The Case of the Lonely Heiress (1948) by Erle Stanley Gardner

A couple of years ago, I read my first Perry Mason novel and really enjoyed it. Not so much for the mystery, but for Perry Mason flying as close to the legal sun as possible. So when I saw this in a bookstore, I decided to give it a shot. But is The Case of the Lonely Heiress one of Gardner’s hidden gems, or one of his flops?

The book opens with a minor legal problem for Mason. Roger Caddo is the slimy owner of Lonely Hearts are Calling, a mail-order catalog with personalized ads. Recently he’s been getting great business from a particular ad he’s been running. The writer claims to be a heiress on the hunt for a “personable young man.” Needless to say she’s been getting mail by the boxful, but Caddo’s competitors have accused him of writing the ad himself. And the woman in question is hard to get a hold of, going to great lengths to keep Caddo from finding out who she is, even as she rejects multiple letters from eligible bachelors.

Mason goes to work and is able to track the woman down. She’s Marilyn Marlow, and she is indeed a heiress. Caddo is satisfied but Mason’s good work doesn’t stop him from ratting Mason’s man out to Marlow so he can get at that money. Mason is inclined to write the whole thing off as a bust when Marlow tracks him down herself. She also wants legal help.

You see, Marlow inherited her money from her recently-deceased mother, a hospital nurse who took care of George P. Endicott in his final days. Endicott was a rich man and left her a fair bit of his estate in his will. Needless to say, his siblings don’t like this and are challenging the will in court. They claim that Marlow’s mother pressured or tricked their brother into signing the will. There were two witnesses to the will, but one of them, Rose Keeling, has been showing signs of swaying in her testimony. Here we learn what Marlow wanted those men for, which I will leave to the interested reader to find out.

Mason is again interested, but the situation escalates. First is that Caddo’s angry wife finds out what her husband is up to and goes on the warpath. Mason is recovering from that when Marlow rings him from Rose’s apartment. The other woman has been stabbed with a knife, shortly after Marilyn received a letter where Rose said she was going to testify that her original story about the will was a lie…

*Lonely Heiress is an entertaining yarn. It takes a while for the body to hit the floor, but Gardner keeps the reader hooked with Caddo’s initial problem, which is honestly very interesting, and gets a few jabs off at romantic writing in the process (albeit with tongue in cheek, as Mason himself plays Cupid at the end). There is a dull period early on, where Mason spends a bit too much time insisting that what Marlow and Caddo are planning isn’t his problem, but once Marlow contacts him the pace picks up again. Unlike Counterfeit Eye, where Mason was in full control, here he’s struggling to keep up, even getting outplayed by the police and suspects a couple of times. Being Mason however, he just grins and dives back in harder. Based on other reviews I’ve read, that’s the main appeal of this series. Gardner pulls no punches demonstrating just how stacked the deck is against defendants, with Marilyn put through a psychologically brutal third-degree that Mason barely manages gets her out of. We’re rooting for Mason to thumb his nose at the machine that’s trying to grind Marlow down, so we overlook some of the shadier things he does in pursuit of his client’s best interest. There’s less of Mason’s game-playing than in Counterfeit Eye, but what’s there is more impactful as we see how far Mason will stretch legal ethics.

But what about the book as a mystery, I hear you ask. Well, there we’re on shakier ground. There are a couple of good moments. There’s a neat reversal of a seemingly trivial point that everyone has taken for granted that could have been pulled right out of Ace Attorney, giving Mason and Della real hope for their client. There’s also a very clever ploy from the culprit that stuck in my mind after the book was finished. But the mystery is overall nothing special. Well-worked out and with substance, but also not the reason I’d recommend the book. Some of the evidence is based on things that either the average person nowadays wouldn’t be familiar with (the stuff about the pens) or on evidence that we don’t get to see as the characters do; instead, it’s merely described for us.

