The Case of the Screaming Woman

"The Case of the Screaming Woman" is the one with the doctor who lives in the nosiest neighborhood in all mankind. Literally everyone sits by their windows with binoculars, spying on everyone else. And there's no less than four different people who run in and out of the doctor's house at 11 o'clock at night. That poor doctor should have bought a Rottweiler or something.
Dr. Babb runs a baby clinic. Pregnant, unwed women come to him and he checks them into the hospital, along with a married woman who wants a child. The married woman leaves with a child that is listed as her's, and the unwed woman goes on her merry way. Someone is keen to get their hands on Dr. Babb's notebook, detailing all the wealthy, powerful people he's helped have babies. Perry's client is one of the husbands who is desperate to protect his young son from finding out he was adopted. John Kirby was seen leaving the doctor's house shortly before his body was discovered, and he checked a young lady into a motel, registering as man and wife, but then left the woman alone. The prosecution contends that Kirby and this young lady conspired together to kill Dr. Babb. Perry makes a right fool out of Burger in the courtroom (naturally) by having Burger's own witness prove Kirby was innocent. It was a fun courtroom scene.

Harper; The Case of the Lucky Loser

I know, a non Perry Mason book! It was a super short, quick read, which was good, because it was terrible.
I hate saying that about any book. I know how hard the author worked, I understand their hopes and dreams about getting their work published and having people read it. But, unfortunately, some books just aren't that good, and this was one of them.
I wanted to read it because first of all, it's horror, and second of all, it takes place in a fictional Southern California town called Harper, which is near "Newland Beach" and "Huntingdon" (amazingly enough, he used Laguna Beach without trying to disguise it). The town of Harper was built on an old decommissioned military base where a strange guy posing as a cook poisoned and killed some people. The people who lived in Harper don't want to talk about the strange things they saw there, which were really not scary, at least not how they were described. The main character, Gordon, grew up in Harper and relates how three of his preschool friends were killed by weird flying plastic pieces, later two of his school mates died in his house, one strangled by a rubber mask, the other by a lamp shade. His older sister was kidnapped by a gorilla but managed to get away. The neighbor's house fell into a huge sinkhole, and a guy got his arm ripped off by a creature with a torch for a head. His grandparents (who lived next door) eventually moved, his parents were permanently traumatized. It was all very nonsensical, even for a horror book
 

Back to the good stuff. Mason is asked by a woman on the phone to go watch a case in court, and she'll pay him for his opinion of a witness. Mason obliges (mostly out of curiosity) and sees the tail end of a hit and run case. Ted Balfour is convicted of running down and accidentally killing an unidentified man while driving drunk. When Mason talks to his client, he discovers she's the secretary to Ted's wealthy uncle. She's also in love with young Ted, but doesn't dare say so. Mason tells her he thinks the main witness was lying, but there's not much that can be done now.
The next day Mason gets a call from Ted's other uncle, Guthrie, asking him to take over representing Ted. He's sending his wife, Dorla, in to speak to him, as Guthrie is still down in Mexico. There was a lot going on in this book, including the corpse, who isn't who anyone thought he was supposed to be. Seriously, why doesn't the prosecution ever check these things out? Dental records don't match? No difference. Fingerprints aren't the same? Eh. They shrug it off. Gardner really makes the D. A. look like a bunch of fools.

The Case of the Glamorous Ghost

"The Case of the Glamorous Ghost" was a fun one. Mason comes into work one morning and Della asks him if he's seen the papers. Mason says no, so she tells him the fantastic story of a young woman running around a park the night before in just a light raincoat who claims she's lost her memory (a couple were making out in the park, and the female chased this girl with a tire iron because she thought she was coming onto her boyfriend). The paper published her picture in the hopes that someone would recognize her and claim her. And, apparently, it worked because her half-sister, Olga, is in the waiting room. Intrigued, Mason has Olga come in and talk to him. Olga tells him her younger half-sister, Eleanor, is a wild girl who has used amnesia to get out of scrapes in the past. Apparently Eleanor claimed she was running off with her boyfriend, Douglas Hepner, and they were married in Arizona. This happened two weeks earlier. Olga hadn't heard a word from her sister since, until she showed up nearly naked in the park. Mason goes with her to the hospital to ID her sister, and it is Eleanor. Mason also feels it would be prudent to put Eleanor somewhere out of circulation for a bit, until he can get to the bottom of things and has a friendly doctor tuck her away anonymously in a sanitarium.
Then Douglas Hepner's body turns up in the park, with Eleanor's gun lying beside it.
That complicates things a bit.
There was all kinds of fun sidetracks with gem smuggling. The best part was (of course) a courtroom scene, when Perry finally drags out of a witness that he was hiding in a woman's closet, watching her dress. When Mason asked him why he didn't leave the apartment while the woman was in the bath, the man claimed he was confused. No kidding, Perry quips dryly (I'm paraphrasing). It was a laugh out loud moment.

