“’Remember now, Mrs. Shelby, if I’m going to represent you, I want you to have just one formula. For the press, there will be only two words, “no comment”. For the officers you will simply say, “I am not guilty. I have done nothing and the charge is unfounded, but I do not care to discuss it in the absence of my attorney. And, when my attorney is here, he will do the talking for me.”’

“’I see,’ Sergeant Dorset sneered, ‘the old formula.’

“’The old formula,’ Mason told him. ‘And, whenever I have a client who is being framed, I revert to that formula.’”

Right from the start, The Case of the Half-Wakened Wife, our third in a series of Erle Stanley Gardner matrimonial titles, deviates wildly from the “typical” Perry Mason mysteries I have read so far. In the first place, Mason himself doesn’t show up until Chapter Five; instead Gardner takes time to introduce a truly unpleasant assortment of people. The nicest of them is Jane Keller, a worried widow (which would’ve made a great ESG title) who has an island that wants selling. She finds a buyer in millionaire Parker Benton, who offers her $30,000. Sounds cheap for California real estate, but in 1945 that amounts to over half a million!

 Jane is surrounded by greedy relatives who want some of that money: there’s her sister (“bright, alert, and greedy”), her niece (“sallow and stringy”) and her brother-in-law, whose confident management of Jane’s money has put her in such dire financial straits that she needs to dump the island quickly! But there’s a problem: a shady promoter named Scott Shelby has finagled an oil lease on the island and threatens to stop the sale unless Jane hands over one third of the selling price. Even though this provision, called a “joker” in contract law (you learn something every time you read a Perry Mason novel) is legally shaky, Shelby’s defiant stand threatens the dreams of Jane, her sister, her niece, her brother-in-law, the niece’s fiancé, and the millionaire.

See? A nice circle of suspects – and we haven’t even met the half-wakened wife yet! In fact, we could’ve called this The Case of the Jaunty Joker and forgotten all about the dame.

When Perry finally shows up at the top of Chapter Five and is filled in on the situation by the fabulous Della Street, he figures this isn’t the sort of situation he usually handles. And frankly, with the huge amount of contractual jargon found in the opening scenes, we can all be grateful for that. But Della is worried, and when Della is worried, she talks as if she were writing up a blurb for the back cover of a Perry Mason mystery:

“An oil lease . . . A couple of sisters, a vague dreamy little woman whom you’d like and a grim-faced chiseler whom you wouldn’t . . . Looks to me as though the chiseler might wind up with the money in the long run.”

Since Mason possesses, above all else, a strong moral inclination to protect a weak woman from a chiseler, he decides to set up a meeting with Scott Shelby and “kick his teeth in.” And this leads to the juiciest deviation I’ve seen from a typical Mason novel yet: Half-Wakened Wife begins to take the shape of a classic closed circle mystery. Typically, Mason meets his client on Page One, and one circumstance follows another until someone gets murdered, Perry’s client is arrested, and everyone meets up in court. The best we can hope for is that Mason himself finds the body, which happens all too often, if you ask me. This time, however, Mason, working in cahoots with Parker Benton the millionaire, decides to force a showdown with Frank Shelby on board Benton’s yacht. The tycoon sails the yacht to a special point in the river near the “for sale” island, knowing that the fog will settle so thickly that the party will be stranded together for the night. All the parties mentioned above have been invited, as well as Perry and Della . . . and here we finally meet Marion Shelby, the promoter’s much younger wife, very pretty with “a friendly unspoiled manner,” nervous around her cruel, philandering husband, but totally unaware of his smarmy business dealings.

As might be both expected and hoped for, negotiations do not go well, the fog settles in, and Mason finds himself in a stateroom, “propped up on snowy pillows in a comfortable bed,” when Della Street calls him from her stateroom and lays out the situation in her perfectly descriptive expositional way:

“I guess I am getting susceptible to the creepy element in life. But you do have to admit that it’s spooky out here, with all this heat and greed, bundled up in a thick fog and with the cold river underneath us.”

Restless, Perry wanders up onto the deck, just in time to hear a shot and a splash and find Marion Shelby running frantically into his arms. The other passengers are roused, and Scott Shelby is found to be missing, his disappearance clearly the responsibility of somebody on that boat! Benton radios the police, and by the time the yacht makes it back to shore, Marion Shelby has been arrested and Mason has himself a new client!

It has all the makings of a standard whodunnit! But that is not the sort of mystery Erle Stanley Gardner writes. Having just finished a certain Carter Dickson novel, I immediately had a striking theory about what had happened, and I worried that I was in for another two thirds of a novel before Perry Mason unmasked a certain person. Fortunately, as soon as Marion is taken into custody, Mason tells both Della and Paul his theories as to what happened, and they totally jibe with mine, which is a sure bet the theory is wrong.

