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Book Review: THE CASE OF THE CARETAKER'S CAT (1935) by Erle Stanley Gardner

8/3/2022

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There is much to enjoy in the seventh published Perry Mason adventure, not the least being the conceit that the celebrated criminal lawyer might take on a Persian cat for a client. In truth, it’s the cat’s owner, a cantankerous older man named Charles Ashton, who visits the office and enlists Mason to help him keep Clinker, his feline companion. Ashton had been the caretaker of Peter Laxter’s city home, and while the late Laxter’s will allows Charles Ashton to continue living at the residence, no such codicil can be found for the cat. There’s an additional angle that attracts Perry Mason: if he chooses to fight for Ashton to keep Clinker, he also has an opportunity to stand up to the shady lawyer Nathaniel Shuster, now representing Samuel Laxter, the dead man’s grandson.

Ironically, it is Clinker who outlives his owner. After threatening to challenge the entire will due to Samuel Laxter’s intolerance of a cat, Charles Ashton’s body is discovered in his room. Clinker’s muddy pawprints lead from the open window onto the bed. The cat’s presence seems to implicate Douglas Keene, a young architect and boyfriend of the disinherited Winifred Laxter. Keene was seen leaving the house that evening as he carried Clinker, and if he left the grounds after the cat came into the room on that rainy night, then he becomes the prime suspect in Ashton’s death.

As it often happens in Erle Stanley Gardner’s busily plotted stories, the entanglements and complications build steadily, and Perry Mason must be both proactive and defensive to arrive at the truth. Among many questions to answer: was millionaire Peter Laxter killed by carbon monoxide gas piped into his bedroom before he perished in a house fire? Who was a man named Clammert, who had access to a critical safety deposit box? And who killed Edith DeVoe, an attractive nurse who might have known more about the Laxter household than was healthy for her?

As with the other series titles first published in the 1930s, The Case of the Caretaker’s Cat is lively in pace and impressively, almost intimidatingly complex in plot. Author Gardner has a marvelous gift for keeping the pot boiling, and I would be hard pressed to recall a single scene in any Perry Mason book from this period that didn’t advance the story and offer a new piece of information to be puzzled over. That breathless pacing can be a bit fatiguing, but it also offers the reader more twists per page than can be found anywhere else.

Even better, this is the first of the early Mason titles whose prose feels unlabored and genuinely effective, as if Erle Stanley Gardner had hit his stride and found a way to balance the writing and characterization to accompany his often brilliant plotting. There seem to be fewer unnecessary “Perry Mason asked” and “Paul Drake replied” dialogue identifiers than in previous books, and some of the author’s paragraph descriptions are nicely evocative instead of feeling stilted.

Caretaker’s Cat is also the first book to fully explore the relationship between Mason and his smitten, capable secretary Della Street. In an entertaining extended storyline, the lawyer asks Della to join him to impersonate a honeymooning couple, and she inhabits the role with verve. If there’s an of-the-era sexism to the stereotype of the pining secretary, it’s nicely offset by Della Street’s fierce intelligence on display. In the courtroom climax, for example, Street is called to the stand to be questioned by opposing counsel and acquits herself admirably, showing that she can parry and equivocate as heartily as her employer.

Speaking of characters and their strengths, Winnie’s Waffles entrepreneur Winifred Laxter may stand as a stereotypical pillar to support the plotline – she’s the respectable ingenue who rejects her amoral family only to find that she and her fiancé are being pulled in once more, this time as murder suspects. But Gardner presents the lovers’ plight in a simple and sympathetic way, and she and Douglas Keene are the innocents that we, and Perry Mason, want to see exonerated and brought together by story’s end.


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On the opposite side lives Nathaniel Shuster, a wonderfully oily creation much different from the long-suffering (but mostly respectable) District Attorney Hamilton Burger. Shuster, by contrast, is a “yapping terrier” of a lawyer with “Franklin teeth”, false teeth so poorly spaced that the excitable man spits when he talks. We learn that Shuster is a fee-chaser, an attorney always looking for ways to add to his clients’ bills. He also holds a grudge against Mason, and all that antipathy promises some delightfully acrimonious exchanges.

Finally, this case offers some wonderfully twisty Perry Mason dodges and courtroom revelations. There’s a doozy of an alibi where Gardner orchestrates a clever reversal, essentially one relying not on where the suspect was at the time of a murder but rather where the victim was.