But make no mistake, this was a good read overall. Mason is an appealing protagonist, and while he doesn’t pull off the same pyrotechnic display of legal fireworks I saw in Counterfeit Eye, he’s still firing on all cylinders fighting a seemingly hopeless battle for the sake of his client. And that’s what most people read this series for. I know I’ll be coming back. I’d appreciate hearing about any of your favorites. Recommended. 

Other Reviews: James Reasoner. 

Find a Victim (1954) by Ross Macdonald

One of the most famous authors in American mystery fiction is Kenneth Millar. Under his pen name of Ross Macdonald, Millar wrote a series of hardboiled novels starring private eye Lew Archer. While his early work was following in the footsteps of Raymond Chandler, Macdonald would carve out his own path around the publication of The Galton Case in 1959, transforming Archer from your stereotypical private eye into a more emotionally involved character, trying to save the souls of the diseased and rotten families he encountered in addition to bringing justice to the culprit. It’s fair to say that while many of us see Ellery Queen as the American detective story, for many of the literati, that crown goes to Ross Macdonald.

I’d first heard of MacDonald in Robert Barnard’s study of Agatha Christie, A Talent to Deceive. Barnard praised his “magnificently conceived, satisfyingly shaped, and wonderfully entertaining” plots, and other reviews I’d read over the years backed that up. Macdonald also became focused in his later works on mysterious crimes in the past affecting the present, and as you all know, I’m a real sucker for that sort of thing. So when I saw his Find a Victim in a bookstore, I decided to take a chance on it, even though I’d never seen the title before now.

The book opens with Archer meeting,“the ghastliest hitchhiker who ever thumbed me,” crawling out of a ditch. The young man has a bullet in his chest. Archer gets help at a nearby hotel, but not without drawing the ire of the owner, Kerrigan. The victim is Tony Aquista, a truck driver for “the Meyer line.” His truck, now missing, was carrying “bounded bourbon.” Kerrigan’s bourbon to be precise. And Kerrigan’s clerk, Anne Meyer, is missing. Tony Aquista had a thing for her and was stalking her. Archer gets involved partly to find Aquista’s killer and partly to get one over the brutish Kerrigan, who he suspects is up to his neck in the whole affair.

I’ve never read a private-eye novel before, but this plays out about how I expected. Archer digs around, interrogates suspects, does some breaking and entering and so on. He clashes with the local sheriff, Church, as well. Church humors Archer at first but quickly turns against him when Archer notes how lax he’s being about investigating the hijacking, climaxing in a brutal parking lot brawl. The whole book takes place over two or three days, tops, and Archer spends most of the first half running around Las Cruces on a warm summer night. I was genuinely engaged at this very lonely man poking around the lives of very lonely people. Macdonald is a vivid prose writer, and his characters are distinctive, if prone to dropping their life story on Archer. For all the sordidness there’s a fair bit of sympathy. Kerrigan and old man Meyer are the only two who really fall under Archer’s scorn by the end of the book. Archer is even willing to stand up for a young thug who beat him with iron knuckles when the DA tries to pin the murders on him. And yes, more than one character bites the dust by the end.

But all that aside, how’s the mystery? Well, it wasn’t the complex and well-clued mystery I was expecting. That’s not to say that it’s bad, just that this is a private-eye novel in the end, albeit a complex one. The culprit and their motive is a genuine surprise, but I suspect that keen readers will turn their eye in this character’s direction before the end, even if the full story eludes them. Like the other books I’ve been reviewing recently, it’s more about the process of elimination once Archer gets the full story than it is about interpreting seemingly meaningless clues.

I still enjoyed this book. Macdonald is sharp but sympathetic, and I enjoyed the solitary investigation that Archer embarks on here. I admit that if I’d read this book blind with no knowledge of the author, I might not have been inclined to seek out more based on this book alone. But knowing who Macdonald is and knowing that he’s going to write even better books in the future, I’m looking forward to trying out more. Recommended. 

