I find these old school mysteries very entertaining. Although I've found some of the ones written in the 1930's to have unfortunate very un-PC references, I didn't notice any in this one. A wealthy eccentric is murdered in a remote cabin with only a parrot as witness. Was it the soon-to-be ex-wife named Helen or another Helen who has been romantically linked to the victim? Was the pet parrot really at the crime scene? And what about the check forgeries that the victim discovered shortly before his death? Lots of twists and turns in this one made it a fun ride. ( )

Much different from TV episode.

"As I've mentioned before, when people get fixed beliefs, they interpret everything in the light of those beliefs. Take politics, for instance. We can look back at past events, and the deadly significance of those events seems so plain that we don't see how people could possibly have overlooked them. Yet millions of voters, at the time, saw those facts and warped their significance so that they supported erroneous political beliefs.
"The same is true of the things which are happening at present. A few years from now we'll look back in wonder that people failed to see the deadly significance of signs on the political horizon. Twenty years from now even the most stupid high school student can appreciate the importance of those signs and the results which must inevitably have followed. But right now we have some twenty-five million who think another. And both sides believe they're correctly interpreting the facts." ( )

My father was interested in reading the very first Perry Mason mystery and we think this was it. (Ryan pointed out to me - I don't know Ryan, but he seems to know what he's talking about - that the first Perry Mason was The Case of the Velvet Claws.) He pointed out to me that the language is different, but he couldn't quite say how. I think it reads like a radio script myself.

Published in 1939, there's a quote which seems descriptive of today's economy.
"You might be interested in his economic philosophy, Mr. Mason. He believed men attached too much importance to money as such. He believed a dollar represented a token of work preformed, that men were given these tokens to hold until they needed the product of work performed by some other man, that anyone who tried to get a token without giving his best work in return was an economic counterfeiter. He felt that most of our depression troubles had been caused by a universal desire to get as many tokens as possible in return for as little work as possibly - that too many men were trying to get lots of tokens without doing any work. He said men should cease to think in terms of tokens and think, instead, only in terms of work performed as conscientiously as possible." ( )

In "Perjured Parrot" a wealthy man is murdered and his parrot apparently knows the name of the killer, only the parrot wasn't in the room when he was killed, and both the man's soon to be ex-wife and his current new wife share the same first name. Perry does a brilliant job of cross examining Sargent Holcomb on the stand, first to show how faulty his interpretation of the evidence is, and then to get the real killer so scared of being caught he flees. This one had a really happy ending. ( )