The reason for Mason’s newlywed masquerade – and his sending of fake telegrams and his reporting of a stolen car that was never missing – is to flush out an incognito character for one last final-chapter surprise. As always, nothing feels particularly true to reality in a Perry Mason case, but we have headlines and Dostoevsky for those types of stories. And when we want muddy paw prints that lead the police to a corpse and Mason to a murderer, then Erle Stanley Gardner will reliably and delightfully deliver.


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Book Review: GOSPEL (1992) by Bill James

7/20/2022

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With his smart, funny, and addictive series of crime fiction novels featuring Detective-Sergeant Colin Harpur and Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Iles, author Bill James manages that rewarding literary two-step: the books are sublime when read chronologically as part of a series (as I am doing now) but are also highly satisfying as stand-alone entries separated from the larger arc. If I were to recommend a starting place for readers new to the books and their characters, I would have them skip the first two titles (1985’s You’d Better Believe It and the following year’s The Lolita Man), slightly atypical stories where the author and his characters are still finding their voices.

Instead, knockout entries like Halo Parade (1987) and Protection (1988) make the best introductions to James’s demimonde of cops and criminals. It is true that the chronological reader will find ripples and resonances as recurring characters emerge and collide (or collude) with one another, bringing their baggage and their prior crimes with them. And yet there is a deep satisfaction in following a single self-contained narrative when Bill James is at the top of his game.

My current read, the funerals-and-fêtes tragicomedy Gospel (1992) is a brilliant showcase of the author’s strengths as a storyteller and observer of often crooked, contradictory human nature; it is also a title that can easily stand on its own merits outside of the series. The story begins with a familiar tableau: Harpur and his colleagues wait on a side street outside a bank. Suave art dealer and protected “supergrass” Jack Lamb informed Harpur that the building is the rumored target for a robbery, and right on schedule the doomed criminals arrive.

In the ensuing chaos, Harpur kills Martin Webb, a gangster with good looks but a low I.Q. who takes aim at an unarmed cop. Martin is/was the dim but beloved son of Doug Webb, the volatile head of a second-string crime family. Unsure exactly who killed Martin, Doug sets his vengeful sights on the informants whom he thinks tipped off the police. He becomes obsessed with two targets: Jack Lamb and a college student named Denise Prior, who has befriended Lamb’s equally youthful wife. Denise is also, not quite coincidentally, carrying on an intense affair with the married Colin Harpur.

The joy of each new story lies in seeing how Bill James will shift around and shake up his kaleidoscope of characters. The result is certain familiar terrain traveled expertly – such as the robbery and stakeout or the uneasy alliance of criminals wary of each other but bonding over a shared goal – while the road (i.e., the plotline) offers its share of detours and surprises. James is one of those authors whom I find compulsively readable. He imbues nearly every one of his creations with so much personality and wiseacre, deadpan poetry that I find myself oddly wishing that amoral cops and status-seeking career criminals showed this much wit and winking humor in reality.

Indeed, Gospel offers the largest role to date for one of the series’ most interesting incidental characters. The very successful and largely unflappable art dealer Jack Lamb is a perfect fit within the Harpur & Iles world: he knows how to walk the line between legitimate businessman and back-of-the-van, high-end fence with aplomb, and he knows that Harpur will always look the other way as long as he proves his worth as a confidential informant. It is because of his tony outdoor fête, whose enviable guest list includes no less a dignitary than the Queen’s Lord Lieutenant, that Lamb must find a novel way to temporarily dispose of an uninvited corpse until the festivities are over and he can remove it from his property.


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Additionally, the author once again offers a leading-man part to “Panicking” Ralph Ember, an aging bar owner whose handsomely scarred, Charlton Heston exterior masks a world of personal insecurities and self-doubts. Ralphy is pulled in by Doug Webb to plan and execute a new heist, and the author keeps the pressure mounting on all sides to force Panicking Ralph to find his way out before he walks into an ambush as perilous as the one the slow-thinking Martin faced. It is a fascinating crucible to put this long-suffering antihero through, and the resolution and memorable reprieve that Bill James offers Ralphy packs a wonderful final-page punch.

