleuthing around, visiting other cities, collecting clues, interviewing witnesses and so on. The suspects also do much interaction here, stirred up by this detective work. Without really announcing it to the reader, Gardner is soon introducing new mysteries into the plot. These mystery situations have as part of their background all the movements of the characters during the sleuthing sections. So the detective parts of the book serve as a background and formal structure for new mysteries. Gardner did something similar in his The Case of the Baited Hook (1940). This approach produces complex formal patterns of plot. It is an example of Gardner's experimental approach to mystery fiction, where he was often doing complex, innovative things with story construction. It also keeps the reader very much off base: the reader has to learn to think of the detective sections in new ways and from new perspectives, to understand the mysteries hidden within them. It is not that the reader is confused about the plot: Gardner's storytelling is always absolutely clear. It is how the reader thinks about the plot that undergoes a shift. It is "fair" in terms of detective construction, but very devious.
The final chapters of the novel contains the actual murder mystery, dealing with who killed whom and why. It seems uninventive and botched, especially compared to the leisurely storytelling of the earlier sections of the novel. There is a good deal about civic corruption in these sections, a popular theme among many Black Mask writers, but it is not developed very well.
Mystery Plot. It is a minor book, that interweaves through a tangle of coincidences at least three separate mystery plots. It is hard to see how any reader could deduce the solutions of these tales. In other words, the book lacks "fair play".
Elements of one of the three plots recall The D.A. Cooks a Goose.
A. B. Carr. The book is readable, and has some pleasant enough storytelling. It is at its best in Chapter 5, which describes the latest events in the life of A. B. Carr in grand comic style. The episode about the stolen jewelry (Chapters 19 - 22) also involves Carr extensively. These sections are in many ways "comedies of manners". Carr is extremely sophisticated, Selby himself is suave, his friend Sheriff Rex Brandon is honest and outraged, and there is much comic repartee. A story like this is most interesting for what it has to say about the on-going characters, whom Gardner clearly loved writing about, than for the strictly mystery elements, although there is a nice formal reversal in the jewelry sections. Character interaction here builds on the relationships established in previous novels, such as the feuding between Brandon and Carr in The D.A. Calls a Turn.
The two households in Circle were resonatingly different from each other, setting up a polarity that dominated the whole novel. Here in Empty Tin the two households are in delicious comic contrast: Mrs. Gentrie's home is as middle class as possible, in fact, one of the most bourgeois settings ever to show up in a Gardner book. Its conventional nature is highlighted and exaggerated to the nth degree for comic effect. The family in Empty Tin also looks forward to the middle class family in The Case of The Careless Kitten (1942) the next year. SPOILERS. Meanwhile, Kane's apartment next door is the center of a spy melodrama involving gun running to the Chinese in World War II. Gardner had deep sympathy for the Chinese, and this is one of many references to them in his work.
This contrast between households is the stuff of farce, and Gardner uses it to make a delicious surrealist confrontation. However bourgeois Mrs. Gentrie's establishment is, Gardner puts it right in the center of the mystery action, with Mrs. Gentrie's home canning being the locale for the Empty Tin of the title. It is outrageous melodrama centering itself on the most domestic activity possible of the 1930's, home canning. (Gardner had previously used home canning in "The Kid Clips a Coupon" (1934).) I suspect canning was a favorite activity of ordinary Americans, people slightly less prosperous than the middle class Gentries. It is important that Gardner put mystery in the heart of the Gentries. In a mystery novel, the importance of a character or locale is measured by how much mystery attaches to it. This perhaps seems like an unusual criterion, as least by the standards of realistic fiction, but the structural underpinnings of puzzle plot fiction make this evaluation inevitable. If Gardner had not associated any mysteries with the Gentries, they would have seemed "light weight". Combined with their everyday background, the novel would be a contrast of dull convention with the mystery laden melodrama of the spy apartment. Gardner did something completely different, however: he suggests the mystery is actually in the heart of the bourgeois family. This gives them tremendous weight and balance in the pattern of the story.
Empty Tin is full of small mysteries, which Gardner solves as he goes. These pleasant little puzzlers add greatly to the enjoyment of the book. Most of these are related to uncovering the truth about the crime. But occasionally Gardner introduces a mystery that involves a meta-level to the story. In Chapter 9, Paul Drake has to figure out how to deal with the police, then he has to deduce Perry's secrets. He shows insight and logic, in a charming episode.
