It was a dark and stormy night. The book doesn't actually begin with those words, but that is the setting at the opening of the story. And it's on this dark and stormy night that Perry Mason is lured out to meet a mystery client with the promise of $1,000 just for the meeting. At the meeting he is introduced to a masked woman and given half a $10,000 bill, the other half of which is given to her. The idea is that she is about to be in the middle of some trouble and Mason is to represent her when that happens. No other explanations.
Now of course there is an explanation for this, and of course that explanation is marital infidelity. And if the book has a weakness it's that the mystery clients are so concerned about this infidelity coming out into the light of day when there's a murder case hanging over them. It also made the mystery of the masked woman not so mysterious, except maybe to wonder why it took Mason until the last few pages to figure it out.
Now, that's not to say it's a bad story. Far from it. It doesn't have the court room theatrics one comes to associate with Perry Mason stories, but it has all the false leads, red herrings, tangled motives and semi-legal lawyerly shenanigans that you expect from them. There is a Russian heiress (or is she), a do gooder socialite, a woman who arranged a shady adoption and now wants to get control of a trust fund, a very shady stock deal, a pair of partners who had it in for one another, and of course, a murder.
You don't read a Perry Mason mystery for brawling action sequences, you read it for the whodunit, the how did they do it and for the dialogue. There is as always a lot of interaction with Della Street and Paul Drake, and some good sequences of Perry talking to the players trying to get to the bottom of what happened. Maybe the best part is Mason dealing with a shady stock deal that is tangentially related to the murder case. Seeing him take a cocky corporate attorney down a peg is a lot of fun.
Some aspects of the mystery seemed obvious to me from very early on. That said, it did not detract from my enjoyment of the story at all. And it's very interesting to see depictions of the seedier side of society from this time, acknowledging that even people who are considered upright can engage in morally questionable behavior in the right circumstances. Most entertainment of this period insists on a more rigid good guy versus bad guy dynamic. And this more realistic slant is what sets Perry Mason apart and makes it still interesting all these years later.
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