Full of plot twists and wry dialogue while offering an engaging psychological study of every character placed under the microscope, Gospel is the ninth Harpur & Iles book and one of the strongest entries to date. The fact that, like most of the titles, it can be enjoyed on its own and still provides a wild ride is testament to the talents of the prolific (and now 93-year-old) Welsh author Bill James, whose 36th Colin Harpur novel (Low Pastures) was published this year. And that means I’ve got at least 27 more books to go, a rewarding road I fully intend to travel.


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Book Review: MURDER ABROAD (1939) by E.R. Punshon

6/19/2022

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In Murder Abroad, E.R. Punshon’s enjoyable thirteenth mystery in his series featuring Bobby Owen, the career policeman investigates the suspicious death of an Englishwoman among the hilly terrain of France’s Massif Central region. An older woman with an affinity for painting, Miss Polthwaite had been living in a converted mill in the quiet village of Citry-sur-l’eau. She was also rumored to have brought along a collection of uncut diamonds, and after a brief disappearance her body is discovered at the bottom of a well.

With little authority and not overly optimistic, Bobby arrives to find the mill already inhabited by an unfriendly English couple named Williams. But the prime suspect is a young man named Charles Camion, who had a row with Miss Polthwaite the night she went missing. Talking with the villagers adds some details to the picture: the murdered woman appeared to be afraid of someone or something; there was bad blood between Camion and a boxing hopeful named Volny, who might have been competing for Miss Polthwaite’s favor and finances; and a few of the rough diamonds have shown up at the base of the shrine to the Black Virgin, despite the curé’s efforts to conceal the fact from Bobby.

As the traveling detective states it at the end of the first chapter, Owen’s mission is threefold: “the diamonds, the murderer, the truth.” If he can uncover one or more, the same Lady Markham who pulled strings to get him a month’s leave from the force will advance Bobby to a private secretaryship for a chief constable. (One neat detail about Punshon’s series is that Bobby rises in the ranks as his successes and hard work are rewarded through promotions. He is introduced as a rookie Police-Constable in 1933’s inaugural Information Received; eleven adventures later, Owen is now a Detective-Sergeant building up enough career security so he can wed his hat-maker love interest, Olive Farrar.) The fact that Owen is a visitor in France and that his English policeman’s status means nothing offers an interesting twist. As he remarks midway through the mystery, ordinarily he would report his findings to his superior and let those above him decide how best to activate the investigative machine and take the next steps. Alone on the hills and plateaus of Auvergne Bobby can’t rely on a group decision, and each action must be taken by him as a free – and often vulnerable – agent and outsider.

E.R. Punshon’s stories can sometimes feel overwritten and underpaced, resulting in tedium when readers find themselves ahead of the author and his detective. But Murder Abroad delivers one of Punshon’s best tales. It is not so much because the crime puzzle baffles, although the scenario of a spinster thrown into a well generates a haunting sense of the harshness of nature enhanced by the rocky, rough Massif setting. For me, it is largely the lack of divisional police trappings that makes the investigation here more immediate and intriguing than in previous stories such as The Mystery of Mr. Jessop (1937). By Chapter Two, Bobby is in the village and flying solo, and so there are no over-the-desk office conversations with a Superintendent Mitchell type to summarize points and decide what “bears looking into.” Punshon gives his detective a Watson of sorts in the form of Père Trouché, a pontificating blind beggar whose pride and acute sense of hearing help Bobby make connections among the villagers he might otherwise have missed.

I found the stranger-in-a-strange-land aspect of Murder Abroad very effective. While the book’s prose and dialogue are presented almost exclusively in English, we are offered enough evidence of idioms and translations to be reminded that Bobby Owen is conversing in the natives’ language. (One example: the English policeman uses the word assassin when referring to Miss Polthwaite’s unknown killer, a term reflective of the French word for murdered, assassiné.)  Bobby himself feels out of place and unfamiliar with the local customs and social psychology of these people. “At home,” writes Punshon, “in England, in London especially, [Bobby] would have been able to place them all much more easily and to form on them a judgment much more likely to be accurate.” 

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Despite – or perhaps because of – Bobby’s status as an alien, the suspects in this story are delineated well and engagingly drawn, and there is a first-chapter clue to the murderer’s identity hiding in plain sight for those with sharp eyes. The book’s climax is genuinely suspenseful, as the discovery of a second body sends Bobby and the blind man into the hills as night descends, where they have a fateful confrontation with an armed killer.

