By Jim Studer
Growing up I read biographies of lawyers and watched Perry Mason on TV. Over the years I saw most of the TV shows and have since watched the reruns over and over. It dawned on me that in spite of being such a fan I had never read any of the Erle Stanley Gardner books that hatched the TV series. Gardner has written over 300 books starting in the 1930s. He wrote well into the 1960s. Eighty five of these were Perry Mason cases. I have since read over a dozen of them. I enjoyed them even more than the TV shows.
The TV version remained ever so faithful to the books in plot and character. The CBS series stayed ever faithful to Gardner’s characters and plots. Mason, his faithful and everloving Della Street, handsome Paul Drake and the endless cast of his operatives are true to the books. Then there is the honest, clever and hardworking Lt. Tragg and even more surprised at losing than Aesop’s hare is the D.A. Hamilton Burger who suffers loss after loss.
The plots gleaned from the novels, which all run to one side or another of two hundred pages, are only slightly altered. Both books and TV series give us Gardner’s twisted tales often with a surprise ending.
Some of the Mason plots were appropriated by the writers of another popular lawyer show, Matlock, which came later. The plots were sometimes the same, but the character of the smooth, scheming, sophisticated Perry was the polar opposite of the countrified Ben. Ben had no Della Street counterpart. Nevertheless, Gardner’s cases lived on.
As I indulged in Erle’s “who-dun-its,” I noticed some things gradually changed from the 1940s to the 21st century. Perry, Della, Paul and Tragg were constantly sucking on a cigarette. Many of the villainous characters puffed or chewed on a stogie. They all ignored any sense of manners. They lit up in cars, offices, during meals, in people’s homes and exhaled smoke face to face.
During the TV episodes there was less of this, but still way more than in the Matlock series years later. Reading these scenes and watching them on TV today had me shaking my head and thinking how rude. Just maybe the human race is making some progress.
Another noted evolution from the books to the TV series is the cars. The aircraft carriers or luxury liners seem more like art museum pieces than modern transportation. Mason and Drake cruise in wide, long-tailed convertibles. How could Drake follow, undetected, a suspect in one of them? Both left their ships moored on city streets, top down. Theft of hubcaps, wheels, car radios and aerials were a cottage industry in the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s, not to mention entire cars being shipped off to chop shops.