The Case of the Rolling Bones

Once upon a time, two men found gold in Klondike. By the end of that winter one of them was dead and one of them was rich. Now, decades later, the heirs of the man that returned want to declare him incompetent - mainly because he seems to have fallen in love.

It is a niece that comes to Perry to ask for help against these plans - but before long the first body appears (not much surprise there). The problem is that the man cannot be dead - because he is already dead. And that's how starts a yarn of the past and days when people were getting rich by finding gold. For a while, I was wondering where Gardner is going with the story but then when the aliases and names started rolling, the story turned into a double story - one side in the 30s show more with Mason; one back in the Klondike.

A woman that is not what she appears to be, a man that cannot be alive, another that dies two times. It is obvious that names had been exchanged but the reasons for it are not straight forward - and it seems that the story is a lot more complicated than anyone expected. Mason deciding to protect his clients and manufacture some clues do not help things much.

At the end the story wrapped in nicely but I am a bit ambivalent about what the lawyer did - legal it may have been but it was not very morally sound. Despite the reasons for it.

I enjoyed the window in the past as seen from a later past - seeing the past with the eyes of the people that would have been dead before I was born (were they real) is fascinating. show less

Around 30 years ago, Alden Leeds made a fortune prospecting for gold in the Yukon. Now Alden is in his seventies, and some of his family members (and heirs) feel that he's getting senile and needs to be committed. Alden's assistant disagrees and asks Perry mason to protect him. Mason takes the case and, since this is an Erle Stanley Gardner novel, there is a murder and the plot goes in anything but a straight line.

The Case of the Rolling Bones was an interesting story. Like many of my generation, I picture Perry mason according to the television series of the late 50s, with the big cars, thin ties, and a straight-laced, sanitized, and orderly society. This novel, however, was written in 1939. The old men spoke about life on the show more frontier and lament the softness of the younger generation. Mason and the other characters aren't restrained by the Hayes Code, nor do they have to worry about offending their sponsors. It's not great literature, but it is certainly entertaining waiting room material.
--J. show less

This was classic Perry Mason, ably assisted by secretary Della and PI Paul. The story here concerned a wealthy older man committed to a sanatorium by his predatory relatives to stop him from marrying, but also reaches back to the gold fields of Alaska.

It was pretty confusing, but I think I got my head around it, and Mason ran rings around the DA, which is all that counts.

Perry is confront with a murder case in which his client is accused of murdering a man in the Klondike in 1907 but the police say he was also murdered in California thirty-three years later. Is Emily Milicant the wife, sister or mistress? Why did the owner of the crooked dice eat his dinner twice?

Mason pushes the boundaries of court ethics to win the case with the help of Della Street and Paul Drake.

"Rolling Bones" confused the heck out of me. I reread scenes as I went along, hoping to better understand it, but it didn't help. The corpse (I think--see, this is how confused I am) used so many different aliases I'm not sure what his real identity was. Perry successfully uses one corpse to solve two murders in the end--I think. Exactly.

What seems like a straight ahead case turns out to be anything but. An example of one too many plot points being tossed out there. Not one of the better reads in the series.

Two men change their identities back and forth about six times and there are a couple murders and blackmail. This one was maybe a little less hard to follow than most of the other Perry Mason books I've read, but still a bit hard to follow.