Hotel Kitsch

 

What a fun book! Husband and wife team Margaret and Corey Bienert visited a bunch of hotels and motels across the country (and even a few internationally) that have unique décor in at least some of their rooms. It's a niche market, but it seems to be thriving. Out of curiosity I looked a bunch up online and their rates are actually pretty reasonable, I was expecting them to be much higher for the experience alone. 

Case of the Crimson Kiss; Case of the Careless Cupid

 

In the interest of full disclosure, this is not a full length book, but rather a novella. And I think I've read it before, it certainly sounded very familiar.

Fay and Anita are roommates who were both casually dating the same man, Dane Grover (these names, Gardner! Seriously?!). Dane and Fay start to get serious and get engaged. Anita is jealous and upset. She's secretly seeing a married man, Carver, who has an apartment upstairs from them. Anita leaves to go out with Carver, who tells her to go wait down in the car. She does, but after twenty minutes she gets angry and goes back up to his apartment and finds him dead. She panics, since a lot of her things are in his place. She quickly hatches a plan. She goes back to her apartment, fixes herself and Fay cups of hot chocolate laced with sleeping pills. Fay drinks hers and passes out. Anita takes some of Fay's things upstairs and swaps them out for her things, comes back and drinks her chocolate and passes out. 

Carver's corpse had a big red lipstick print on his forehead, hence the name of the story, and that's how Mason catches the killer, too. It was a good story, I enjoyed it. 

I love this cover. Seriously, what the heck does it have to do with anything?! Nothing, is the answer. The main female character is a woman in her fifties. And no one played darts. Too bad, I bet Paul would have been very good at it. 

This is it. The very last Mason book I had left to read. I still have one more novella and a short story, but other than that, I'm done. 

Selma Anson and Delane Arlington are in love. Arlington's meddling niece, Mildred, is unhappy about it and thinks Selma is just a gold-digger. Selma's first husband died a year earlier from food poisoning after attending a barbeque at Arlington's house, but now the insurance company thinks he was poisoned with arsenic from Selma's bird mounting hobby (a really gross hobby, in my opinion, that part bothered me a lot. Hunting for food is one thing, but killing innocent little birds just to mount them for fun is icky). 

It had a happy ending (they usually do) and it was an interesting read. 

Ernest Shackleton

 

This is one of those on a whim books. Shackleton's exploration of the South Pole came up in casual conversation at work one day (we librarians are WILD) and I realized I didn't know much about him. I picked this particular book because it was written by George Plimpton, and I like the way he writes. He wrote a book about attending preseason training with the Detroit Lions that was hysterical. 

Shackleton tried to reach the South Pole a few times. The second time, his ship Endurance got caught in the ice and was twisted so badly she couldn't sail. He left most of his men behind on Elephant Island and took a small boat to an island called South Georgia to hopefully get help so they could go back and rescue the men he left behind. He did, and tried a third time to reach the South Pole, only to have a heart attack and die. He was buried in South Georgia. Plimpton took a trip to Antarctica and alternated between Shackleton's journey and his own 100 years later. It was interesting and the pictures were really breathtaking.  

Murder Under Her Skin; L.A.'s Landmark Restaurants

 

The second book in the Parker and Pentecost series (or is it Pentecost and Parker? I should probably look that up...) was really interesting. 

After a dramatic opening in which Lillian Pentecost goads an arsonist into showing his true colors while she's testifying at his trial, the dynamic detective duo deserve a break. Alas, it is not meant to be. One of Will's friends from the circus, Ruby, was murdered and one of her other friends, mentor and knife-thrower Val, is in jail on suspicion of having sunk one of his knives into Ruby's back. Will and Lillian travel to Virginia, where the circus is currently playing. 

Ruby was the tattooed lady and had plenty of secrets of her own. The odds of her being murdered only a day after arriving back in her old hometown (which she ran away from before finishing high school and didn't return, not even for her parents' funeral) seem a bit suspicious. 

