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Book Review: THE CASE OF THE VELVET CLAWS (1933) by Erle Stanley Gardner

3/20/2020

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I wonder if, after sampling my third Perry Mason book in the series by prolific writer Erle Stanley Gardner, these might not fall under the heading of "guilty pleasures". I suspect that they also operate for me as something one "loves to hate", although I fall far from either extreme on the Perry Mason Gratification Scale. The following critique may step on long-standing fans' toes, but after exposure to Gardner's first Mason caper, 1933's The Case of the Velvet Claws, I am still trying to assess just what my final (admittedly subjective) verdict should be.

Typically, a reading experience isn't this complicated. I read a book, I react to the book, I determine if the book gave satisfaction and how or why it did or did not. But analysis of a Gardner story, at least of the few I have read, doesn't seem that simple. This is because some very enjoyable and inventive strengths – including morally specious but highly clever defense attorney tactics like witness manipulation and sleight-of-hand evidence reveals – share space with a story weakened by unconvincing, superficial characterization and dialogue. Of course the Mason novels are meant to entertain and never pretend to be more than they are, which is in itself a point in their favor. But that odd combination of impressively good and amateurishly bad is something I haven't encountered often in mystery fiction, and it brings me back to the "guilty pleasure" label.

This mix of strengths and weaknesses is already fully formed and on display in The Case of the Velvet Claws, Mason's début case. What's singular about this story is that it doesn't end in a dramatic and contentious court trial like the great majority do: Mason keeps his client, an attractive femme fatale accused of shooting her husband, out of a courtroom despite the fact that Eva Belter has lied to the lawyer (and has even tried to frame him for murder!) every step of the way. George Belter is/was the publisher of Spicy Bits, a gossip tabloid largely existing as a vehicle to squeeze the rich and famous out of some money through business-legitimized blackmail. Because of this, there is a surplus of suspects who might want to see Belter dead, but Mason focuses on one in particular: Congressman Harrison Burke, last seen at a night club with a woman who was not his wife, a woman who happens to be Eva Belter herself.

So we arrive at one of Gardner's strongest qualities as an author, and the greatest personal argument for my continuing with the series. The man is quite brilliant at establishing the plotline (the hook, essentially) and guiding it along through multiple turns and reversals, escalating to a breathless climax. Such literary planning and plotting is not easy or effortless to pull off, and the three titles I have read to date – the others are The Case of the Howling Dog (1934) and The Case of the Counterfeit Eye (1935) – show no slack in their pacing or ingenuity. 

Closely connected with pacing is the quality of the twists and tactics themselves. In these early adventures, Perry Mason's maneuvering would be risky in the extreme if it wasn't safely confined to Gardner's artificially created world. Gambits like altering evidence to fluster prosecution witnesses, manufacturing a fake confession to muddy the waters, and manipulating police investigation would result in disbarment many times over. Yet the cleverness of these actions and Mason's ostensibly justified motivations keep the reader flipping pages while suspending judgment. It's an impressive tightrope to walk: Mason is bending the rules, but he argues that he is just trying to even up the odds which are already stacked against his accused client.
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For example, in Velvet Claws Gardner has his hero conspire with a friendly pawnbroker to force an admission from a suspect. All Mason needs from Sol Steinburg (a benign but still stereotypical Jewish figure typical of pulp stories of the time) is to "recognize" whichever man Mason brings into the shop with a "That's him, that's the one" declaration. (In other words, lie.) He explains that he will never need Sol to testify in court, but rather he's trying to make the man think he can tie him to a gun purchase. It's a clever ruse, and Gardner gets extra points for the suspect smelling the set-up and pushing back just as hard as Mason is pushing him.

While the plotting and legal legerdemain in Gardner's books are highly enjoyable, characterization, description, and dialogue are (for me) another story. Some reviewers have connected the toughness of the tales with roots from hardboiled detective fiction, and I think that's accurate. But Erle Stanley Gardner is no Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler, and the Perry Mason books substitute pedestrian prose for the moody metaphors and flawed figures populating the Hammett and Chandler worlds. In particular, Gardner's overuse/abuse of countless "Mason said" and "asked Paul Drake"-type dialogue tags really slow down the rhythm, especially as they are so often unnecessary in two-person exchanges. Yet they are peppered throughout every single conversation, and these books are filled with two-person dialogue runs.
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There's also a stilted quality to the scenes, which is due in part to the rather flat characterization (this cop is combative; that cop is friendly; Mason is always gruff and in command) and in part due to the sensationalist, hard-to-believe plotlines that Gardner favors. In Howling Dog, for example, I was wearying of a bellicose police chief who seemed to have little depth when he surprised me by saying in response, "I'm commencing to think so." I grabbed onto that word choice and thought it was a nicely observant touch to have a character use a word outside of his presumed vocabulary; I thought it revealed something of the chief's personality, that he was the type of person who prided himself on showing an education even though he had little. But then a few chapters later private investigator Paul Drake also says "I'm commencing to think so," and after that the author lets Mason use the phrase. Perry Mason's fictional world is one where characters speak on the surface (whether lying or telling the truth) rather than engaging in subtlety or subtext, and that's due to the preferences and literary limitations of his creator.

In spite of these traits, Gardner's books are still great fun and easy to digest, and I expect to sample many more of Mason's cases, especially when I'm looking for a fast and light mystery book in between more literary fare. And one can't help but admire an author concerned with providing both flashy entertainment and calculated promotion: at the end pages of Velvet Claws, the loyal Della Street reminds Mason that a new client is waiting in the outer office for him. Says Della:
"It's a girl expensively dressed, good looking. Seems well bred. She's in trouble, but she won't open up."
"Sulky, eh?"
"Sulky? Well, perhaps I'd call her sort of trapped."
"That's because you like her looks," Mason grinned. "If you didn't, you'd call her sulky."
…"Well, maybe she is just sulky."