What follows takes us away from a standard whodunnit and back into the sort of legal procedural we’re all looking for. In fact, most of the people we’ve already met fade into obscurity and from now on the book becomes a cat and mouse game between Mason and a character who wasn’t even on the boat but whom the attorney believes can verify his theory. Fortunately, this character, Ellen Cushing, is one of those tough-minded women whom Gardner writes so well: a successful real-estate dame who has been in cahoots with Scott Shelby of the financial and maybe more sordid variety.

Mason is firing with all guns against this woman, bearing down on her with Della, Paul Drake, and even Lieutenant Tragg for once on his side. But the delicious aspect of this section is how badly things go for our hero! For once, he seems to have met his match, and by the time they have their showdown in court, Mason, who has just made mincemeat of a snarling coroner and an uppity ballistics expert, finds himself backed against the wall by Miss Cushing and a smirking Hamilton Burger. Paul Drake even has the chutzpah to tell Perry that, for once, he has lost his touch:

“Now you let me tell you something about practical jury psychology, Perry. Something you know, but which you won’t admit. You’ve forgotten it, lost sight of it. You let (your client) keep quiet and Hamilton Burger is going to cut you up into hamburger. The jury will be sore because they got a run-around. You put her on the witness stand, and he is going to make her and you the laughing stock of the city, and he’s going to get a conviction of first-degree murder.”

Things have looked bad for our hero before, but at thiseleventh hour, they seem hopeless for both the half-wakened wife and her attorney. However, Mason is a cat who always gets his mouse! And while the evidence that clinches it for him is about as deus ex machina as it gets, and I can’t say the final solution doesn’t break two or three of Knox’s Commandments, Mason’s final showdown with the guilty party is, as usual, delicious, and it’s nice to see the attorney (who doesn’t get nearly enough sleep this time around) end the novel discussing with Della Street the possibility of buying “a little hideaway” together.

A few years ago, Gardner aficionado Jeffrey Marks wrote an article for Mystery Scene naming his choice of the ten best Perry Mason novels. The Case of the Half-Wakened Wife made it at #10, and Marks points out how this book starts to see the “merging” of Perry Mason and his creator, Erle Stanley Gardner. Here’s Perry at his lowest point:

“Mason paced back-and-forth across the carpeted floor of his private office, his thumb tucked in the armholes of his vest, his head slightly bowed. Della Street sat patiently at her desk, an open shorthand book in front of her. The page was about half covered with notes. She was holding her pencil waiting for any other instructions Mason might choose to give.”

This, according to Jeffrey embodies the way Gardner himself worked: “Gardner would sit in a rocking chair, moving back and forth until his work this way across the carpet. He would then pick up the chair, move it back, and then start again. Masons relentless, pacing ties, character and creator, even more closely.”

It’s also nice to surmise that Gardner decided to give one of his district attorneys the name “Hamilton Burger” just so Paul Drake could deliver the aforementioned quip about hamburger in this very novel!!

*     *     *     *     *

“The Case of the Half-Wakened Wife” premiered on March 15, 1958 as the 26^th episode in the first season of Perry Mason. I don’t know what I was thinking would happen: on the one hand, the first section of the novel is so perfectly shaped as a traditional murder mystery that it could certainly have worked in the TV show’s format. On the other hand, the second section focuses so wholly on one character that I figured some changes would have to be made.

The end result is a strange excuse for an adaptation. The circle of nine suspects is reduced to four. Scott Shelby may be a nasty man in business, but all the financial dealings from the book are missing; instead, his disappearance is tied to his jealousy over his wife’s seeming attentions to their hired handyman, who also happens to be Perry Mason’s old Army buddy!! And just as there is a different defendant, there is a different murderer. And the discovery of that killer leads to the biggest fault in logic in the episode! (Va gur abiry, gur xvyyre cebivqrf cubgbtencuf bs n cvpavp ur fhccbfrqyl jrag ba jvgu uvf tveysevraq ba gur qnl bs gur zheqre. Znfba cebirf gung gur cvpgherf jrer npghnyyl gnxra ba gur sbyybjvat zbeavat, hfvat gur intnevrf bs gur jrngure orgjrra qnlf nf cebbs. Va gur GI rcvfbqr, gur cvpgherf ner cerfragrq naq qvfcebira orpnhfr bs funqbjf – jurerhcba, gur punenpgre oevatf sbegu n cubgbtencu bs gur GI zheqrere fubbgvat Fpbgg Furyol!!! Rira gubhtu guvf cubgb cebirf gung gur jvgarff jnf ng gur fprar bs gur pevzr gnxvat gur cvpgher, jul ba rnegu, vs ur unq guvf cubgb, jbhyq ur tb gb nyy guvf gebhoyr bs snxvat uvf bja zbgvir???)

Maybe I’m biased, but none of it feels as satisfying as what we find in the book. Oh, and while we finally have a novel featuring D.A. Hamilton Burger and Lieutenant Tragg, they are dropped as Mason is defending his pal in a small town miles away from Los Angeles.

Next month: more financial chicanery, but the roles are switched: the wife is the monster/victim, and the husband is the defendant!