There were some fun moments, and holy cow, can someone please render Will's outfits in color so I can see how awesome they look? The way Spotswood describes them...I'm so jealous!

This was a fun, nostalgic look back at some of the most famous restaurants in Los Angeles history. Geary wrote another book I liked so much that I bought it: Made in California. 

I wish my Dad was still alive--he would have gotten a kick out of this book. I recognized a lot of the places he talked about going as a kid: Barney's Beanery and Apple Pan. He took me to the Pantry (awesome pancakes), Du-Par's (also awesome pancakes), and Canter's (no pancakes but great hamantaschen). We talked about going to the Pacific Dining Car but didn't make it. I wish traffic getting up to L.A. wasn't so heinous. I would love to go to Phillipe or El Coyote. Someday 😀

101 Horror Books to Read Before You're Murdered

 

I'm always on the lookout for new horror books to read. There were some pretty good recommendations in here I think. Obviously I haven't read them yet, but they definitely sound interesting. 

The Case of the Troubled Trustee

 

I can't believe I'm almost done with the Perry Mason! What on earth am I going to read next?! 

I'm sure I'll find *something* 😀

Dutton is the trustee of Desere's estate. Desere's father was afraid she would blow right through it, so he named Dutton as the trustee to keep his daughter's spending in check. Dutton comes to Mason for advice. He's done some shady things, namely embezzlement, but insists it was for Desere's own good (sure, okay). He's in love with her but she's too young and immature to realize how good Dutton would be for her, and instead is carrying on with a group of beatnik hippies. She's supposedly engaged to one of them named Fred (a no good beatnik hippie name if I ever heard one!). 

There was a pretty good courtroom scene in this one, where Hamilton got to cross examine Mason's witnesses, and did a darn good job of it, too. It looks pretty bleak for Dutton, but not surprisingly Mason pulls a rabbit out of a hat at the last minute. 

Case of the Reluctant Model; the Case of the Horrified Heirs

 

Apparently I read this one before. I didn't remember it, so it all worked out and I rather liked it. A little different from most Mason stories.

Art dealer Rankin wants to sue Collin Durant for slander. He told a former model, Maxine, that the painting Rankin sold wealthy art collector Otto Olney is a fake. Maxine told Rankin, who feels slandered. Perry cautions suing Durant himself and encourages him to tell Olney what Durant said and let Olney sue Durant, which is what happens. Then Perry starts to get a funny feeling about the whole thing, especially when the only witness to what Durant said, Maxine, suddenly skips town. 

There were a lot of loose ends that didn't get tied up, like Maxine's canary. No one ever found out what happened to it (it wasn't in her apartment, but Durant's dead body was). 

I remembered reading this one before. Wealthy Lauretta Trent has been having severe gastrological upsets and her doctor warns her one more episode might do her in. 

How Perry gets involved is actually pretty different. Virginia Baxter, a secretary to a recently deceased attorney, is arrested at the airport for smuggling drugs. She calls Perry, knowing him from her time working for her employer. He represents her in court and gets her case dismissed, but he's curious why someone would go to so much trouble to try to frame a nice lady like Virginia. He tells her to call him if anything weird happens. 

Virginia is approached at home by a man claiming to be George Manard. He says that Virginia's former boss drew up an agreement for him and another man, and he's lost the original and would like the lawyer's copy. Virginia tells him her boss' brother has the papers. She has the original typewriter from the office, however. 

Things roll along and it looks like now Virginia is being framed for the murder of Lauretta Trent after a motorist witnesses her car running Trent's car off the road. Oh, and the heirs are horrified to learn Lauretta's stomach issues were due to arsenic poisoning, not the spicy Mexican food she loved. It had a surprisingly happy ending, for a Mason story. 

Paul's constant whining about not getting to eat anything decent is getting old, though. I wish Gardner would move on. 

Surely You Can't Be Serious; The Case of the Daring Divorcee; The Case of the Phantom Fortune

 

"Airplane!" is such a fun film. I watched it again while I was reading this book and it still holds up extremely well. Even if I can quote parts of it by heart 😀

Brothers David and Jerry Zucker and their friend Jim Abrahams worked on making the movie for quite a while. It started after they caught a late night showing of a movie from the 1950s called "Zero Hour!". They thought the film was hysterical even though it was a serious movie. They were able to buy the rights to it and used a lot of the dialogue and plot, adding their own unique jokes. Their main desire was to cast serious actors and have them deliver the lines completely straight and it paid off. One fun bit of trivia is that they had to petition the Director's Guild of America in order to have three directors credited. Apparently that isn't done. 

This one hinged on an eyewitness, Perry's receptionist Gertie, and the woman in the dark glasses she saw leaving her purse in the office waiting area. Perry and Della go through it so they can contact the owner and find a recently fired gun. And as we all know in Mason stories: where there's a gun, a body is sure to follow. 

Adelle Hastings and her husband, Garvin, have reached an amicable conclusion to their marriage and Adelle is residing in Las Vegas in order to procure a divorce. Garvin turns up dead, and his second wife, Minerva, claims she never actually divorced him, meaning Adelle wasn't really his wife and therefore Minerva is the beneficiary to Garvin's business. 

The courtroom scenes were pretty good and the story was decent enough. Everything just feels super repetitive now. Of course there are two guns and two ex-wives and two wills, etc., etc. 

This one felt more fresh and original. Horace Warren comes to see Perry. He thinks someone is blackmailing his wife. He found a suitcase with $47,000 in her closet. Warren would like Perry and Della to come to a party at his house that evening. He's cooked up an elaborate backstory that Della is an acquaintance of his right-hand man, Judson. Judson is inviting Della to the party and tells her to bring a male companion, so she brings Perry. Meanwhile, Paul and a team of detectives in a dummy catering truck that's available to all PIs in L.A. will be fingerprinting and analyzing the dishes from the party to see if there are matches in the criminal database. I had a super fun mental image of like the Scooby-Doo van, only full of Paul Drakes. 

Plausible? No way. Hysterical? Yes. 

Della turns a lot of male heads at the party and ends up making quite a few female enemies. Oh, and Lorna Warren is being blackmailed. Turns out she worked for a conman who stole $47,000. Gideon, the conman, asked her to hide the money but she didn't, and it was stolen from the office safe. Gideon went to prison, Lorna was acquitted and moved, changed her name, met Warren, and started a new life. Now that Gideon is out of prison he wants his money and Lorna feels like it was her fault it was stolen since she didn't hide it like he asked her to. 

Gideon is shot in an abandoned warehouse and Warren is found holding a gun. The murder weapon, you say? Haha! Of *course* there are two guns. And a killer literally hiding in plain sight. 

Head Over Heels; the Case of the Stepdaughter's Secret

 

I feel kind of guilty putting this one on here, since it really was more pictures than words, but it was a lovely book, full of candid and casual photos of Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman. They were obviously very enamored of each other and it shows. 

Wealthy businessman Bancroft comes to Mason for advice. He thinks his stepdaughter, who is about to marry a man from a very prominent family, is being blackmailed. Perry doesn't like dealing with blackmailers, so he makes Bancroft promise to let him do it his way and Bancroft agrees. 

Perry comes up with an elaborate scheme that involves using scantily clad women on a speedboat to cause a distraction while a water skier retrieves the blackmail money from a can tossed in the lake. Paul gets to have some fun driving the speedboat and being surrounded by the bikini clad girls, so good for him. Hopefully he got a little something to eat, too. 

The blackmailer ends up dead on Bancroft's yacht with Mrs. Bancroft left holding the murder weapon. It was okay, not as good as some of the earlier ones. It just didn't feel very original to me.