Erle Stanley GardnerRezensionen

A fun quick read. I was surprised to find that Perry Mason had no part in this book. Gramp Wiggens was new to me. Lots of fun.

Shills Can't Cash Chips review: This book was a lot of run to read. There's no way you could have had a chance to solve the case before the end as new, significant details are brought in throughout the story. However, if you just give yourself up to the flow of the stor and the situations Donald Lam finds himself in (and how he gets out of them), it's a great read for the genre! I highly recommend.

Forty-second Mason. Lawyer nitpicks poorly thought out case to death.

Twenty-second novel in the Mason series. Mason shoots himself in the foot for 200 pages. Some of the shine wearing off.

This Perry mason is distinctly, and frequently unpleasantly, unlike the TV one. Read anyway.

Written in 1933, this first novel of the Perry Mason series is a wonderfully fun read/listen.

The Bigger They Come: A Cool and Lam Mystery by Erle Stanley Gardner

BIBLIOGRAPHIC DETAILS:
-PRINT: COPYRIGHT: (January 1, 1939) 10/4/2022; ISBN: 9781613163566; PUBLISHER: Penzler Publishers; PAGES: 227; UNABRIDGED (Paperback info from Goodreads)
-*DIGITAL: COPYRIGHT: (1/1/1939) 10/4/2022; ISBN: 9781613163573; PUBLISHER: American Mystery Classics / Simon & Schuster; PAGES: 251; UNABRIDGED
-AUDIO: COPYRIGHT: Not found
Feature Film or tv: Not found

SERIES: Cool and Lam #1

MAIN CHARACTERS: (list not comprehensive)
Bertha Cool - Owner of detective agency
Donald Lam – hired by Bertha
Alma Hunter – Friend of client of the Cool detective agency
Sandra Birks – Client of the detective agency
Morgan Birks – husband of the client of the detective agency
The Chief – a criminal
Fred – an employee of the Chief’s
Bleatie – Sandra’s brother (sort of)

SUMMARY/ EVALUATION:
-SELECTED: It came to my attention that a television show that I enjoyed as a child, Perry Mason, was based on a series of books by Erle Stanley Gardner, and that a precursor series was Lam & Cool, so I wanted to read the first one of that series.
-ABOUT: Donald Lam competes for employment at a detective agency, and although he doesn’t look the part, Bertha Cool appreciates his imagination and hires him on the spot. He is assigned to a missing person case of sorts—to find a spouse for the purpose of serving divorce papers, but there turns out to be much more to the job.
-LIKED: It was clever and entertaining.
-DISLIKED: NA.
-OVERALL: This has the flavor of mysteries from the decade that it was written, 193o’s.

AUTHOR:
Erle Stanley Gardner
From Wikipedia:
“Erle Stanley Gardner (July 17, 1889 – March 11, 1970) was a prolific American author. A former lawyer, he is best known for the Perry Mason series of legal detective stories, but he wrote numerous other novels and shorter pieces and also a series of nonfiction books, mostly narrations of his travels through Baja California and other regions in Mexico.
The best-selling American author of the 20th century at the time of his death, Gardner also published under numerous pseudonyms, including A. A. Fair, Carl Franklin Ruth, Carleton Kendrake, Charles M. Green, Charles J. Kenny, Edward Leaming, Grant Holiday, Kyle Corning, Les Tillray, Robert Parr, Stephen Caldwell, and once as Perry Mason character Della Street (The Case of the Suspect Sweethearts). Three stories were published as Anonymous (A Fair Trial, Part Music and Part Tears, and You Can't Run Away from Yourself aka The Jazz Baby).”

NARRATOR:
N/A

LOCATION(S)
California; Arizona

TIME(S)
1930’s

GENRE
Mystery, Fiction, Crime, Detective

SUBJECTS:
Process Serving; Law; Detectives; Divorce; Crime

DEDICATION:
Not found.

