The Case of the Baited Hook (1940) by Erle Stanley Gardner

The Case of the Baited Hook opens with a great hook for Perry Mason. A man wants Mason to defend an anonymous, masked woman who won’t even speak to Mason. Defend her from what? He won’t say. How will Mason know if his other work will conflict with this? He can contact the client anonymously. Is this the shadiest thing imaginable? Absolutely. But the client cuts off part of a ten-thousand-dollar bill and gives part to Mason and part to the woman. If she gives him the other part, it’s a sign that she needs his help. The whole thing is too mysterious to not attract Mason’s interest.

This being a Mason novel, things continue to escalate. In the next chapter, Mason is approached by Mrs. Tump for some legal help. She wants Mason to help her with an issue regarding her semi-adoptive daughter, Bryl Gailord. Bryl is the child of Russian immigrants who died at sea while fleeing the Bolsheviks. Mrs. Tump was entrusted with the girl, but the orphanage she sent her to sold the child to a couple. Mrs. Tump has tracked her down and believes that her stepfather, Tildings, is misusing her trust fund. Tildings is a member of a hospital’s board of directors…that’s currently being investigated for embezzlement. And Tildings himself has vanished. All that’s left of him is his bloodstained car, with a bloodstained jacket with a bullet hole in it and a handkerchief with lipstick on it in the pocket.

Until Mason and Paul Drake find his body…

Baited Hook is a rush. There’s always some new turn of events or new connection between the characters. There are multiple factions acting against each other, so Mason always has some lead to follow. This is one of the Masons where he never ends up in court (there are more of those than you think), but he still has plenty of opportunities to be the shady lawyer we all know and love. Honestly, he gets vicious in this novel; he’s at his most unscrupulous here. But in fairness, this is one of the books where everyone who says more than five words to him is either playing coy or actively lying to him. As he tells Della, “The best fighters don’t worry about what the other man may do. And if they keep things moving fast enough, the other man is too busy to do much thinking.” It’s interesting to contrast this with my last Mason read, where he was on the backburner for most of the book and even got outplayed a few times. Here he’s constantly in people’s faces, not always ahead but never behind.

Gardner raises some interesting questions throughout the book. Why were the dead man’s shoes removed? Why is the granddaughter of the hospital’s founder insisting on suspecting the trustee who is being open and transparent during the embezzlement investigation, but implicitly trusts the one who’s gone AWOL? Some of these questions get good answers, others get pretty basic ones. Penzler cheerfully admits in the introduction that the clues are rather thin on the ground here, which isn’t quite true. There are some good moments of deduction here. About halfway through, Mason overturns a major assumption about the crime and debunks a character’s story using details that the reader should have picked up on but didn’t. Mason’s reasoning as to the identity of the mysterious woman is a little vague but solid enough. But I have to admit, there’s a lot of sturm und drang building up to a pretty basic who-and-why solution. I didn’t see the killer coming and the explanation is logical, but Mason delivers it with little build-up. Not to mention that, as Mason himself points out, the police can solve it really quick by looking at a piece of evidence, which they never do until he tells them to.

But overall, I enjoyed this book. It’s what I’ve come to expect from Gardner: a rapid, ever-shifting plot, hard-boiled tone, some interesting observations of people, a lawyer’s job, and society itself, all as part of an overall wild ride. I was hooked. Recommended.

Other Reviews: The Invisible Event, Vintage Pop Fictions, Dead Yesterday, In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel.