Last night I tried reading the Perry Mason novel The Case of the Howling Dog by Erle Stanley Gardner, from the 1930s, and unexpectedly kept reading until I noticed it was like 3:45. I tried to put it down then around the halfway point but couldn't go to sleep and gave up and finished it.
I didn't actually realize that the Perry Mason show was based on books at all until I saw them mentioned on this mystery blog that, as mentioned,![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
viggorlijah sent me the link to. I guess I watched the original black and white show in reruns as a child - quite a lot of it even - but long enough ago that I don't really remember anything about it.
The blog does say that they are of variable quality and have some huge caveats in terms of race and gender, but this was one of the ones on his shortlist for best one. I have to give TW for early 1900s San Francisco Chinese treatment, although the greatest racism is practiced by a deputy sheriff and it is later contradicted by another character. There's quite a bit of truly awful stuff to hold your nose through when it comes to anti-Chinese racism though, because there's a plot point about a rich man's Chinese cook and whether he is an illegal immigrant or not, as well as a scene where the racist deputy does that racist fake pidgin thing to talk to him and tells Mason - who doesn't buy it but also doesn't explain why the deputy is a bigoted idiot - that you have to talk to Chinese people that way so that they'll understand you; and the Chinese guy answers him in the same way, evidently because the deputy wants him to. This is actually way ahead of a lot of the racism and sexism you see in these period books, in that the narrator and protagonist don't endorse it and it is later shown to be false! But it is still not fun to read, and I probably would have given up if it had gotten much more page space.
There is a much smaller issue with misogyny integral to the plot - multiple fully-fledged female characters are there, but there's an uncontested plot point about how a beautiful, young woman who is wearing too little makeup obviously is hiding something and up to something because no woman would REALLY do that. I think in the writer's defense that it's only white middle class men he says this to, so it's possible Gardner was aware that that isn't true and even could conceive that a woman might have contradicted him? But it also does get said multiple times and seems to be endorsed by the text. Amusingly though, Mason also calls out stereotyping and talks about the effect of a defendant being protrayed as a femme fatale or "vamp" on public opinion, implicitly endorsing the idea that stereotypical portraits of femininity are superimposed over real women who are actually just people!
There are some good bits about collusion between the police and prosecutor and the unfair tactics of state prosecutors though, which is nice to see in print given the number of GAD novels I've read that fully endorse the validity of 100% circumstantial cases, even leading to the death penalty.
So on the whole I give this book 5/5 but with a big content warning, and I will certainly be reading at least a few more of the series.
I didn't actually realize that the Perry Mason show was based on books at all until I saw them mentioned on this mystery blog that, as mentioned,
viggorlijah sent me the link to. I guess I watched the original black and white show in reruns as a child - quite a lot of it even - but long enough ago that I don't really remember anything about it.The blog does say that they are of variable quality and have some huge caveats in terms of race and gender, but this was one of the ones on his shortlist for best one. I have to give TW for early 1900s San Francisco Chinese treatment, although the greatest racism is practiced by a deputy sheriff and it is later contradicted by another character. There's quite a bit of truly awful stuff to hold your nose through when it comes to anti-Chinese racism though, because there's a plot point about a rich man's Chinese cook and whether he is an illegal immigrant or not, as well as a scene where the racist deputy does that racist fake pidgin thing to talk to him and tells Mason - who doesn't buy it but also doesn't explain why the deputy is a bigoted idiot - that you have to talk to Chinese people that way so that they'll understand you; and the Chinese guy answers him in the same way, evidently because the deputy wants him to. This is actually way ahead of a lot of the racism and sexism you see in these period books, in that the narrator and protagonist don't endorse it and it is later shown to be false! But it is still not fun to read, and I probably would have given up if it had gotten much more page space.
There is a much smaller issue with misogyny integral to the plot - multiple fully-fledged female characters are there, but there's an uncontested plot point about how a beautiful, young woman who is wearing too little makeup obviously is hiding something and up to something because no woman would REALLY do that. I think in the writer's defense that it's only white middle class men he says this to, so it's possible Gardner was aware that that isn't true and even could conceive that a woman might have contradicted him? But it also does get said multiple times and seems to be endorsed by the text. Amusingly though, Mason also calls out stereotyping and talks about the effect of a defendant being protrayed as a femme fatale or "vamp" on public opinion, implicitly endorsing the idea that stereotypical portraits of femininity are superimposed over real women who are actually just people!
There are some good bits about collusion between the police and prosecutor and the unfair tactics of state prosecutors though, which is nice to see in print given the number of GAD novels I've read that fully endorse the validity of 100% circumstantial cases, even leading to the death penalty.
So on the whole I give this book 5/5 but with a big content warning, and I will certainly be reading at least a few more of the series.