Perry Mason himself functions here more as a pure detective than he does in many Gardner books. His client is not on trial, and simply hires Mason to solve the crime. There are no courtroom scenes, and no passages where Mason obscures evidence or whisks clients away from the police. Mason even cooperates with the police, feeding information to Lt. Tragg. Mason is also set-up more as a 1930's style detective hero, complete with scenes of danger and action. This book would make a good movie.
I was first alerted to Empty Tin by reader Lisa Childress. Her comments are interesting: "First of all, it is, I am pretty sure, one of the few Mason's that does not include a trial scene. Also, the Della Street portrayed here is quite different from her usual character. (In Dorothy B. Hughes' book, The Case of the Real Perry Mason, the author reveals that Della was based on three different women, all sisters, who worked for him at various times. The one in Empty Tin is not the same one in the later books. Interesting psychologically, I think). It has as a main character, a woman who in the 90's would be an executive, but in the 40's is confined to running her home with the same kind of efficiency. (Gardner spells this out explicitly. In fact, his attitude toward the women in his novels is what has kept me reading him into adulthood.) It has a Chinese element in the plot and missing heiress elements. The tone of the novel is not as cut and dried as some of the later ones, with more description than is usual. All in all, I think it is an atypical rendering of many typical Gardner themes. On another front, the plotting of the Mason books varies more than people think. Some others besides Empty Tin concentrate more on the solving of the crime than in the courtroom scenes, although Empty Tin is one the few that omits the trial entirely."
Jon L. Breen's study of courtroom fiction Novel Verdicts contains a complete list of Perry Mason novels that do not include trial scenes.
Ghost begins with a torrent of story invention (Chapters 1-9). Every time the reader is convinced they know what is going on, Gardner introduces something out of left field. Eventually this inventiveness runs out of steam. Gardner replaces it by a number of things: some detective work, some mystery twists, and above all, by some well staged courtroom encounters. These later chapters are a bit thin, but pleasant.
In the opening (Chapters 1-2), information is dropped into Perry's lap, first from a newspaper article, then from a client. But starting in Chapter 3, Perry does real detective work (strongly aided by Paul Drake and Della Street, both of whom make significant discoveries.). The information they get, step by step, is the result of that detective work. Such detection makes enjoyable reading.
Despite its title, there is nothing supernatural about The Case of the Glamorous Ghost. Right from the start, the book makes clear that the alleged "ghost" is a real live woman.
SPOILERS. Douglas Hepner is eventually revealed to be a crook who preys on other crooks (Chapter 6). This puts him in the same category as Lester Leith and Paul Pry. However, he is less sympathetic and less romanticized than these early pulp heroes of Gardner. He does share their good looks and charm.
Art. The Case of the Glamorous Ghost employs bright color imagery with the luggage (end of Chapter 4). The "paint on the bathtub" scene (end of Chapter 7) also suggests color. While Gardner does not make the analogy, both color images suggest abstract paintings:
Anticipating The D.A. Draws a Circle. Most of the characters in the book can be considered as members of three different families. Their constant interactions can be seen as a precursor to the mysteries constructed around two households, that begin with Gardner's The D.A. Draws a Circle (1939). As in the later tales, people that seem to have nothing to do with each other keep finding themselves more and more involved. Unlike the later books in the series, the characters do not have fixed homes. Instead, they are all aboard a cruise ship during much of the plot.
Other elements that anticipate Circle and the later books:
Marriage: Skepticism. Several women in The Case of the Substitute Face express doubts about the value of marriage as an institution. They prefer to remain single, and keep their independence. This recalls the blunt realism of Gardner's work: he admires people who face facts squarely, who take on life and do not run away from it.
In The D.A. Holds a Candle (Chapters 6, 21), an unwed mother argues that a marriage license is just a formality, and that people should not condemn her because she never got married. However, she is not opposed to marriage. She just claims that being in love and having a child is just as good as a formal marriage. The novel does show the huge practical problems she faces as an unwed mother, though.
It shares the two apartment approach found in the Circle tradition.
Gardner Traditions. There are links to the Circle - Tin tradition:
Structure. The novella-length "The Case of the Crying Swallow" is constructed like a Perry Mason novel, with huge amounts of plot stuffed compactly into the tale. As in quite a few Gardner novels, there is an opening non-murder mystery (here, the whereabouts of a missing person) - which in turn leads much later to the discovery of a murder.
