In The Case of the Fraudulent Foto we get to see Perry in a new rôle - as Deputy District attorney for Waring County. He’s standing in for the Waring County D.A. who is currently on trial for murder. And Perry is defending him. It’s a tangled tale of political and bureaucratic corruption and blackmail with some personal complications thrown in.
The Case of the Romantic Rogue is fiendishly complicated. An heiress is being pursued by a con-man, the con-man is being blackmailed, the con-man’s girlfriend is unhappy about all of these things, the heiress’s uncle who ran off with his secretary has been missing but may or may not have been found. Only Perry mason could unravel a case like this. This one is slightly unusual since the final revelation does not come in a courtroom scene. A good episode but you have to concentrate.
In The Case of the Jaded Joker Danny Ross is a comic whose career is faltering but a new TV show promoted by his pal Charlie Goff will put him back on top. The new TV show goes ahead but without Danny and he’s pretty devastated, as is his buddy/aide/general factotum Freddie. Even Buzzy, the beatnik piano player who is the other member of Danny’s odd little entourage, is almost moved to express some emotion at the news. When Charlie Goff is found dead it’s Freddie who is arrested but there are several other people who also have plausible motives.
Show business is always a good background to murder but this story also gives us, as a bonus, a glimpse into the crazy world of the beatniks. It’s a solid episode.
The Case of the Lost Last Act is another show business murder story. Successful playwright Ernest Royce has written a play about playwright named Steve who gets murdered before he can write the last act of his new play. And now the last set of Royce’s play has disappeared.
This is a play that has made Royce a lot of enemies even before it’s finished. It’s a bitter angry play and everyone who has read the first two acts has good reason not to want the play finished.
When Royce is shot, exactly the way the character in his play was shot, ex-racketeer Frank Brooks figures there’s a good chance he’ll be charged with the murder so he hires Mason to defend him. Brooks had put a lot of money into the play because it was going to make his girlfriend Faith a star but once he figures out that Royce is taking much too close an interest in Faith Brooks decides to pull both his money and his girl out of the play.
Perry’s courtroom pyrotechnics are well and truly up to his outrageous standards. His antics aren’t just theatrical, they are actual theatre. There are the usual nifty plot twists. A very good episode.
The Case of the Bedeviled Doctor begins with a stolen tape-recording, a recording of a session with a psychoanalyst. The recording could be very embarrassing if it fell into the wrong hands and as Perry points out the fact that it’s been stolen suggests that it already has fallen into the wrong hands. Murder is the result. Ordinarily in a case of blackmail leading to murder the blackmail victim would be the obvious suspect, but not in this case. In fact there are six people with very plausible motives for the murder.
This story doesn’t have the bravura use of arcane points of law or ingenious alibis that you get in the best Perry Mason episodes. This is a routine episode, but even a routine Perry Mason episode is still pretty enjoyable.
Always a good series to revisit.
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