The excellent Dean Street Press has returned to print and eBook E.R. Punshon’s elusive mysteries, so fans of classic mystery fiction can access them affordably once more (or discover them for the first time).  The Goodreads group Reading the Detectives is currently moving through the Bobby Owen series, and this month’s selection coincided with my own Punshon progress, as I had read up to Murder Abroad. I’m glad I made the journey. And this Detective-Sergeant seems to be going places. 

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Book Review: ASTRIDE A GRAVE (1991) by Bill James

5/26/2022

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The opening scene shows Detective Inspector Colin Harpur infiltrating his wife’s book club at their house. While considering evocative literary quotations, one member suggests Samuel Beckett’s famous line from Waiting for Godot, where Pozzo explains that women “give birth astride a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.” Harpur prefers a more effective quote, namely Dirty Harry Callahan’s invitation for a bank robber to reach for his weapon and “Make my day, punk.” The career detective defends his choice: “In four words it’s a line about constitutional treatment of the vile, about the absolute centrality of the law.” For readers who have spent time in author Bill James’s fascinating microcosm of cops and criminals, it is clear that the notions of law and morality are anything but absolute.

Astride a Grave is James’s eighth novel to feature Harpur and his dangerously perceptive boss, ACC Desmond Iles. I have been enjoying this surprising, gritty, and very funny police series immensely, but Grave is the first book that felt like it added up to less than the sum of its parts. James’s writing is as sharp and engaging as ever, and the book delivers the humor and psychological pressure-tests found in other tales. This time around, though, the story isn’t fashioned around a group of mismatched crooks coming together to rob a bank. The bank has already been robbed – in the previous entry Club – and Astride a Grave focuses on the aftermath of the robbery: those left standing (and the spouse of one victim caught in the crossfire) want their share, and not everyone agrees about the method and means of distribution.

It should be a fine, unique setting for a crime novel: thieves fall out as police tighten the net to find the robbers. Robbery leader Caring Oliver Leach has gone to ground but comes out of hiding to confront Panicking Ralph Ember, a partner with literal weak knees and a burdened conscience. In an early chapter, tensions mount, guns are grappled over, and Ralph dispatches his ex-boss and buries him in the woods. But the complications are just beginning for Panicking Ralph, who must also contend with Caring’s wife Patsy – who becomes increasingly attracted to her husband’s incidental murderer, with his scar and his Charlton Heston looks – and Anna Chitty, whose own husband was killed in the Exeter bank robbery. Harpur and Iles continue to pay visits to Ralph’s bar The Monty, hoping to shake the already unsteady owner off balance. The scrutiny only becomes more intense when Patsy’s daughter Lynette disappears; did she run away or is she being held as leverage by someone who wants their share of the loot?

And yet, I found something derivative about this installment, as if characters, situations, and standoffs had been presented before. And indeed they had been, in other stories and with different permutations. Panicking Ralph has featured centrally in the last few books, and while his combination of twisted honor and psychological weakness are interesting to a point, his man-alone personality (and the author’s continuing interest to live inside this character’s neurotic head) makes him far less attractive to me than he is to Patsy Leach.
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DI Harpur’s compulsive bed-hopping has also been explored in other installments; Harpur has been playing with fire by carrying on with the wife of a department sharpshooter, and now he makes a suspicious enemy of Iles by starting an affair with the Assistant Chief Commissioner’s wife, Sarah. Certainly, the behavior speaks volumes about Harpur’s need not for sex but for rule-breaking and living on a decidedly dangerous edge. Even a child’s disappearance and the subsequent search, used so brilliantly in Protection (1988) and The Lolita Man (1986), doesn’t feel quite so urgent or important here. 

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None of these criticisms are to say that Astride a Grave is bad; it just suffers from comparison to the seven previous books in the series, ones in which James covers his ground with more originality. All of James’s books to date carry a healthy sense of nihilism, where any character could become moral or amoral – or be extinguished – as the wind blows and as the situation suits. The same fluidity courses through this story, where lovers embrace yards away from a freshly dug grave and law officials foster a growing disregard for any sort of civil or societal codes.

As with Beckett’s famous line, Bill James’s books seem to deliver a rather unpalatable paradox about life: at birth we are born racing to die, and in each person lies the potential for moral hypocrisy. It is precisely because we are racing toward our graves that we continually question whether society’s rules are really so inviolate as we believe. 

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