The Case of the Bigamous Spouse; The Case of the Fugitive Nurse; The Case of the Queenly Contestant; The Case of the Lazy Lover; The Case of the Daring Decoy

Okay, I know it looks like a lot, but honestly, these books are pretty short and they're quick reads because they're so fast paced. In "The Case of the Bigamous Spouse", Perry's client, Gwynn, discovers her friend (and roommate) Nell's husband has another wife. She goes to Perry because she thinks Felton, the husband, knows that she knows and is trying to kill her. He poisoned her cocktail, but because it tasted funny, Gwynn dumped it out without drinking it. Felton is murdered, and Gwynn is left holding the murder weapon. Her story of how she got the gun is pretty far-fetched, even for Perry. In the end of course Gwynn is innocent (spoiler: Nell did it) but I think he made a mistake (or I misunderstood when I read it, that's probably more likely). See, Gwynn's story is that as she was leaving the house where Felton lived with his other wife, she was stopped by a stranded motorist who claimed he was a police officer and needed her to drive him to a service station. He gave Gwynn his gun so if he tried anything she could use it on him. Gwynn reluctantly took him into her car and drove him to a gas station, where he jumped out of the car and disappeared. Gwynn went home and told Nell the story and showed her the gun. Nell noticed there was an empty shell casing in the gun, meaning it had been fired. Now, according to Nell, she drugged Gwynn, took the gun, and went back and shot her husband. But...the empty casing? Gwynn said Nell pointed it out to her and she saw it, but if she did then the gun should have been fully loaded, since no one had killed Felton yet. The timing seemed all off, too. Oh well. It was still good.

The "Case of the Fugitive Nurse" had one of the funniest courtroom scenes yet. Dr. Malden is presumed killed when his private plane crashes on its way to Salt Lake City. The only body in the plane is burned beyond recognition. Dr. Malden's wife, Steffanie, is accused of drugging Dr. Malden's whisky so he would fall asleep while piloting the plane and crash it. There was a lot going on in this book as far as illegal drugs, embezzlement, a nurse girlfriend, a hermit best friend, and a shady chauffeur. In court, Perry manages to get the prosecution's witness to admit the dental records of the corpse don't match the dental records of Dr. Malden. The D.A. tries to brush it off like it doesn't matter, but the judge is nonplussed. It was pretty enjoyable to read. Perry is wrong about who the corpse really was, but he was right that Dr. Malden ran off with his girlfriend and took advantage of the plane crash to disappear. Who the corpse really was felt very rushed on and kind of implausible (how many people know how to pilot planes? In this book, literally everyone. I know exactly one person in real life). Worth it for the courtroom bits alone, though.

In "The Case of the Queenly Contestant", Mason is visited by a woman who is desperate to keep her past a secret. As a young woman, she won a beauty contest and left her Midwest hometown to go to Hollywood. She made some screen tests, but nothing came of them and she returned to her small town. She ended up pregnant while in a relationship with the son of the wealthiest man in town. The son was shipped off to Europe and she was given a thousand dollars and told to get it taken care of. Since it was the 1940s (this book was published in 1967, I think) she was ashamed and embarrassed and fled town. She got a job as a housekeeper with a nice, childless couple. Once her condition became apparent, the wife offered to adopt the child. Ellen checked in to the hospital under the wife's name and gave birth to a son, Wight. Wight was raised by his adoptive parents and thought Ellen was an old family friend, but after the parents die in a car crash, she told him the truth. Now Wight's biological father, the sole heir to the business and two million dollars, is missing and presumed dead after a yachting accident. He left everything to his half-brothers, unless it's shown that he has an illegitimate child somewhere. At first Ellen doesn't want to be found, but then she decides Wight deserves his due and wants Mason's help proving Wight is really Harmon's son. The only person who can prove it, the nurse who attended Ellen when she gave birth, is murdered, complicating matters.
This book couldn't be written now, of course, because a simple paternity test would have cleared the whole thing up.

Onto the "Case of the Lazy Lover". This is the one that has the most implausible (and that's really saying something) ending ever. I give Gardner a lot of leeway, because his dialogue and courtroom scenes are so much fun, and I love Mason, Della, and Paul, but my goodness. This one was just ridiculous. Perry gets not one but two checks in the mail for $2,500 each from a Lola Allred. There's no accompanying note, so Mason has no idea what she wants, but when he deposits the checks the bank discovers one is a very clever forgery but the other one is legit. Later, he receives a letter from Lola asking him to take care of her daughter, Patricia, if anything should come up. Mason sets Drake to tracking Lola and her daughter down and finds them both. Turns out Lola is married to a very tricky businessman named Bertrand, who's in the middle of a nasty lawsuit. His business partner, Fleetwood, was supposedly hit when Patricia turned into the driveway and clipped a hedge and is now suffering from amnesia. Allred suggests Lola take him away somewhere so he can be kept quiet until he recovers his memory, and Lola does. Allred then spreads the rumor around town that Fleetwood ran off with his wife. Then Allred turns up dead. Mason of course finally get to the bottom of things, and it turns out...wait for it...a woman used a POLE VAULT to create footprints to show a woman running back to a car so they could frame Lola for the murder of her husband. Yes, a pole vault. He says it with a straight face. Gotta love it :)

