To celebrate Erle Stanley Gardner’s 136th birthday (17 July 1889) and because other reviewers are posting their latest Gardner read, I pulled out one of my favorite Perry Mason books and re-read it. The Case of the Duplicate Daughter (Morrow, 1960) was one of three Mason titles Gardner published in 1960. He also published one Cool and Lam volume that year, and he was immersed in editing scripts and managing the Perry Mason television show which he launched in 1957 and ran for 10 years. So a few corners were cut in writing this one, such as the use of an old fictional trope that Mason still invests with originality.
Carter Gilman disappears one morning while his 20-year-old daughter Muriel is cooking breakfast at his request. She searches the grounds and finds a pool of red liquid on the floor of Gilman’s wood workshop, along with dozens of hundred dollar bills. Convinced it was a murder scene, she telephoned the office of Perry Mason, whom her father had left instructions to contact in the event of an emergency.
Mason visited the house to allay Muriel’s alarm and determined the red liquid was paint. The two collected the hundred-dollar bills, which totaled ten thousand dollars, the 2025 equivalent of nearly $110,000. Mason set Paul Drake to work on investigating the family, made up of Gilman, his daughter Muriel from his first marriage, his second wife Nancy, and her daughter Glamis from her first marriage. Gilman materializes in Mason’s office long enough to give him cryptic instructions and then he disappears again.
While waiting for Drake to produce results, Mason gets a call from a private investigator named Vera Martel who warns him to stay out of Gilman’s business and to tell Gilman things are much worse than he thinks. Intrigued, Mason asks Drake about Martel; Drake says she is unethical and she uses the results of her investigations to blackmail her clients and anyone else she can.
Not surprisingly, Martel turns up dead and Carter Gilman is charged in her murder. The usual courtroom pyrotechnics follow with a novel solution that is definitely not fair play and rests on an ancient fictional ploy but it’s effective here. Prosecutor Hamilton Burger subpoenas Mason as a witness for the prosecution, only Mason reveals the killer before he actually has to testify.
The motive rests on the social conventions of the 1950s, which may seem peculiar to contemporary readers. There are multiple references to Nancy’s Bohemian lifestyle when she was younger; she was an artist which at the time was synonymous for a dissolute lifestyle. Cue pearl clutching. Gardner happily killed blackmailers off more than once in his books; we don’t see much about blackmail in current crime fiction, probably because standards have changed dramatically in the past 60 years and there’s not much now that is susceptible to blackmail.
As usual, Gardner is obsessed with the age and appearance of the female characters.
I was struck by Mason’s availability. He had no other client that needed his attention apparently, and he was free to visit the Gilman property and devote his time to their needs on the spur of the minute. Now of course it can take weeks to obtain an appointment with a moderately successful attorney and longer still for them to produce results.
Another classic case from Perry Mason, not as complex as his earlier ones but still imminently readable.