Just finished Gardner's first Perry Mason novel, THE CASE OF
THE VELVET CLAW. Mason is hardboiled in this book. He knocks
out somebody trying to strong-arm him, advises his client to
lie to the police, and pulls all kinds of dirty tricks to get
his client off. A great character and a great book. I loved
it! How many of them are hardboiled? If I recall from a
recent thread, at least the first four are, and then he
softens up a bit, and then even moreso later in the
series.
My only complaint is that at least three times he uses the
same tactic of telling his client that he knows she's lying
to him because other people have provided contrary proof, and
then, when she caves in and admits the truth, he says, "ha!
faked you out! they never said that!" His client is a tough
and clever girl. Assuming that she would fall for the same
trick three times in a row is stretching it more than a
little. There were a few other things that didn't really pull
together either (see bottom of message below spoiler
warning).
I was very pleased that there wasn't a bunch of legal
mumbo-jumbo and cute little twists in the law to jack around
with the plot. I hate that stuff with a passion. In my
opinion, that was the weakest part of Cain's THE POSTMAN
ALWAYS RINGS TWICE.
The whole book brought back memories when I was about 6 years
old, hanging out at my grandparents' and them watching Perry
Mason on TV. He was pretty damn tough even when he softened
up, wasn't he?
*******
*******
SPOILER FOLLOWS!!!
*******
*******
What happened to the other slug that Perry says must have
been in the tub? The police didn't find it? And wasn't Eva
still guilty of attempted murder? And why wasn't there an
immediate stink about the fact that two shots had been fired?
Whether it was an automatic or revolver, there had to be two
empty casings, didn't there? Oh well, that's all just picky
stuff! The book was a quick read, very entertaining, and a
lot of fun.
miker
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 10 Sep 2002 EDT