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.