SAMPLE QUOTATION:
From “Chapter One”
“Pushing my way into the office, I stood just inside the door, my hat in my hand.
There were six men ahead of me. The ad had said between the ages of twenty-five and thirty. If appearances were any indication, some of them were optimistic liars. For the most part, we were a seedy-looking outfit.
A straw-haired secretary behind a typewriting desk banged away at a typewriter. She looked up at me. Her face as cold as a clean bedsheet.
‘What do you want?’ She asked.
‘I want to see Mr. Cool.’
‘What about?’
I moved my head in a comprehensive gesture to include the half-dozen men who were looking up at me in casually hostile appraisal. ‘I’m answering the ad.’
‘I thought so. Sit down,’ she said.
‘There seems,’ I observed, ‘to be no chair available.’
‘There will be in a minute. You may stand and wait, or come back.’
‘I’ll stand.’
She turned back to her typewriter. A buzzer sounded. She picked up a telephone, listened a moment, said, ‘Very well,’ and looked expectantly at the door which said ‘B. L. Cool, Private.’ The door opened. A man, who looked as though he was trying to get to the open air in a hurry, streaked through the office. The blonde said, ‘You may go in Mr. Smith.’
A young chap with stooped shoulders and slim waist got to his feet, jerked down his vest, adjusted his tie, pinned a smirk on his face, opened the door to the private office, and went in.
The blonde said to me, ‘What’s your name?’
‘Donald Lam.’
‘L-a-m-b?’ she asked.
‘L-a-m,’ I said.
She jotted it down, and then, with her eyes on me, started making shorthand notes under the name. I could see she was cataloguing my personal appearance.
‘That all?’ I asked when she covered me from head to foot with her eyes and finished making pothooks with her fingers.
‘Yes. Sit down in that chair and wait.’
I sat and waited. Smith didn’t last long. He was out in less than two minutes. The second man made the round trip so fast it looked as though he’d come out on the bounce. The third man lasted ten minutes and came out looking dazed. The door of the outer office opened. Three more applicants came in. The blonde took their names, sized them up, and made notes. After they were seated, she picked up the telephone and said laconically, ‘Four more,’ listened a moment, and hung up.
When the next man came out, the blonde went in. She was in there about five minutes. When she came out, she gave me the nod: ‘You may go in next, Mr. Lam,’ she said.
The men who were ahead of me frowned at her and then at me. They didn’t say anything.
Apparently she didn’t mind their frowns any more than I did.
I opened the door, entered a huge room with several filing cabinets, two comfortable chairs, a table, and a big desk.
I put on my best smile, said, ‘Mr. Cool, I—’ and then stopped, because the person seated behind the desk wasn’t a Mister.
She was somewhere in her sixties, with gray hair, twinkling gray eyes, and a benign, grandmotherly expression on her face. She must have weighed over two-hundred. She said, ‘Sit down, Mr. Lam—no, not in that chair. Come over here where I can look at you. There, that’s better. Now, for Christ’s sake, don’t lie to me.’

RATING:.
4

STARTED READING – FINISHED READING
8/23/23 – 9/16/23

Why do I get the sneaking suspicion Gardner wrote this over a quiet weekend, perked up on chai and chocolate biscuits?

Seriously, the 82nd Perry Mason novel (but my first) is murder by numbers. The dialogue is uninventive, the mystery intriguing but ultimately more of an exercise than a narrative, and things plod along smoothly with the clockwork sound of an expert pulp writer. There's nothing really wrong with it, and I like that Gardner is (very lightly) self-parodic in the denouement scene, where an eccentric judge somehow convinces all parties to bypass usual trial procedure and just tell their stories to one another.

Still, I doubt I'd go back to this well very much, even if the "golden era" novels are much more clever in their execution. It just has that feel of a jobbing writer churning out another volume. There's nothing wrong with that (I'm gradually moving into that field myself) but this book fulfills its function, nothing more.

I hadn't read this Perry Mason mystery in a long time, and had forgotten that his relationship with his secretary Della Street was sometimes an after-hours thing.
These are typical of the series, but not outstanding.

This was a neat little puzzle with excellent misdirecting clues, one of the more tightly plotted ESG that I've read. It also has the classic cross examination trick of rapid fire questioning to elicit the truth (à la Legally Blonde) which is a premise I'm always happy to accept in fictionland. These were topped off with some coy ol' fashion smoochin' between Perry and Della, the development of which I must pinpoint, which book of the series did this start happening!

I think I must have bought this secondhand when I was a teenager - one of the people Mason is engaged to defend is a 'leg model' so there is some excuse for the cover picture. There was no court room action at all in this story and no police questioning either, unless you count their questioning of Mason himself at the end.

