Only the Perry Best

It was this last summer, when I spent some time researching a Rap Sheet post about what would have been the 118th birthday of mystery writer Erle Stanley Gardner, that I became aware of how modern author James Reasoner has been slowly but consistently reviewing Gardner’s classic Perry Mason novels in his blog, Rough Edges. As somebody who has read only a handful of the Mason novels (though I must have seen every episode of the 1957-1966 TV series by now), his diagnosis of this once-popular series has been fascinating.

Today, for instance, Reasoner looks back at The Case of the Daring Decoy, published in 1957, which he opines was “still a good period in the Perry Mason series, if not as consistently excellent as the more hard-boiled Thirties and Forties. By this time many of the books opened not with Mason, as the earlier ones do, but with the person who will turn out to be the client later on.” (Well, we now know where the format of the Raymond Burr TV series comes from, don’t we?) To compose previous posts, Reasoner read or re-read The Case of the Sun Bather’s Diary (1955), The Case of the Sleepwalker’s Niece (1936), The Case of the Silent Partner (1940), and The Case of the Velvet Claws, which was the first Mason outing, released in 1933.

Keep ’em coming, Jim.