There is no courtroom drama in "The Case of the Crying Swallow" though. Such courtroom scenes take up much of the second half of many Perry Mason novels. This absence actually accounts for much of difference in length between "The Case of the Crying Swallow" and a typical Mason novel.
Solution: Multiple Independent Actors. The solution of the tale reveals that three different suspects have independently done different actions during the course of the story. And earlier in the tale, we learned about actions of two other suspects. This all links the tale to what I've called the pulp style of plotting. It is not a pure example of the "pulp style".
This multitude of independent characters involved with the solution, can also be seen as a flaw, when the story is judged by the standards of Golden Age mystery fiction. I was greatly annoyed with this solution, the first time I read the tale. On a recent re-reading, I was more accepting of this solution. At the least, Gardner has included a lot of plot in the tale.
Architecture and Landscape. Architectural aspects of the mansion in "The Case of the Crying Swallow" are discussed in detail. They play a role in the story. This is an example of the interest in architecture in Golden Age mystery fiction. We also learn about the mansion grounds and surrounding countryside: which reflects the related interest in landscape in Golden Age mystery fiction.
The peninsula with a mansion high on its top, recalls the landscape of The Spanish Cape Mystery (1935) by Ellery Queen.
Art. At the beginning Della "neatly" lays out ten large bills on Perry' desk. We don't learn exactly how they are spread - but likely it involves geometry. This is perhaps another image in Gardner that evokes abstract geometric art.
A Women-Oriented Writer. There are two men suspects and five women suspects. This shows once again how woman-oriented Gardner was as a writer. However, while Gardner regularly featured working women in his tales, only one of these women has a job: the nurse.
Black Market. There's an interesting comment about black marketeers at the start of the tale. The actual story does not deal with such people. Still, it gets Gardner's perceptions in print, on a subject of concern in the era.
"The Case of the Crying Swallow" is thus a mainly non-hardboiled mystery, that references current tough-guy crooks in its opening. This recalls the approach used by Mary Roberts Rinehart in Miss Pinkerton (1932).
Paired Houses. The Case of the Nervous Accomplice (Chapter 3) has two houses next door to each other. This recalls the paired houses in the Circle - Tin tradition. But there is a big difference: these houses are nearly abandoned, and soon to be torn down as part of freeway construction. Nobody lives there full time. The real estate people who own the houses, do conduct occasional activities there - which enables the plot of the novel.
From an upper floor room in one house, one can see and spy on the activities in the other house's yard. This recalls "The Case of the Crying Swallow", where the tower room in the mansion allowed one to spy upon the trailer next door.
We get a detailed look at the two houses and especially their yards (Chapter 3). This reflects the interest in landscape and architecture in Golden Age mystery fiction.
The outdoor landscape in The Case of the Drowsy Mosquito is close to what artists call an "Environment". The landscape in The Case of the Nervous Accomplice might be an Environment too.
Social Background. The novel includes a look back, at the many stages the property has gone through during its history (Chapter 3).
Building a freeway was topical in 1955. This was the era in which the US was building its interstate highway system.
Della as Detective. Della makes an acute, surprising observation (last part of Chapter 5). This discovery plays a role in advancing the detective plot.
The Marriage Subplot: Structure. When her husband cheats on her, the heroine comes up with a plot to save her marriage (Chapter 1). This is rather in the "Scheme / counter-scheme" tradition of some of Gardner's pulp stories:
The wife's counter-scheme is original. And it has a certain satiric value.
The Marriage Subplot: Feminist?. I feel sympathetic with this wronged wife, trying to save her marriage. But this whole subplot made me uncomfortable. The rotten husband sees both wife and girlfriend as sex objects. They are like two hookers he's rented for sex, in his view. The wife feels she has no choice but to accept this, to save her marriage. Her whole situation is thus nightmarish.
The wife's situation reflects those of many real-life women. Feminists will agree that this is a real, and common problem. The novel also (correctly) blames the husband and sees the wife as innocent. In that sense The Case of the Nervous Accomplice is a feminist novel. But The Case of the Nervous Accomplice does not advocate any feminist changes in society. It does not recognize that women need more power and jobs, and social changes to make them treated better.
Its plot is hardly fair play, which is made worse by its strange construction, with its villains off stage throughout the story. But there are some pleasant detective ideas in the complex plot, and lots of original train lore.
Plot aspects recall The Case of the Empty Tin:
It can be seen as a somewhat distant descendent of the Circle tradition. There are not two houses, but there are two families, who are very different in tone. Each comes to Cool & Lam with a mystery: a missing person case. At first, the cases seem to have nothing to do with each other. But soon Donald Lam is uncovering more and more connections. The mysterious events turn out to be nocturnal once again, and involve strange disappearances, in the Circle tradition.
Like Pass the Gravy of the same year, mysterious events occur "on the road" and at night, with a service station playing a role in the events.
This light-hearted work has plot, plot and more plot, in the Gardner tradition. The solution is not quite fair play: there is so much plot, that it is hard to see how a reader could deduce all the events in the book before they happen. Still, the flood of storytelling makes for enjoyable reading.
Gardner Traditions. Both novellas have some links to the The Case of the Empty Tin / The D.A. Draws a Circle tradition. Factors in common:
The Clue of the Runaway Blonde. "The Clue of the Runaway Blonde" (1945) shows the realistic side of tampering with evidence. Perry Mason and other Gardner characters always enjoyed tampering with evidence, altering it with abandon and never suffering any consequences for it. Here a more sober realism prevails, and we see the frightening, life ruining consequences of such a felony. These aspects of the story made me nervous, and the novella is fairly stressful reading.
Much better is the mystery plot itself, which contains a pretty well done impossible crime. Gardner's impossible crime technique is eclectic here; it involves both mechanical ingenuity and psychological trickery. Gardner utterly eschews any supernatural atmosphere. Instead his interest seems piqued by a complexly laid out crime scene, something that comes across with great visual intensity. Today we would say that the crime scene has "mandala" like elements to it, as a complex geometrical pattern that is meditated on throughout the story; but probably such a concept was not explicitly in Gardner's mind in the 1940's.
The crime scene is outdoors, and involves elaborate traces, tracks and constructions in the ground. Such "earthworks" recalls the desert trails in such Whispering Sands stories as "Law of the Rope" and "Carved in Sand". Gardner had a real flair for constructing such "worlds in the dirt". The crime scene in "The Clue of the Runaway Blonde" is probably more interesting as a whole, than for the specific impossible crime idea Gardner uses.
Gardner's story reminds one a bit of other impossible crime tales of the era that were also set in the outdoors: John Dickson Carr's She Died a Lady (1943), and Fredric Brown's "Whistler's Murder" (1946).
"The Clue of the Runaway Blonde" has a simple Dying Message, something rare in Gardner. The message has the merit of being fairly plausible, something a man might actually say. But otherwise it is not creative or especially clever. The dying message is set forth (Chapter 10), then solved soon after (start of Chapter 11).
The way "The Clue of the Runaway Blonde" has both an impossible crime and a dying message, suggests Gardner was trying to incorporate some items of traditional mystery fiction into his plot.
BIG SPOILERS. "The Clue of the Runaway Blonde" does a good job with its choice of killer.
The Clue of the Hungry Horse. "The Clue of the Hungry Horse" (1947) follows many of the same approaches as "The Clue of the Runaway Blonde". Both:
People in Gardner rarely get dressed up. They are usually working, and seem indifferent to what they are wearing. Exception: when his male characters go to gambling establishments, something of which Gardner strongly disapproves, they are often in evening clothes. Gardner suggests that this too is bad: it intimidates them, make them uncomfortable, and separates them from common sense. The fancy clothes represent a loss of good judgment. Gardner novels on this topic:
Vice. It is more hard-boiled than most, and often looks at vice, soon to be the subject of the Perry Mason The Case of the Hesitant Hostess. It has two interesting portraits of women who are "bad girls": Millie the loose woman (end of Chapter 9) and the ex-stripper Irene (Chapter 15). Gardner is sympathetic to both.
The rest of this discussion has SPOILERS.
Gay Men. Top of the Heap looks briefly at two men, whose characters are intertwined with aspects of gender.
The newsboy (Chapter 8) is one of the few teenage men in Gardner. He is escaping from a life of crime, something that peer pressure pushed him into. He did not want to be "called a sissy": fear of a queer label leads to bad judgment and crime. Now he is entirely on his own, a frightening portrayal of social aloneness. It is hard not to wonder if he is indeed queer, and if we are getting a glimpse of gay life of the time, teenage runaways on their own. This evening encounter with a lost man recalls the Sidney Zoom tales, and Zoom's nocturnal cruisings through parks.
