Three more Perry Mason's by Erle Stanley Gardner. "Buried Clock" focuses around a clock that is buried in the forest near some cabins in Kern County that apparently keeps sidereal, or star time. I had no idea what this meant, but apparently the stars gain about four minutes every day on sun time. What does this have to do with murder, you ask? Oh, quite a bit, actually, once you realize that all the people in this remote mountain community wander around at night, taking pictures. The clock actually comes in for a faked alibi. I was wondering right until the end how he was going to finagle that one in!
"Drowning Duck" was really good. A wealthy man hires Perry to investigate an 18 year old murder case. It turns out that the son of the man who was found guilty and hanged is trying to marry his daughter, and the man wants Perry to prove the father's innocence before he'll give permission. The man wants to avoid having a scandal in the family, see. Of course, it's a worse scandal when he's arrested and charged with murdering his house guest.
"Borrowed Brunette" had the craziest premise in the world, but was one of the more understandable and easy to follow Mason mysteries I've read so far. A woman looking to divorce her wealthy husband so she can marry another man learns her husband has hired detectives to shadow her to learn the identity of her boyfriend, so she has a friend hire a girl who looks like her to live in her apartment to throw the detectives off track. All is going splendidly until the friend turns up dead in the apartment, and the woman hired to impersonate her, along with her chaperone, are charged with the crime. The D.A. tries to get Perry in trouble with the Grand Jury for perjury, but of course the Grand Jury is to smart for that! Silly D.A., thinking he could get Perry in trouble! In the end it was actually a very logical suspect who was guilty: the woman's husband, who thought that the friend was actually the boyfriend.
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