I didn't really enjoy this one: the client was obnoxious, everyone lied to Mason, Mason lied to the police, Mason was supercilious with Paul Drake, and there was a fair amount of repetition. It is very fortunate that the people Mason represents always turn out to be innocent...I think it is time my small ESG collection is returned to a secondhand book store.½

Perry Mason & the Treacherous Client
Review of the Della Street Press Kindle eBook (September 17, 2011) of the William Morrow & Company hardcover original (1933)

“People that come to me don’t come to me because they like the looks of my eyes, or the way my office is furnished, or because they’ve known me at a club. They come to me because they need me. They come to me because they want to hire me for what I can do.”
She looked up at him then. “Just what is it that you do, Mr. Mason?” she asked.
He snapped out two words at her. “I fight!”
She nodded vigorously. “That’s exactly what I want you to do for me.”

I recently enjoyed The Case of the Baited Hook (Perry Mason #16, 1940) from a Kindle Deal of the Day and realized that I had never previously read the classic lawyer-detective series. I now went back to the very first book to see how the origin story was told. It turned out that The Case of the Velvet Claws wasn't an origin story at all as Perry Mason is already running a law practice with Della Street as his secretary and the Paul Drake Detective Agency as his go-to investigators.

Mason takes on the case of Eva Griffin which begins as an effort to avoid blackmail from a scandal sheet. Della Street takes an immediate dislike to the client and warns Mason off, but Mason perseveres regardless. Street's instinct proves correct as when a murder occurs further into the story, Griffin threatens to report that Mason himself may have been the killer. Despite the treachery of the client, Mason still works to solve the case and save her from a murder accusation and conviction.

On the Berengaria Ease of Solving Scale® this was a fairly easy solve, a 2 out of 10, as the most likely culprit proves to be the villain in the end. That was after all the confusion of the client's apparent involvement had been explained away by Mason.

I'll probably still pick up a few further Perry Masons when I'm looking for a read in a light hard-boiled vein. Gardner is definitely reliable for that. None of the writing approaches the poetic metaphors of Raymond Chandler though, so it isn't quite top drawer.

See dust cover at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/07/The_Case_of_the_Velvet_Claws.jpg
The spine and front cover of the original 1933 William Morrow & Company hardcover. Image sourced from Wikipedia by Facsimile Dustjackets LLC — William Morrow & Co. first edition, Fair use, Link.

Soundtrack
The Opening and Closing Themes for the original Perry Mason TV series were composed by Fred Steiner and you can hear them at this YouTube clip. The composition was actually called Park Avenue Beat and you can read about it further at Wikipedia.

Trivia and Links
Make a note about the website of Facsimile Dust Jackets LLC in case you ever have an older plain volume in your home library which you'd like to display on your shelves with the equivalent of its original dust jacket. I've used them in the past so can definitely recommend the high quality of their work. The price is relatively high considering it is only the dust cover and not the book itself, but in the case of a well-loved older volume you likely won't begrudge the price.

The Case of the Velvet Claws was adapted as a movie in 1936 which starred Warren William in his 4th and final appearance as the lawyer/detective. The major change from the novel is that Perry Mason is married to his secretary Della Street. You can see a trailer for the film on YouTube here.

The Case of the Velvet Claws was adapted for television in the original Perry Mason TV series (1957-1966) which starred Raymond Burr as the lawyer/detective. The adaptation was broadcast as Season 6 Episode 22 in 1963.

This had its moments and was very readable as ever, but the denouement relied on the murderer having so much on the spot presence of mind and deviousness as to be unbelievable. There was a fair amount of repetition as Della agonized over the fact that Perry had concealed a piece of property stolen from the murder scene and thus put himself on the wrong side of the law. His motive for doing so was tied up with the business the murder victim had been involved in. No one seemed particularly bothered about the morality of keeping this secret, which troubled me a little. Obviously times have changed...

Perry Mason & the Mystery Client
Review of the American Mystery Classics Kindle eBook (2020) of the William Morrow & Company hardcover original (1940)

Considering my love of mystery classics it is perhaps surprising that I'd never previously read a Perry Mason novel. I picked up the 16th of the series The Case of the Baited Hook in a 2023 Kindle Deal of the Day and also saw that it was part of an American Mystery Classics reprint series. I can see how the various complications of the case made it a candidate as a "classic" as selected by editor/publisher Otto Penzler.

Lawyer Perry Mason is called out in the middle of the night to accept a case where he is asked to defend a possible future client. The "bait" in the case is that Mason's fee is 1/2 of a $10,000 bill. He will only collect the other half when it is presented to him by his client if and when she calls on him. The catch (or the "hook") is that the client is a masked woman who prefers to not reveal her identity.

