Okay, new Perry Masons!
This one was fun. Perry gave Della two weeks of vacation, so she heads to her aunt's house in Bolero Beach. Mason stops by since he's "in the neighborhood" (wink, wink). Della has an intriguing mystery for him. There's a lovely young lady named Dianne who is totally pigging out at the commissary every day. Della is mystified as to why she would ruin her perfect figure. Mason is just happy to be looking at her perfect figure.
At any rate. Della's aunt knows Dianne and invites her over for dinner. Perry and Della learn that Dianne has signed a contract to model a new type of clothing for larger women, and agreed to gain weight in order to do so. Perry asks to see the contract, takes a look, and discovers an odd clause: the man paying Dianne is entitled to half of whatever she earns *or inherits* for the next six years. Perry quickly deduces that Dianne has a rich unknown relative and Mr. Boring (the man behind the contract) knows about it and is after her inheritance.
Boring drops Dianne like a hot potato (leaving the poor girl to take off the extra weight she gained) and Perry decides he must have found a bigger meal ticket, like blackmailing the relative directly. Turns out Dianne's father, who was in a boating accident fourteen years earlier and presumed dead, is actually very much alive and very wealthy now, living the good life in Riverside with a new wife. When Boring turns up dead in a motel room and Paul Drake's own operative puts Dianne as the last person in the room, things get hot.
Perry is visited by a young woman named Audrey who gives him five $100 tickets from a horse race the day before and asks him to collect the winnings for her. Perry suspects a set up, but he agrees and takes Della with him for a fun day at the track. They actually stayed for two whole races! Perry goes to collect the $14,000 Audrey won the day before and is immediately accused by a man named Fremont, who claims that the tickets were bought with money embezzled from his company. Since Fremont doesn't have a leg to stand on, Perry leaves with the money and contacts his client. He learns her name is really Nancy, and her brother, Rodney, is currently cooling his heels (I love that expression) in jail, having been arrested the day before at the track for the same thing Fremont accused Mason of doing (Rodney actually is guilty though, Nancy used her own money to place her bets). Turns out Rodney's been helping himself to a little of Fremont's cash now and again, and finds himself up to his eyeballs in debt. Nancy, knowing about it, scraped up every dime she had and played a long shot at the track, hoping to win enough money to pay Fremont back and get her brother out of Dutch.
Fremont is playing hardball, though, and wants to prosecute. Then he turns up dead in the bathroom of the hotel room Nancy rented. She keeps lying to Perry, which got him super annoyed. Of course in the end it all worked out.
Side note: I read an interview with William Hopper (who played Drake on the original show) and he said after the show became so popular Gardner started making Drake more like how Hopper played him. I saw that in these last few books, with Drake coming into the office and saying "Hello, Beautiful" to Della, which Gardner never had him do until he did it on the show. Fun little inside tidbit.
It took me ages to get through this book. Not that it wasn't well written, it was, I just knew absolutely nothing about Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. I don't think I've seen a single movie either one of them has been in. So why did I check it out? you ask. Yeah, I don't know either. Curiosity, I suppose.
The first third of the book talked about Bogie, his early life and rise to stardom. He was on wife number 3 when he met the Hollywood newcomer, Betty Bacall (her real name, Hollywood changed "Betty" to "Lauren", thinking it sounded sexier. I disagree). Their attraction was immediate and he divorced his wife and married "Baby" (there was a twenty-five year age difference, so the nickname was apt).
They weren't together very long before Bogie tragically died of cancer, but they had two children and made some movies together. Bogie died a legend, and Bacall took it upon herself to make sure that legend stayed shining. She went on to marry again and have another child, but her later years weren't very happy. She lived at the Dakota in 1980 when John Lennon was murdered out front and all she did was complain about how "inconvenient" it was for her to get to and from rehearsals. She sounded like a very unpleasant person.
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