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When Perry Mason stumbles upon a classified ad for a brown-haired woman with specific physical attributes, he takes note of the seemingly suspicious request. Then the woman hired for the job reaches out, fearing that her new employer--who pays her and her chaperone to stay inside an apartment and answer to another woman's name--might be using her for nefarious purposes. But by the time Mason works out the first mystery, a second, with murder, is just getting started, and that's only the show more first twist that awaits him as he endeavors to prove the innovence of "the borrowed brunette." -- book jacket show lessTags
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Member Reviews
So far, this is one of my favorite of the Perry Mason books. Instead of a client coming to him with a weird situation that captures his interest, he notices something strange that alerts HIM to the mystery. Multiple brunettes lining street corners, all dressed the same, all similar in appearance.
Most of the story is set outside the courtroom, but we get two different sorts of court hearings to make up for it. The murderer wasn't too difficult to guess due to a limited suspect pool, but the ways for the accused to slip out of it seemed like an impossible situation....at first. Not many writers are as clever with legal twists as Gardner. He really is a king of clever crime and twisty courtroom drama.
Most of the story is set outside the courtroom, but we get two different sorts of court hearings to make up for it. The murderer wasn't too difficult to guess due to a limited suspect pool, but the ways for the accused to slip out of it seemed like an impossible situation....at first. Not many writers are as clever with legal twists as Gardner. He really is a king of clever crime and twisty courtroom drama.
"Borrowed Brunette" had the craziest premise in the world, but was one of the more understandable and easy to follow Mason mysteries I've read so far. A woman looking to divorce her wealthy husband so she can marry another man learns her husband has hired detectives to shadow her to learn the identity of her boyfriend, so she has a friend hire a girl who looks like her to live in her apartment to throw the detectives off track. All is going splendidly until the friend turns up dead in the apartment, and the woman hired to impersonate her, along with her chaperone, are charged with the crime. The D.A. tries to get Perry in trouble with the Grand Jury for perjury, but of course the Grand Jury is to smart for that! Silly D.A., thinking he show more could get Perry in trouble! In the end it was actually a very logical suspect who was guilty: the woman's husband, who thought that the friend was actually the boyfriend. show less
Found a 1946 first edition at a thrift store. Added to the charm of reading this clever mystery. Mason redefines thinking outside the box and since Garner was a lawyer he gets the technical stuff right, and is damn clever about it as well.
Some Gardner stories become formulaic, but this is more original --it starts with an intriguing opening -- Mason passes a whole series of attractive, similarly dressed brunette each standing on a separate street corner. Naturally, he stops and asks one what it is all about....
Great set-up ... Overall pretty good, but not one of the best.
Classic hard boiled Perry Mason loveliness
Original price: $0.35.
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Author Information
863+ Works 30,659 Members
Mystery writer Erle Gardner was born on July 17, 1889 in Malden, Massachusetts. In 1902, he had moved to Oroville, CA. His parents could not afford to send a second son to college, so he worked in a legal office as a clerk reading law. He spent a short time at Valparaiso University in Indiana but had to drop out because of an illegal boxing show more exhibition. He continued to travel throughout California and read law at several law offices and finally passed the bar in 1911, at the age of 21. He married Natalie Francis Beatrice Talbert on April 9, 1912. In 1916, he formed the Law Firm of Orr and Gardner in Venture, CA. Gardner used many pseudonyms such as Charles Green, Kyle Corning and Grant Holiday. While working as an attorney, he began writing fiction. In 1921, "Nellie's Naughty Nighty" was published in the pulp magazine Breezy Stories. He had a goal of writing 100,000 words a month and would sometimes write two or more stories a day. In 1923, "The Shrieking Skeleton" was sold to the Black Mask Magazine. In the 1930's, Gardner had two manuscripts that were rejected and than "rediscovered" by Thayer Hobson, the president of the William Morrow Publishing Company, and rewritten as courtroom mysteries. During this process, the character Perry Mason was born. In 1933, the first Perry Mason book was written, "The Case of the Velvet Claws." The next one was entitled "The Case of the Sulky Girl" and they were followed by more than eighty additional Mason mysteries. Gardner died on March 11, 1970. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Some Editions
Series
Belongs to Publisher Series
Work Relationships
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- The Case of the Borrowed Brunette
- Original title
- The Case of the Borrowed Brunette
- Original publication date
- 1946
- People/Characters
- Perry Mason; Della Street
Classifications
Statistics
- Members
- 319
- Popularity
- 99,546
- Reviews
- 10
- Rating
- (3.87)
- Languages
- 12 — Czech, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 20
- ASINs
- 27