Later the next day, it becomes evident that the crime involved is a murder. Mason must not only find the killer in order to solve the crime, he also has to determine who his client is and what was the reason for the elaborate method of his hiring. His trusted secretary Della Street and right hand man private detective Paul Drake are there to back him up.

See cover at https://pictures.abebooks.com/inventory/19371309871.jpg
The front cover the original 1940 William Morrow & Company hardcover. Image sourced from AbeBooks.

Overall, this left a good impression and it was somewhat of the hard-boiled school, with Mason playing more of a detective role than a lawyer. There are no courtroom scenes. In fact I think I read somewhere that in the original books, the cases never get to court but are always solved through the preliminary investigations with Mason & company often in conflict with the District Attorney and the police force. I plan to read several more Perry Masons and American Mystery Classics.

Soundtrack
The Opening and Closing Themes for the original Perry Mason TV series were composed by Fred Steiner and you can hear them at this YouTube clip. The composition was actually called Park Avenue Beat and you can read about it further at Wikipedia.

Trivia and Links
The Case of the Baited Hook was adapted for television in the original Perry Mason TV series (1957-1966) which starred Raymond Burr as the lawyer/detective. The adaptation was broadcast as Season 1 Episode 14 on December 21, 1957.

This edition of The Case of the Baited Hook is part of the Otto Penzler American Mystery Classics series (2018-ongoing). There is a related Goodreads Listopia here with 55 books listed as of early January 2024. There are currently 68 titles listed at the Mysterious Press online bookshop. The official website for the series at Penzler Publishers seems to show only the most recent and upcoming titles.

Good twists, turns & misdirection½

Interesting twists and resolution. Perry, Della, and their detective friend are on top of the game again! =)

Another good read in the series! Lam and Cool start investigating a car accident that pretty quickly turns into a murder case! And again, real estate subdivisions are involved, like a previous book in the series. It moves at a good pace but does get a bit convoluted with the car accidents intertwining. By the end, "cool"-er heads prevail, and Lam and Cool come out with their account paid in full!

"The sergeant had a message for me?" I asked.
"Two words," he said. "Drop dead."½

“You look as though you took the full count,” he said.
“Only the count of nine,” I told him.
“You think you’re still in the fighting?”
“Yes.”

Bertha and Cool are hired to guard a high class party from gate crashers. Nonetheless, a jade Buddah and a pygmy blowgun go missing. And then the host of the party ends up murdered, by blow dart! It's a tough case to unravel, but Bertha and Cool take it anyway!
This read was much better than the last book I read in this series, "Fools Die on Friday”! A.A. Fair got his characters right back on the pages in the way that I like them most! Sort of confusing at the end, but a good read through and through!½

Two persons in the city had the number of Perry Mason's private, unlisted telephone. One was Della Street, Mason's secretary, and the other was Paul Drake, head of the Drake Detective Agency.

I decided to read this book because of the new series. I am glad I did but I probably won’t read anymore. Perry Mason is a dick. I mean a really big one. It clashes so greatly from my memories of the tv series I couldn’t get past it. More like 2.5 stars for me.

The Half-Wakened Wife is one of the better Perry Mason stories I’ve read over the years, and is from that period in the 1950s when Gardner's series was at its zenith. It has some particularly nice moments between Perry and Della that make it memorable. While the caveat of Gardner’s dialog, sometimes much too formal — having characters speak on paper as they never would in real life abounds — exists as always, it’s overcome by some nifty plotting, and those romantic moments between Perry and Della.

It all has to do with a woman named Jane who wants to sell an island and share the wealth with her sister Martha and Martha’s daughter, Marjorie. Oil rights to the island are in dispute because of some tricky business, however, and it may hold up the deal. Perry joins all the participants in the negotiations on a yachting outing designed to hash out the problem. When he hears a scream on the fog-shrouded night at sea, however, and a woman runs smack-dab into him holding a gun, it can’t be long before someone is charged with murder — even if they can’t find the participant who went overboard.

In some unusual twists, Perry and Paul get sued, and Perry gets fired by his own client, whom Paul Drake believes is absolutely guilty. What leads to the lawsuit is a wet blanket and shoes which prompts Perry to accuse someone, and end up with egg on his face — right in front of Tragg! As usual, the plot’s all a bit complicated, but in the end it all makes sense. Before we get there, we have one of the most romantic moments in the long-running series, as Della sits on the grass with Perry’s head in her lap, remaining awake beneath the stars while Perry sleeps. It’s a rare tender moment, but a second surprising one at the end reveals a wistfulness of the heart for the lawyer and his secretary. They are considering purchasing a property in Della’s name, for a day yet to come. Knowing what we do now, one has to wonder if this wasn’t a reflection of Gardner’s own life.

