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3.0 out of 5 stars
Intial entry in the Perry Mason series is weak, clawless, Jun 26 2000
Background: The stylistic heritage of the Perry Mason mysteries is the American pulp magazines of the 1920s. In the early Mason mysteries, Perry - a good-looking, broad-shouldered, two-fisted, man of action - is constantly stiff-arming sultry beauties on his way to an explosive encounter that precipitates the book's climactic action sequence. In the opening chapters of these stories, Gardner subjects the reader to assertive passages that Mason is a crusader for justice, a man so action-oriented he is constitutionally incapable of sitting in his office and waiting for a case to come to him or to develop on its own once it has - he has to be out on the street, in the midst of the action, making things happen, always on the offensive, never standing pat or accepting being put on the defensive. These narrative passages - naïve, embarrassingly crude "character" development - pop up throughout the early books, stopping the narrative dead in its tracks, and putting on full display a non-writer's worst characteristic: telling the reader a character's traits instead of showing them through action, dialogue, and use of other of the writer's tools.Rating "Ground Rules": These flaws, and others so staggeringly obvious that enumerating them is akin to using cannons to take out a flea, occur throughout the Gardner books, and can easily be used (with justification) to trash his work. But for this reader they are a "given", part of the literary terrain, and are not relevant to my assessment of the Gardner books. In other words, my assessments of the Perry Mason mysteries turn a blind eye to Erle Stanley Gardner's wooden, style-less writing, inept descriptive passages, unrealistic dialogue, and weak characterizations. As I've just noted, as examples of literary style all of Gardner's books, including the Perry Mason series, are all pretty bad. Nonetheless, the Mason stories are a lot of fun, offering intriguing puzzles, nifty legal gymnastics, courtroom pyrotechnics, and lots of action and close calls for Perry and crew. Basically, you have to turn off the literary sensibilities and enjoy the "guilty" pleasure of a fun read of bad writing. So, my 1-5 star ratings (A, B, C, D, and F) are relative to other books in the Gardner canon, not to other mysteries, and certainly not to literature or general fiction. "The Case of the Velvet Claws": C In this inaugural story in the Perry Mason series, Gardner spends a lot of time defining the by now all-too-well-known characteristics of the series - the characters (Della Street, faithful, adoring secretary and Paul Drake, beleaguered, efficient, somewhat dense private detective and Watson to Mason's Holmes), the urban setting, the typical client (in this case, as in so many others, an obstreperous, self-destructive, double-crossing female whose appearance was de rigueur in the pulps and the film noir classics of the forties) and of course our intrepid lawyer-hero - the impatient, no-nonsense, man-of-action who will stop at nothing to honor his client's right to be represented by the best legal mind possible. If all of this sounds a bit comic-bookish, well, it is, since its true ancestors - the pulps of that era - were only marginally removed from that form themselves. In this outing the mystery is weak, the cast of suspects too small, and the situation and characters stock - lifted straight out of the pulp magazines where Gardner developed his style and his early following. There is none of the courtroom daring-do that earmarks the best of the Perry Mason series. The writing displays more of the dark-alley, rainy-night elements of the hard-boiled pulp style than the later entries in the series, and so has some interest for the reader who wants to trace Gardner's evolution to a new style, one that melds the elements of pulp with his unique blend of convoluted plot, legal intricacies, fast-paced action, and courtroom melodramatics.
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