The first season Star Trek episode “Court-Martial” introduced us to Samuel Cogley (Elisha Cook), a cantakerous, stubbornly old-fashioned defense attorney who takes on Kirk (accused of murder) as a client. Tony Isabella and attorney/comics analyst Robert Ingersoll bring Cogley back in the Trek novel THE CASE OF THE COLONIST’S CORPSE: A Sam Cogley Mystery, written in the style of a Perry Mason thriller.
Under the terms of the Organian peace treaty, the Federation and the Klingons have rival colonies on the same world; now it appears the Klingon leader has murdered his human counterpart. Cogley, aided by counterpart’s of Mason’s supporting cast (trusty Girl Friday and a PI doing the legwork) takes the case which, of course, proves more complicated than expected.
I’d heard good things about how fun this was so I finally checked it out from the library. I was disappointed and gave up midway through. The book bogs down in exposition, from endless discussions of how old-fashioned and non-digital Cogley is (a trait I think played better in the original series when people were more wary of computers) to how his investigator is a former Section 31 agent. Not that this is a bad detail, but the book goes on to give the full history of Section 31 and I didn’t need that.
For comparison I picked up one of Erle Stanley Gardner’s novels, THE CASE OF THE RESTLESS REDHEAD, which opens with his LA attorney dropping off some paperwork in a neighboring county where a local lawyer has been assigned to defend a young woman on a charge of theft. He’s cross-examining the prime witness and floundering but Perry gives him some tips that turn things around.
The redhead, Evelyn, shows up in Perry’s office the next day and asks for help. A one-time Hollywood hopeful believes the theft frame-up relates to the schemer who scammed her out of her money to help arrange screen tests and movie stardom. As typical for the novels, by the middle of the book this set-up has crossed the line into murder with Perry’s client the prime suspect.
The novel’s not one of Gardner’s best. Like all Perry Mason novels it’s talky, and at a couple of spots it has people repeating information we already know but in a different context (on the witness stand for instance). Evelyn’s initial request for help isn’t as intriguing as some of Perry’s other cases. However it moves much faster and more efficiently than the Cogley book, setting up characters and situations with a minimum of exposition and giving more space to the court pyrotechnics and plot twists. Which explains why Perry’s a legend and Cogley’s just a footnote.
INVISIBILITY: The History and Science of How Not to Be Seen by Gregory I. Gbur was one I picked up after ordering it for a friend. Despite the title, this is less about invisibility in fact and fiction (though it does cover The Invisible Man, The Damned Thing and a few other fictional examples) and more about the history of optics, light, and the related physics. This seems to be Gbur’s real interest and while informative it’s not quite what I was looking for; the ending bits, discussing successful modern efforts at creating invisibility (but only enough to, say, cover something the size of a paperback), are somewhat more interesting.
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