Okay, the “mea culpa” is mine. In February, I promised you a series of seven reviews, one a month, of all the Perry Mason titles related to marriage. And here I am, head bared, shamefaced, to tell you that you will not be getting seven reviews.

You’re getting eight.

Here’s the deal: on the 14^th of May, we crossed the halfway point of my projected list with The Case of the Dubious Bridegroom. While you may imagine that each month, I pluck a new title out of the box like a bon bon, savor it, guzzle it, then write my review, the truth is that I read all these books earlier this year when I was experiencing a desperate need to consult Mr. Mason myself. Yes, Erle Stanley Gardner’s greatest creation has become my comfort food in these difficult days: the moment I pick up a copy of The Case of the Whatever Whoozis, the stress evaporates from my life like an objection overruled!

This past week was one of those weeks where I needed to sit sideways in an armchair (the way Paul Drake does it) and dive into a classic Perry Mason mystery – preferably one of the glorious, convoluted noirish early ones from the 30’s into the mid-40’s. And then, as if it were an act of God, I remembered that Turner Classic Movies had played one of the old Perry Mason movies, The Case of the Stuttering Bishop. I had recorded and forgotten about it.

That’s when my mind started working: I’ll bet that somewhere in this wide world there have been plenty of bishops who guided some good folks into – you guessed it! – the sacrament of marriage. So really, when you think about it for a minute, I should have included Stuttering Bishop on my initial list the whole time! True, the one wedding mentioned in the plot is over twenty years old and has nothing to do with this or any bishop. In fact, we’re not sure for the longest time whether or not this guy is a real man of the cloth!

Anyway, I promised you seven Perry Mason reviews, and I’m giving you eight! Maybe that makes me a very bad boy! Then let me atone for my sins. Let me read this 1936 novel, the ninth in the Mason series, and examine both the 1937 film and the 1959 TV adaptation as well and tell you all about ‘em! They say confession is good for the soul – yours and mine!

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Suspicious clergy have long been a juicy plot point that transcends genres (think of all those Hawthorne clerics! Think about The Mystery of Edwin Drood . . . think Elmer Gantry!) Whether a fallen man of the cloth, a raging hypocrite or an outright confidence trickster, these larger-than-life figures have entertained us for centuries. As a matter of fact, when HBO adapted the Perry Mason mythos to its short-lived series back in 2018, it built its first season around an Aimee Semple McPherson-type evangelist. To their credit, the writers crafted a complex figure here, part savior, part sinner, part victim herself. The real McPherson was a superstar of the 1920’s and 30’s, as big a celebrity as Mary Pickford or Vilma Banky, largely due to her utilizing modern communication methods like radio and film to spread her fundamentalist gospel.

Perhaps Gardner wasn’t thinking of McPherson or any of a host of other famous preachers of the day when he wrote this. Nevertheless, he starts ramping up our suspicions of Bishop William Mallory from page one of Stuttering Bishop. First of all, the guy’s from Australia, and that’s a sure sign in mystery fiction that there’s something a bit dodgy about the bloke. Mallory causes Perry Mason’s eyes to narrow as he takes in the stubby figure:

“The short, sturdy legs terminating in well-worn black shoes marched briskly enough, but, watching the man, Mason knew those legs would have marched just as steadily had they been propelling the rugged torso toward the electric chair.”

The Bishop wants to consult Perry about a manslaughter case involving a drunk driver that occurred twenty-two years earlier. (I researched and discovered that in America in 1916 there were 2.25 million cars on the road. Today we have 295 million cars in the U.S..) Mallory wants Mason to help a friend of his, but in doing so the lawyer will have to take on a ruthless multi-millionaire named Renwold C. Brownley. Mallory will introduce the lawyer to his friend and then go into hiding, whereupon it will be Mason’s job to “locate” Mallory and “pressure” him into bearing witness for the complainant.

