The Case of the Dangerous Dowager

I nearly stopped reading on the first page of this book. Halfway down the page is the phrase “gambling girl”. Near the bottom of the page, the woman Perry is talking to mentions a “dangerous dowager”. This is footnoted with the most obvious footnote I’ve ever seen in a mystery: “It will be obvious to the reader why Della Street immediately changed the case file name from ‘The Case of the Gambling Girl’ to ‘The Case of the Dangerous Dowager.’ (Publisher’s Note.)” My immediate reaction was WHO THE F*CK CARES? My hackles were raised.

It also doesn’t help that I’ve found Perry to be a bit of a huckster, and this book was no exception: he gets Drake, the detective, to go to a bank and sign up for a bank account in show more someone else’s name and get a stack of blank cheques. How is identity theft an acceptable way of solving a crime?

Combine these two issues with the flat writing style, and I decided to abandon this one. No more Perry Mason for me. show less

When an old dowager shows up in Perry Mason's office and try to hire him to help her granddaughter, he is not really interested. There is no body yet and he does not believe that she needs a lawyer - after all, all she needs is someone to pay some IOUs to a gambling establishment.

Of course, as always, things turn out to be more complicated than this. Perry decides to help and things go a bit awry. A man dies, Perry is in the wrong place again and if he wants to save himself and the granddaughter, he needs to find what really happened. The police and circumstances do not help much; everyone lying to everyone else is even less helpful.

On top of the mystery itself, we also get a glimpse at an era that is forgotten today - not the dames show more and the smoking and the racism and the 30s in their glory - but the gambling in California in the 30s - the ships 12 miles out at sea, the laws and prohibitions of the era. When the book was written, it was probably a common knowledge and just part of how things worked. 8 decades later, it is history.

Back to the mystery - we see Paul Drake not being infallible, Della Street being even more competent than usual (and I wonder how much of her relationship with Perry was considered a relationship back then and how much was just an employer/secretary normality in those days). And see a woman that is not cast as a damsel in distress - the dowager is a dangerous woman indeed.

You do not even miss Hamilton Burger or a trial - it is a straight detective novel. And a pretty strong one.

Another good entry in the series. show less

A strong entry - the central mystery is pretty clever, although I kind of lost track of all the toing and froing at the end, that is more down to me not bothering to think it through than any lack of clarity in the text. A little off-format for Perry Mason, with very, very little in the way of courtroom drama, but makes for a nice change of pace. At this point ESG is very comfortable with his setup and his characters and it feels like he's enjoying telling these tales, which seem to come very easily to him.

The Case Of The Dangerous Dowager (1937) (P. Mason #10) by Erle Stanley Gardner. The impetus for this tale is a young woman and her I.O.U.s. The notes are held onboard the gambling ship where she lost, and continued to lose, just about every time she set foot on the yacht. Reading this now the concept of a ship sitting 12 miles off the coast of California just for the purpose of gambling seems a bit extreme, but in the 1930’s there was no lottery, on-line gambling sites, or any of the modern ways to give away your money. Back then you really had to work at it.
The girl’s grandmother hires Mason to get the notes back. She’s a spunky no nonsense woman. You can tell because she smokes cigars, so don’t mess with her. And she is show more known to tote a firearm in her purse.
Most of the action takes place on the gambling ship. Mason and Drake go aboard, Drake posing as first a gambler and later as the young woman’s husband. Mason is more of the detective here, poking about and setting things into motion. When the man running the ship is killed both Mason and the young woman are implicated. The murder is a type of locked room puzzle, but with a variation.
The major problem with the I.O.U.s is that the granddaughter is about to divorce her less than savory husband and if he can prove she is a gambling addict (which she is) he can win custody of their son.
The girl is on the run, the husband is hiding out, at least one of Paul drake’s operative blabs info to the dirty press, and Mason himself is a fugitive from the law. Still this is no big deal for the brilliant and eloquent Perry Mason who handles everything that comes at him with style and panache and a great deal of good humor.
No courtroom in this one but it certainly doesn’t need one as this story is both entertaining and a lot of fun, show less

The investigation in this book felt more than the usual degree of shady for this series, and there's a few really startling instances of casual racist banter thrown in for kicks. The gambling ship does make for an interesting setting, and I liked the solution, in the end, so that brings it back up to 3 stars for me.

This one didn't hook me in the beginning as much as most of the series, but it was definitely a different type and the ending was filled with twists I didn't see coming. Mason skirts the rule of the letter of the law a lot and this one he definitely does. Overall another I ended up really enjoying.

A chockful of errors and lies make up this rockling book. It is like having all of your assumptions on how a Perry Mason novel should be pulled up from underneath you. Hide somewhere and let the words of this story roll over you. Once you start, you do not want to put it down.