Bill (Chapters 16-17) is different: a fantasy of toughness. He develops a perverse relationship with hero Donald Lam, which also has a queer undertone. The encounter echoes Lam's encounter with a policeman (end of Chapter 6), which has a similar perverse charge. Both men grip and seize Lam. And both deceive him.
Mystery Plot. The plot of Top of the Heap is not one of Gardner's best. The ultimate mystery solution (Chapter 17) is mainly routine, tying together the disparate subplots. It does have an interesting aspect: a new wrinkle on the "two-city" theme that runs through Gardner.
Two earlier chapters have neat plot surprises, both of which border on the surrealistic. SPOILERS:
Later in Top of the Heap, Gardner also shows elaborate security features at a gambling casino (Chapter 16). But these are not used for any sort of impossible crime puzzle. (One also recalls the jewelry store alarms in "The Kid Stacks a Deck" and "The Kid Steals a Star", the high tech alarm in The Case of the Empty Tin, and the high tech features of the home in The D.A. Calls a Turn (Chapter 16)).
Mixed Modes. Turn On the Heat mixes modes between "mystery" sections and "detective" sections - but in a way less involved in mis-directing the reader than some Gardner tales that do this. It starts with Lam and Cool getting a mysterious commission to search for a woman who disappeared years ago. The sleuths have to solve two mysteries:
These sections (Chapters 1-4, 10, 12) together make up a fine novella. This novella has an experimental quality, due to its investigation of "a mystery about detection".
SPOILERS. Another way in which this novella "mixes modes": the detection by the bad guys conceals hidden criminal action by them. This detection-concealing-crime occurs in other Gardner works too.
A Corrupt City. The quest eventually leads Lam to Santa Carlotta, a prosperous but highly corrupt oceanside city under control of underworld gambling lords (Chapter 4).
One suspects that the fictitious Santa Carlotta is based on the real life city Santa Monica, in 1940 notorious for its corruption. Raymond Chandler had earlier offered a thinly disguised account of corrupt Santa Monica, called in his works Bay City. Bay City appears in Chandler's "Bay City Blues" (1938), Farewell, My Lovely (1940) and The Lady in the Lake (1943).
Gardner was exploring the politics of a small but sometimes corrupt California town in his Doug Selby books at this time. In both the Selby novels and Turn On the Heat, the potential for reform comes from honest men running for office on reform tickets.
Television. Turn On the Heat was made into an excellent television pilot Cool and Lam (1958). It is discussed in detail in the article on its director Jacques Tourneur.
Gold Comes in Bricks is a minor Gardner novel. These comments are included here for the sake of completeness. They do not form a recommendation of the novel.
Best Parts. The sections leading up to the murder show Gardner's flood of storytelling invention (Chapters 2, 3, 4).
After this, there are brief episodes that discuss the crime. These are good bits, a page or less in length, immersed in long sections that are none too interesting:
Links to Chandler. Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep (1939) of the year before has a plot premise that anticipates Gold Comes in Bricks. In both a rich man hires the private eye hero to investigate a mystery that is threatening his willful adult daughter.
There are differences:
Boxing. We learn very little about the wealthy family's mansion. Unlike many mystery novels which show the lifestyles of the rich in detail, the house and its routines are given almost no description. This is definitely not Downton Abbey.
An exception: we learn a lot about the gymnasium in the basement (Chapter 3). The gym has a boxing ring. Gardner had been a boxer in his youth. We are perhaps seeing Gardner's fantasy of a fabulous mansion: a house with its own boxing ring!
Gardner satirizes the rich family, in that none of them have ever actually used the ring, or the gym as a whole. In general, they seem none too fond of exercise, the daughter excepted.
In "The Case of the Crying Swallow" (Chapter 1) we learn that the mansion has its own golf course and riding trails on its grounds.
Evading the Law. The first Cool & Lam novel The Bigger They Come had Donald finding a loophole in the law of murder. In Gold Comes in Bricks crooks find a clever way to evade California's Blue Sky Act law regulating securities (Chapters 5, start of 6).
Water Adventure. The opening (Chapter 1) gets Perry involved in an adventure scenario. A mysterious woman secretly swims into a heavily guarded island owned by a millionaire, and attempts to pull off a surprise errand. This sort of adventure episode is atypical of the Perry Mason books. This opening is enjoyable to read. But unfortunately it turns out to be not strongly connected with much of the rest of the book.