Other Reviews: Only Detect, Jason Half (this one gives some good behind-the-scenes detail on the book's construction, namely that Macdonald had to rewrite it to add some Mickey Spillane-style gunplay)

Wobble to Death (1970) by Peter Lovesey

Over the past year, I’ve been checking out the works of Peter Lovesey. I’ve looked at his non-series works and I’ve looked at the first of the modern-day police procedurals he wrote for most of his career, but I haven’t yet looked his debut series set in the Victorian era, which, I’m given to understand, sparked a trend for historical mysteries, especially those set in that time period. That changes today.

The titular Wobble of Wobble to Death is a “Go As You Please Contest,” a sort of indoor walking/endurance challenge. They were “instituted by Sir John Ashtley in 1878, and became very popular on both sides of the Atlantic in the eighties.” It will come as no surprise to the curious reader that Lovesey had written before this book a profile of five long-distance runners, The Kings of Distance and "contributed to many sporting journals."

The Wobble in question takes place on a cold November week in 1879 at the Agricultural Hall in Islington, which has been turned into an indoor racetrack. The main draw is the competition between the arrogant Captain Erskine Chadwick and Charles Darrell, both champion runners. There are other present as well, from the ambitious first-timers and wannabe champions to the just plain weird, such as F. H. Mostyn-Smith, whose eccentric method of running conceals one of the more amusing motives I’ve seen in a mystery novel. Similarly to Keystone, Lovesey makes the race genuinely engaging and interesting. He’s a sharp writer, and while some of the runners blend together (three of them serve as a Greek chorus to the events), Lovesey makes his key characters distinct. I was honestly invested in the race, even though it’s about fifty pages before a body hits the floor.

The body in question is Darrell’s. During the second day of the race, Darrell is felled by what he thinks are bad cramps, but within the hour, he’s dead. At first, death is put down to tetanus—the Hall is normally used to store animals and Darrell walked barefoot with open blisters the day before—but by the end of the second day Sergent Cribb and Constable Thackery are on the scene. Darrell’s body was pumped full of strychnine. His trainer, Sam Monk, is the prime suspect, a suspicion that seems to be confirmed when he’s found gassed in one the makeshift huts for the runners and their trainers. But Cribb isn’t convinced.

Cribb and Thackary are a great detective duo. Cribb is amazingly lazy—he does two interviews before laying down for a nap in the dead man’s bed—but he has the quick wit and sharp eye we want from our great detectives, and a silver tongue to boot. Thackary is good too, plodding but not stupid, never keeping pace with Cribb but no more than a step behind. I see how these two became so popular. Lovesey gets some humor about how the race goes on even with two dead men in the background. Class is also a major factor in the race; Chadwick is only taking part in something so lowly because of the promise of a competition with Darrell. With him dead, the manager is forced to resort to bribery to get Chadwick to run with his lessers. Thackery is forced to take to the track himself to interrogate some of the suspects. Lovesey captures Victorian England perfectly, casually taking parts of this world that doubtless seemed alien then and mindboggling now—strychnine as a stimulant!—and introduces them with great ease, never bogging the reader down in his research. It’s a charming and fun book all the way through.

But most readers want to know how good the mystery is. I was satisfied with it. Lovesey pulls off a clever deception on the reader, but I can see some being slightly disappointed with the resolution. At the end of the day, this is a police procedural set in Victorian England, not an Agatha Christie pastiche, and the mystery reflects that. It’s well-clued and there are some nice bits of mystery—such as Monk’s “suicide note,” which he definitely wrote, much to Cribb’s mystification—as well as some good detection, but it’s not trying to be Ellery Queen.

But overall, I really liked this book. It’s a short but solid piece of historical fiction, worth reading for fans of this type of mystery. Recommended.

Other Reviews: Mysteries Ahoy!, In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, Past Offenses, Tipping My Fedora, Beneath the Stains of Time.