"The Case of the Daring Decoy" was a lot of fun, too. Mason is contacted by a man named Jerry Conway. Conway is currently locked in a proxy battle for control of Texas Global, and he's afraid he's just been framed for something. He tells Mason a fantastic story about a woman named Rosalind calling him up to get him the secret list of people who've sent his rival, Gifford Farrell, their proxies. Rosalind makes him run all around, wait at pay phones, etc., before finally sending him to a hotel where he's to ask for a message at the desk. The clerk gives him an envelope containing a room key. When Conway goes up there, he finds a girl in just her underwear with a mudpack on her face and her hair up in a towel. She grabs a gun out of the desk and points it at him, shaking so bad he's afraid she'd going to pull the trigger on accident. He gets the gun away from her and splits. Mason is sure the gun was used for a murder, and sure enough, a dead body turns up in that room. It's not the girl Conway saw, but a different one. And it's not the murder weapon, either. Hmmm. Things get pretty complicated, but there's some fun scenes with Paul Drake and an elevator girl named Myrtle.

Private Lives of the Tudors; The Case of the Curious Bride

One I forgot to write about yesterday, Tracy Borman's "The Private Lives of the Tudors". It was really interesting, about the more mundane aspects of their lives, like what kind of clothing they wore, how they went to the bathroom, what they ate. The Groom of the Stool, which was a very coveted position, is actually exactly what it sounds like: someone who went into the stool closet (or bathroom) with the King and wiped. Yuck times ten. I get why people wanted to do it, though, the King was literally never, ever alone any other time, and it was a good opportunity for someone to chat him up. Still. Even if I *could* have someone do that for me, I don't think I would want to.

And then one I finished rereading last night. A woman comes into Mason's office, asking for advice for "a friend" who wants to know if her marriage is legal. Perry sees through that charade immediately and wounds her pride, so much that she storms out, leaving behind her purse. When he and Della open it, they discover a gun. Hmm. Turns out the young lady, Rhoda, was married to a con artist name Moxley. Moxley took her life savings and disappeared. Rhoda heard he died in a plane crash, so she decided she was free to remarry. She didn't really choose any better the second time around: Carl Montaine is the only son of a wealthy man, but he's a wimpy little Daddy's boy. Rhoda is sure she can make a man out of him, though. Unfortunately, her first husband has reappeared, demanding blackmail money to keep the Montaine name out of the scandal rags. Before Mason can act, Moxley is murdered and it looks like Rhoda did it. Mason pulled some fast and loose things with doorbells in court, it was pretty entertaining. Of course in the end we find out Rhoda wasn't guilty even though she thought she'd murdered Moxley (conveniently, the power went out at the exact time of the murder, so she didn't realize she wasn't alone in the room with him).

Fatal Throne; The Visitors; Walking Alone; Werewolf of Bamberg; The Case of the Terrified Typist; The Case of the Grinning Gorilla; The Case of the Velvet Claws

Whew, I knew I was behind but holy cow, I had no idea how bad! And I'm sure I missed one or two, I'll have to double-check my records. At any rate, let's get this done!
"Fatal Throne" was written by various YA authors. It was an interesting conceit: each one picked a wife of Henry VIII and wrote her story, with whining, petulant Henry rebutting after each chapter. No real new revelations here (I think even casual fans of the Tudors would know it all) but it was still nicely written and a quick read.

I am loving the current resurgence in horror fiction popularity! There are so many good books coming out that I can't wait to read. This one was super creepy, I enjoyed it. Middle aged siblings Marion and John live together in their ancestral family home. They have "family money", so neither of them has to work. Marion has actually never held a job, while John lost his job teaching after getting into trouble with an underage student. At first I felt very sorry for Marion, she seemed very sad and pathetic, but it didn't take long before you realize she isn't as innocent as she seems. Her brother is even worse, but at least I knew from the start he was a slimeball.