Gardner liked scenes with boats, water or marinas. See: The Case of the Dangerous Dowager, Top of the Heap. In all three books, the tight security around some boat, marina or island area plays a role in the plot.
Legal Battle. An enjoyable legal battle follows. SPOILERS:
Chair. We learn that Perry uses a deep leather chair to seat clients (first part of Chapter 7). The client's response to the chair, which causes most people to sink into it, is seen by Perry as a a key to their personality. Perry actually keeps a card index recording clients' response to the chair. The chair is "one of Mason's most subtle psychological weapons." It puts many people "off their guard" by relaxing them. Others "squirmed uneasily". This is an example of the deep chairs that pop up in accounts.
The records Perry keeps of clients' response to the chair, echo the earlier records kept in "Thieves' Kitchen" (1932), a Lester Leith tale. Leith has records kept of suspects' responses to free cakes and pies.
Links to Film Noir. Hostess resembles its contemporaries in film noir. In particular, the crooked night club that is the center of Hostess resembles the one in Fritz Lang's The Big Heat (1953) of the same year. Both take place in the same sociological coordinates. In both, the night club maintains an aura of respectability, and is patronized by middle and upper middle class citizens, mainly men. In both, the club is a gateway into vice, a place where ordinary people can meet the underworld. Both night clubs are full of hostesses, both clubs are owned by crooks, and both are under the protection of crooked city governments and their police forces. The corruption involved eventually becomes a spring board for murder. There is a similar look at a town full of crooked night clubs in Phil Karlson's The Phenix City Story (1955), although the night clubs in that film cater to a much lower class clientele, mainly soldiers from a nearby Army base. Gardner is not interested in the violence of much film noir, or its tough guy heroes. Instead, he is largely interested in How Things Work. The book has a similar subject matter to film noir, but a different tone, one rooted in Gardner's puzzle plot fiction.
While Perry is not depicted as a two-fisted private eye, he is shown as an idealistic crusader for justice in the book. Instead of being hired by a client, he is working here as a court appointed attorney to a poor man. He resists many attempts to discourage him, pays huge sums of money for his crusade out of his own pocket, and makes several speeches about the need for justice. This recalls the idealistic policemen and civic leaders in the film noirs of the era. The whole book is Gardner's version of a film noir, fascinatingly adapted to his own writing style.
Mystery Plot. Hostess is richly plotted. It involves several puzzle plots, whose solutions are sprung on the reader at various times throughout the story. These are quite clever. The finale leaves several holes in the plot - the bad guys' motive for framing the poor man seems weak, for example - but the book as a whole is a well plotted story.
SPOILERS. The book is also unusual in that the crimes are not traced to a single perpetrator, in the Golden Age tradition. Instead a whole gang of crooks turns out to be involved. This does not surprise the reader greatly, and it does not violate "fair play": Gardner has indicated all along that most of these people are both working together, and up to no good. Still, it is a shift from the typical mystery novel construction.
Della Street. Della Street takes an active role in this story, as she did in The Case of the Empty Tin (1941). Perry and Della's journey to Las Vegas in this tale recalls a similar visit to another city in Empty Tin.
Fish or Cut Bait offers a nearly endless flow of plot. The book is hardly fair play - it is hard to imagine anyone logically deducing each new development from previous clues. Yet the plot developments also form logical extensions of previous situations. The work is another example of Gardner's seemingly inexhaustible ability to generate complex plot.
This section also contains the unusual ballistics idea of "dating the gun".
The Bigger They Come. The Bigger They Come (1939) has an impossible appearance puzzle too, trying to figure out how a guest made it inside a watched hotel. Gardner's solution uses a fairly common gambit in impossible crime tradition. He develops some nice new variations on it, as well.
The Count of Nine. The Count of Nine (1958), a Bertha Cool and Donald Lam novel, opens with an impossible theft (Chapters 1-8). The theft recalls the criminal schemes found in Gardner's early pulp stories about Lester Leith and Paul Pry. The subsequent murder mystery in the novel is much less interesting.
The Kid Stacks a Deck. "The Kid Stacks a Deck" (1932) has an impossible escape, as hero the Patent Leather Kid escapes from a building surrounded by police. The escape situation is related to other Gardner impossibilities, but with twists:
