The outcome is well hidden until the end. ( )

One of the better Perry Mason mysteries. Hamilton Burger was really upsetting the judge, and I wasn't sure how Perry Mason was going to get out of this one. ( )

I like the Perry Mason novels

They are not great literature.

They are not great plots , me thinks

But they are great ( simple ) reads.

They all merge into one another but that does not matter.

I aim to read them all.

Bigship

19 August 2013 ( )

To a child reared on the Perry Mason TV series it came as something of a shock to discover the novels upon which it was based, in which Perry isn't nice respectable Raymond Burr but a flamboyant figure, more P.I. than lawyer, who spends much of his time on the fringes of legality, not infrequently straying beyond them. Likewise, Della seems to be a bit of a vibrant gal rather than the almost demure Barbara Hale. I've lost count of the number of the novels I've read since that discovery; these days I regard them as an entirely different entity than the TV series and later movies.

They're also all fairly interchangeable; I don't know how often I've been partway through a Mason novel and realized I've read it before. But, and this is the great thing about my enjoyment of Mason novels: it hasn't mattered. Assuming sufficient time has elapsed, I won't remember how the crime was achieved or who did it any more than I might remember a two-year-old cricket result: I had great fun at the time, and that's all that's needed.

So, even though it's been just a few weeks or months since I read this book (I'm catching up on a lot of unwritten book notes), all I can remember is that (obviously, from the title) a confusion of identity plays a part and that the setup is genuinely puzzling -- a father disappears into thin air while his daughter is briefly in the room next door cooking the breakfast second helping he's asked for -- and that the solution, for once in a Mason book, is likewise. So back on my shelf it goes to wait for that precious moment when I spot it there, read the blurb, flip through the pages, and think, How come I haven't read this one before . . .? ( )

definitely not a play fair mystery. The solution lies in one of Father Knox's rules for playing fair with the reader. ( )