Musings from Brian J. Noggle

This is the second Perry Mason book I’ve re-read this year; the first was The Case of the Cautious Coquette in April. This volume is published by Walter J. Black, the same fellow that does the Classics Club and Dickens editions I’ve been collecting; now that I look at it, they use the same binding. No doubt these were inexpensive books sold as part of a Perry Mason book club, and the fact that I see so many of these titles in the wild indicates they were probably early volumes in the series.

In this book, celebrating its 56th anniversary this year, Mason consults with a nurse who wants to prevent the murder of her charge by a husband after her (the charge’s) property. Mason can’t do much for her, but gets roped into defending the nurse when she’s accused of theft. Then the charge actually dies, and Mason must defend the accused–the dead woman’s sister who also consulted with Mason with an incomplete hand-written will.

A quick read and a good mystery. There’s a reason Mason was popular in fiction and on television for fifty years.

I picked up this book because I liked its cover and its book jacket flap blurbs. Of course, now that I look more closely, the cover is kinda weird:

I mean, there’s a tire with a shiny hubcap on the pavement, and there’s the hot chick (ca 1982) witness to a hit and run reflected in it. However, if the perspective of the reflection is to be believed, she’s either a legless panhandler on a little cart or coming out of a manhole in the street. Or the car and the obligatory hard-boiled hat are somehow on a platform three to four feet above the pavement level where the woman is standing.

Okay, so the hard-boiled detective, series character Tanner in this case, is supposed to find a model who witnessed a hit-and-run where the hitter was a local crime boss and the hitee was really a hit. That’s what the flap says. Inside, the Tanner character and his Greenleaf author try to throwback to Chandler and Macdonald (Ross)–the detective even mentions reading those authors at one point. The language is seriously over-the-top riven with metaphors, sometimes two to a sentence or five in a paragraph. It made for some slower reading.

Then, after a bit, the language didn’t jar me, so I thought perhaps this Tanner fellow was hard in the line of the greats. The book, set in El Gordo, California (literally, The Fat Man) uses the California landscape prevalent in the classics, and the book plays in the elements of the idle rich, gangsters, and mixed-up youth.

However, ultimately, it’s not up to the level of the names it tries to invoke. The plot gets just one not too twisted and the resolution is a little too tidy.

I won’t dodge others in this series, but I’m not ordering them all right now. It’s below Robert Crais and Robert B. Parker but not completely unworthwhile.

I’ve read this book before, so I knew how it was going to end. I read it again anyway. That’s what I like about McBain. That I like McBain. Or something.

This book is one of the Deaf Man books, which you know what that means if you know McBain. The 87th Precinct series are pretty straight ahead police procedurals, but a number of the books center on the heist designs of the arch criminal of the series, The Deaf Man. These books deal less with the investigation of a realistic crime than the heistalistic stylings and clues and eventual accidental collapse of the schemes. In this book, he begins sending clues to the 87th Precinct that usually indicates the heist he’s going to pull. If he’s playing fair. Oh, yeah, there’s a dead body found in Grover Park, too.

The Deaf Man subseries aren’t the best introduction to the series if you haven’t read them before, but if you’re familiar with the series, they’re a understandable diversion. McBain must have had fun with them.

So I’ve read it more than once, and I’ll probably read it again someday. The next time I find another copy on my to-read shelves. Which could be as early as December.

I got this book in the Reader’s Digest purty edition instead of the Walter J. Black Classics Club/Classic Editions (as is Oliver Twist and some of the other Dickens I have). Hence, instead of $1 or $4.95 I would have paid for it, I paid $30 or so (plus shipping and handling). There was a phase I was going through when I thought it would be neat to have matching editions of books in my collection, before I came to my senses and started amassing matching editions that only cost $1.00.

At first, I thought I would like this book much better than Oliver Twist for two reasons: first, the book uses a double-effect first person narrator. Now, to those of you not up on those terms, it means that the voice telling the story is an I (I did, I said). The double-effect means that the voice is telling a story from the past, so the events of the past convey not only what happened and what the narrator thought of them as they happened, but the greater wisdom of interpretation from a later time. This allows some offhand foreshadowing as well as a certain wryness.

Secondly, with a first person narrator, I figured that flaw I found in Oliver Twist, that things happened to Oliver, a passive participant in his own story, wouldn’t happen. Well, therein I was incorrect. For although things happened to Oliver, in Great Expectations, Pip spends a lot of time doing nothing.

For a quick synopsis: A young orphan, raised by his sister and her blacksmith husband, finds an escaped convict in the graveyard where his parents are buried (the child’s, not the convict’s). Forced to help the convict, the orphan brings him a file and some victuals. The convict is captured the next day, but the child never lets on he helped the convict. After time passes, the child (Pip) grows a bit and is selected to visit a reclusive wealthy woman who has stopped her clocks at the time she was jilted by a con man some years ago. Pip meets her ward as well, a young woman who is attractive but cold. Apparently, the woman is raising the child to be a man-eater to exact revenge on the gender. Suddenly, the woman’s attorney–and a criminal defender of some reknown–comes forward to tell Pip he has “great expectations”–that is, someone has given him an allowance for education and he might come into some property when he turns 21. Pip turns from an earnest, lower class fellow into a shiftless upper class snob, continues to pursue the beautiful but cold Estella, and waits to learn the name and nature of his benefactor.

So, ultimately, while Oliver Twist had a lot of things just happen to Oliver, Great Expectations has a first person narrator who does little but kill time. Overall, the book was too long building with a lot of paragraphs spent on the things Pip did while passing the time, but the nut of the story could have been told in 200 pages. This is the nature of Victorian literature, I guess, filled with passages and “comic” moments that really aren’t that funny to a modern audience.

Worth your time if you’re into literature, but there are better things to read.

This old book is more akin to a pamphlet as it weighs in at 20 typed-and-photocopied pages, but since the library counted it as a book, I will, too. Like Webster Park: 1892-1992, it provides insight into the history of the region in which I live, but it’s not much. The book provides a little text describing how to look for information about your home from the city of St. Louis (if your home was built before the city threw out the county lo, those many years ago) or St. Louis County. Additionally, it provides a couple of maps showing some of the early subdivisions of the land, so I now know who owned the land my house was on from the time the Spanish crown deeded it to a fellow named Sarpy to the time it was parcelled into 40 acre lots. It’s not far, really, for me to draw up a line of owners all the way to me if I were so inclined. Perhaps someday I might.

The book precedes the Internet, though, in that it includes a couple of forms that you can photocopy and fill out to take with you to the government. Of course, from what I know of the government, it still precedes the Internet, so perhaps those will come in handy.

Worth the hour I spent browsing it just for the maps.