It may be no surprise to note that the next book in the series happens to be The Case of the Sulky Girl.
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Book Review: THE CASE OF THE HOWLING DOG (1934) by Erle Stanley Gardner

6/15/2019

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During a recent perusal of Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves, one of the entries in P.G. Wodehouse’s always amusing book series, I was delighted to find that Bertie Wooster was working his way through “the latest Erle Stanley Gardner.” While I knew that young Bertram – who might not possess the most discerning of literary minds – was a fan of popular detective fiction, it seemed particularly apt that he would choose this famed American author. For one thing, his titles are often sensationalistic and evocative: Gardner’s cases involve Lucky Legs, Substitute Faces, and Counterfeit Eyes. For another, Gardner’s famous creation Perry Mason was massively popular but culturally disposable; conventional wisdom is that the many stories featuring his lawyer’s exploits are mass-market yarns and not much more.

And then I realized: I’ve never read an Erle Stanley Gardner. Bertie Wooster has more experience with the author than I do.

So, as a longtime classic mystery fiction fan, I was very curious how Gardner and his attorney would fare in my court of private opinion. The result, in a very satisfying way, is contradictory. My mix of sentiments is actually better than the non-verdict of a hung jury, because there is much conclusive evidence to invite further investigation with a few more books. But it is undeniable that there are points in the testimony that speak admirably of the defendant even as other elements expose some mighty weaknesses in the case.

Indeed, 1934’s The Case of the Howling Dog has much to recommend, starting with its curious premise. A man comes to Mason complaining that his neighbor’s dog is fraying his nerves with his baying and wants a legal remedy. He also asks for details about drawing up a will where all his possessions would go to that neighbor’s wife. The conflicting requests – coupled with reports that the client has been watching his neighbors through binoculars – make deputy district attorney Pete Dorcas question the man’s sanity, but Mason thinks there’s more to the situation, and there is.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that my early assumptions about the plotline’s trajectory were completely upended, and that the story quickly became much more complicated (at times, unnecessarily so) and also loopier. Part of the challenge is that a few plot threads, such as the search for a deported Chinese servant – unfortunately referred to by all the police and lawyer characters, including Mason, as a “chink” – are left fluttering. Generally, though, everything adds to the picture, and there are some very neat setups that deliver dramatic disintegrations of key witnesses on the stand.

The Case of the Howling Dog delivers two such moments, and they are clever and inventive: one involves casting doubt on an eyewitness’s statement, while the other unwraps a bandaged hand alibi. But the real shock for me is Perry Mason’s use of ethically dubious – and in one case certainly illegal – actions to make sure Bessie Forbes, the client he is defending, is not found guilty of murder.

Knowing little more than his pop culture reputation, I had always assumed that Gardner’s famous character was a by-the-books defender of justice who won his cases handily by being shrewd and playing fair. But here Mason engages in some very questionable behavior, acting as a maverick rule-bender and taking a few phenomenal risks. One choice involves hiring an actress to impersonate a suspect, while another finds Mason manufacturing a confession of murder and forging a person’s name on the document(!). Why he coerces Della Street, his adoring personal assistant (and potential witness for the prosecution if this stunt isn’t successful), into helping him type the letter is anybody’s guess. After all, Mason is forward-thinking enough to destroy the typewriter afterwards, commenting that, like a fingerprint, each machine is unique.

The grounds of such a disbar-able offense is that it will lead to the excavation of a new floor foundation where Mason suspects the bodies are buried. Even though the fake confession is indirectly sent to a journalist and not to the police, it’s still an unbelievable gamble, but then all of the attorney’s hunches pay off (naturally) and it is the prosecuting district attorney who is nonplussed and disgraced.

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So this early Perry Mason story is a rather wild and outsize affair. Although entertaining and actively paced, I couldn’t help comparing it to Rex Stout’s masterful Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin mysteries, and Gardner suffers in comparison. True, Wolfe is allergic to courtrooms, but both he and Mason share a penchant for the climactic reveal and for confronting the criminal with convicting evidence. But Rex Stout’s prose (as he filters it through Goodwin’s tongue-in-cheek narration) is often nimble, carefully chosen, compact, and compelling. Unlike his plotting on display, Erle Stanley Gardner’s syntax and style comes across as repetitive and artificial.

I choose two elemental examples to defend my statement, lest I stand accused of slander and defamation of character. First, the book is filled with mostly two-person conversations peppered with the likes of “Perry Mason said” or “replied Paul Drake.” I strongly suspect that Gardner may have kept his eye on a page count (or was paid by the word) because all of this unneeded identity repetition is trying. The dialogue – until he gets into the courtroom, it's usually Mason explaining while the other person asks questions – doesn’t need such tagging, as it’s hardly in dispute who is speaking to whom.

Second, the interactions of the characters (and often the characters themselves) come off as stilted and stereotypical. People in Perry Mason’s world tend to fall into two camps: they are either adoring and fawn at the feet of the celebrity attorney or they are belligerent and antagonistic to him. Such binaries aren’t a great problem – it certainly helps identify heroes and villains in the cast – but it does draw attention to the artifice that Gardner has built. I will be generous and overlook the casual misogyny as yet another era-crafted artifact, but it’s still troubling to hear Perry Mason bark multiple “Shut up and listen” commands to a woman who is thoroughly composed and rational. Or, as Gardner needlessly tags it in Chapter 12, “Shut up,” he told her, “and listen.”

This was a surprising and provocative reading experience, and perhaps provoked me in ways the author didn’t intend. I look forward to trying another Erle Stanley Gardner in the near future. If Bertie Wooster recommends it, then that’s good enough for me.

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