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.
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