When I picked up The Case of the Borrowed Brunette from the library recently, I picked up a couple more Erle Stanley Gardner novels, both from the late 1940s.
THE CASE OF THE DUBIOUS BRIDEGROOM starts when Perry Mason catches a gorgeous woman sneaking down the fire escape from the office overhead — and did she have a gun in her hand before dropping it in the alley? An investigation reveals the owner of the company one flight up has his share of problems, including a dubious Mexican divorce (“In the US you’re a bigamist. As long as you and your new wife stay here in Mexico, you’re legally married.”), a vengeful first wife and a scheme by her to take over his business — who could have guessed that she’d turn up with a fatal bullet in her? Fun. The cover takes us back to the days when Sex Sells was the basic rule of paperbacks (as I discussed here). I don’t know the artist.
THE CASE OF THE LONELY HEIRESS kicks off when the owner of a lonely-hearts magazine — the hard-copy version of a dating site — tells Perry he’s uneasy that an allegedly wealthy woman has paid to put an ad in his paper. Why would an heiress need an ad to find a man? Does she have an angle and if so could it get him legal trouble?
It turns out the heiress is the one in trouble: rivals for her inheritance are contesting the will by trying to suborn a witness to the deceased signing it and the ad is part of an overly elaborate scheme to thwart them. That, of course, makes the heiress suspect number one when right after she visits the witness, the woman is found dead with a cracked skull … This has an astonishing number of agendas in play and an improbable romance to wrap up on but it was still fun. It’s also interesting that 1)even back people made the same observations about women having to wade through a lot of crap to find anyone even half-decent; 2)based on discussions I had online, the old slang used herein such as “make a pass” and “chiseler” is now obsolete (I have a sudden urge to write a 1940s story where I can use them).
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