Only the unnatural formality of dialog in a few spots — especially a scene with Paul Drake rattling on and on from his bed while Perry and Della sit and listen — mar a terrific entry in the series. It’s a minor distraction from a great story and entry in the series. It adds a rather unfortunate sense of artificiality to the story that pulls us away from complete immersion. It’s a minor caveat, however, and I’m still giving this one five stars because it’s got so many good moments to offset the few less than stellar ones. A really great one in the series.

“She’s too busy stealing her sister’s boyfriend.” - Della Street

“No, she’s just giving her sex appeal its morning exercise.” - Perry Mason


The Case of the Green-Eyed Sister is one of Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason novels written in the 1950s, when Gardner was at his zenith in the famous series. This one is surprisingly breezy, in spite of the usual complicated plot involving blackmail and eventually, murder, and a rather lengthy courtroom scene.

It begins like a horse jumping from the starting gate when Della makes certain Perry knows she doesn’t like the green-eyed client waiting to see him. Her name is Sylvia Bain Atwood, and she’s trying to get out of some tricky business being run by a guy named Brogan, that Paul Drake believes is a shady but smart blackmailer. The backstory involves whether the money that her ailing father used to get rich — there’s a lot of money involved — came from an old robbery. Sylvia doesn’t want that, because it could void all that money she and her more subdued sister, Hattie, and her brother will inherit.

Sylvia thinks she’s smarter than Mason, and it jams up the works! Her efforts to stay ahead of the blackmailer — and Mason — muddy things up at every turn. With Della in tow, Mason walks in on a murder scene he’s been set up to find, and has a very disagreeable Sgt. Holcomb looking to catch Perry on the other side of the line he’s always skirting. Tragg lends Mason a hand in this one, tipping him off at one point! But Mason’s not the only one in a jam, because when the father kicks off, the green-eyed sister’s schemes cause Hattie to be charged with murder.

This is really an excellent entry in the series, very enjoyable. Even a protracted courtroom questioning doesn't slow this one down enough to mar it significantly. An ice pick, some very tricky business with the blackmail tape everyone wants, and some even trickier business regarding time of death make this one zip along nicely. Even the lengthy questioning in court of witnesses is involving rather than tedious, and this case has one of the most unusual endings of the entire series.

Will Perry let someone fry for a crime they didn’t commit? Will the green-eyed sister get the last laugh? You’ll have to read it to find out. A good one!

"Fools die on Friday... and Thursday's almost over."

Despite the quote attributed to Raymond Chandler on the front cover, this is definitely not the best of the series. I'd say it's almost the worst one in this series that I've read so far. A client hires Cool & Lam to prevent a poisoning, and it happens anyway! And then there's a lot of running around, and arsenic, and a dentist, and real estate. And then the killer is caught. I really had a hard time staying interested in this plot and found my mind wondering quite a bit as I read. Well, at least I learned one thing - there's a product in the world called anchovy paste. So...

“Fry me for an oyster!”½

Perry Mason is a grown-up Encyclopaedia Brown and especially so in this one, where the case-breaking clue was so offhandedly waved across the reader's face. Also, I wouldn't say that I love it but the old-timey objectifying of the assorted ingénues and dames in the series is very funny to me. Not to mention Delia the enabler! Why, yes, Perry, your next appointment is extremely suspicious but she does have all them curves that you appreciate! Camera cuts to me having a snorting chuckle.

These six masters include Ellery Queen, in what is his, to me, best short novel. I think the conclusion is truly surprising.
Michael Gilbert seldom produces anything but a masterful work, and this is another, with Patrick Petrella as the chief protagonist. It gives such a great look at England's criminal underground.
Ed McBain is a favorite to lots of people, though not to me. You will probably like this entry.
Georges Simenon is another I don't much care for. I've wondered why and think maybe it's at least partly because the original is in French and what I read is a translation. Madame Simenon has a prominent part in this story and that helps.
Erle Stanley Gardner is an uneven writer. This is rather contrived, but interesting.
Finally, this John D. MacDonald story is not about Travis McGee, is not, in fact, part of any series, but is an interesting story, one we might need to laugh at ourselves about.
All in all, this is a good collection.