Bentley Little's collection of short stories was actually better than I thought it would be. It's a good format for him, I think. Most of this collection was written in the early 1980s, and then the last few were from 2016-2017. They were all at least decent, and some were pretty good. There was one story, about a bullied girl who finds she has the power to make bad things happen to her bullies simply by writing it down in a special book resonated with me :)

I think I'm finally caught up on the Hangman's Daughter books by Oliver Potzsch. Jakob and his family travel to Bamberg for his younger brother, Bartl's, wedding. Jakob and Bartl haven't spoken in years, and neither of them is anxious to mend the rift, but their family would like them to. Simon is eager to consult with a medical colleague but gets pulled into a strange case. The city of Bamberg seems to be being stalked by a werewolf, and the citizens are in a panic as the dead bodies turn up. Barbara, fed up with her family, runs away to join a troupe of actors and is heartbroken when one is arrested on suspicion of being the werewolf and locked up. As usual, a lot going on but it was very well done and all tied together.

And now it's time for the rereads! I don't know what it is about this time of year. No matter how many library books I have checked out, no matter how many of my own books I've bought and never read, I always have the urge to reread some of my old favorites. This year it's Perry Mason, I guess. Could be worse. "The Case of the Terrified Typist" starts off with Perry needing a typist and fast. When a girl shows up at their office who can type like lightening, he puts her to work, only to discover she's smuggling diamonds. Whoops. Of course she wasn't really guilty of anything (Perry's clients never are) but it was a fun ride to get to the conclusion.

"The Case of the Grinning Gorilla" has a great scene with Perry being chased by a crazed gorilla in a mansion while the gorilla's owner lies dead, having been stabbed. Unfortunately, the gorilla didn't kill him, although he certainly had cause to: the owner was performing cruel experiments on the beasts he had in captivity, trying to induce them to homicide. What a whacko. Perry's client, the woman accused of murder, was fired by the guy for stealing. When Perry proved she didn't steal anything, the guy rewrote his will, leaving her a good sum of money to apologize for besmirching her good name, which, of course, the D.A. interprets as motive.

"The Case of the Velvet Claws" is the first Perry Mason mystery. Perry takes on a client that Della absolutely cannot stand and is positive she is going to get Perry into a lot of hot water (spoiler alert: Della is right. Life lesson, folks. Listen to Della). Eva Belter is worried her husband will find out about her boyfriend after they were seen together in a night club. She's afraid a local scandal rag will blackmail her and wants Perry to handle it. Perry refuses to pay blackmail and decides to get to the bottom of the thing by determining who owns the rag. Turns out it's Eva's husband, George. Hmm, the plot thickens! George is murdered and Eva basically throws Perry under the bus. The solution to the murder was wildly improbable, but not nearly as crazy as some of Mason's later adventures.

Tinderbox

"Tinderbox" by Robert W. Fieseler was truly heartbreaking. In 1973, a fire in a New Orleans gay bar killed over thirty people, some of whom were burned so badly they were never identified. The fact that it was a gay establishment meant the media wasn't interested in the story, and friends and family members of the deceased were afraid to speak out and mourn publicly for fear of being outed, since so many gays were living firmly in the closet at that point. If all that wasn't bad enough, a con man made off with a bunch of money donated to help the victims of the fire and the families of the deceased. The man who admitted to setting the fire committed suicide a little over a year later. There were just no winners in this story, everyone suffered and it feels like nothing good came out of it. It's definitely an important story that needs to be remembered.

People's History of the Vampire Uprising; Jane Seymour the Haunted Queen

I liked "A People's History of the Vampire Uprising", right until the end. I hope there's going to be a sequel, because otherwise the ending ruined the whole book for me. It made no sense. A dead body turns up in New Mexico, and then vanishes from the coroner's office, apparently having reanimated and walked away. A researcher from the CDC is called out to investigate the new "virus". Things start happening pretty fast: the vampires, or "Gloamings", as they prefer to be called, insist that they deserve special accommodations under the ADA and everyone's debating on whether what they have is a disease that needs a cure or not, and how much should companies accommodate them when they chose to become unable to come out in daylight? Due to their heightened strength and senses, law enforcement is having to scramble to come up with ways to catch Gloaming law breakers. It raised a lot of interesting questions and then...just ended. Disappointing.

I enjoyed Weir's take on Queen Jane Seymour, Henry VIII's third wife. Jane is always portrayed (in all the nonfiction and fiction I've read) as having been a pawn in her ambitious family's plans. They basically disregarded Jane's wishes and threw her in Henry's path and encouraged her to lead him on. Weir pictures it a little differently: Jane served Queen Katherine of Aragon and saw the King bewitched by Anne Boleyn. She is dismayed when the King leaves his lawful wife for "The Lady" (or "The Concubine", as less charitable people called her). Jane was a devout, gracious Catholic lady who was loyal and devoted to Katherine, and having to leave her service to serve Anne after she's proclaimed Queen is torture, but she bears it well, knowing her duty is to her family. Henry is more and more aggrieved by Anne's behavior, and finds Jane a welcoming, comforting distraction. She doesn't pick fights and harp at him like Anne does, and Jane finds herself falling in love with the sweet man who has the weight of the world on his shoulders.