This set-up is the perfect blend of the sort of do-gooder stuff Mason loves and a little something shady (which is dangerous, and Mason loves danger, too!) Oh and then there’s that stutter. As Perry tells his perfect secretary, Della Street,

“Bishops don’t stutter . . . They’re men who must be of outstanding ability, and they have to talk in public. Now, if a person stuttered, he’s hardly become a minister, any more than he would a lawyer. But if he did stutter and was a minister, he’s hardly become a bishop.”

Mason puts Paul Drake on the case right away – and you know how happy it makes me when Perry and Paul and Della start cooking with gas together by page six! Drake scarcely has time to take Perry to the spot where he has tracked Mallory when everything goes screwy: the bishop is attacked and left hospitalized with a concussion, and heroes find themselves on the lookout for a redheaded bombshell named Janice Seaton. And then to complicate matters further, Drake discovers that the 1916 drunk driver was none other than the millionaire’s despised daughter-in-law, Julia Branner. Since Julia was in the car with her husband, Oscar Brownley, the millionaire’s son, and since they were on their honeymoon, I trust that the connections made between this novel and the marriage theme I’ve been espousing (get it?) meets with your approval. I can continue, right?

And what’s lovely is that all of this is just backstory to the real problem going on, which has a bit of the Tichborne plot trope going for it: Oscar has died, and his father has reached out to a granddaughter named Janice to come live with him and his other grandson Philip in the lap of luxury. But this Janice isn’t Janice Seaton, see, she’s Janice Alma Brownley. And it seems that Bishop Mallory has reason to believe that Janice Seaton is the real Janice Brownley. It’s only Chapter Three, and my head is spinning nicely, thank you. But how does it all make Perry Mason feel?

“‘Riding the crest, aren’t you, Chief?’
“He nodded, eyes brimming with the joy of living. ‘How I love a mystery, Della,’ he said. ‘I hate routine. I hate details. I like the thrill of matching my wits with crooks. I like to have people lie to me and catch them in their lies. I love to listen to people talk and wonder how much of it is true and how much of it is false. I want life, action, shifting conditions. I like to fit facts together, bit by bit, like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.’
“‘And you think this stuttering bishop is trying to slip something over on you?’
“Mason twisted the stem of his empty cocktail glass in his fingers. ‘Darned if I know, Della,’ he said.”

The centerpiece of this novel takes place on a wild rainy night and includes dramatic confrontations, lots of chicanery, and a blood-soaked murder worthy of a Warner Brothers gangster flick! As per usual, Perry really puts his foot in it, with the result that District Attorney Hamilton Burger is once again after his adversary’s license, and the possibility of long-term jail time is floated. As a result, Della and Paul have to perform double duty: Drake catches a cold and Della roughs up a goon and gives herself a henna rinse.

It’s when Della and Perry take on the goon that you remember Gardner’s roots trace back to the pulps – and while we applaud his longevity and success, there’s no doubt that as Mason grew older, Gardner polished and smoothed him down to a blander sort of hero. Here everything is raw and exciting, a trademark of the early Perry Mason cases. Gardner’s plot wheel is still in its nascent stages here (we’re only at Book Nine!) and each spin adds fresh complications, creating a labyrinthine, noirish narrative. On the downside, that tends to mean little to no courtroom action, but the pluses make this pretty much an even match.

Sure enough, we don’t head into court until Chapter 14, with a little more than forty pages to go. The trial sequence is brief – a necessity because this novel has one of the longest, most complex wrap-ups of any Mason novel in my memory. The capture of the killer is only the start of it! There’s a massive conspiracy to unravel, enough to explain what a dozen or so major characters were doing out in the rain on that bloody night. And, because he might have been a pious man, Gardner saves the solution to the oddest mystery – the one about the bishop’s stutter – for the very end.

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Warner Brothers adapted Stuttering Bishop in 1937, making it one of the few Mason mysteries for which we have two adaptations. This was the last in a series of six Perry Mason films. Warren Williams had played the role in the first four movies, and Ricardo Cortez succeeded Williams in the fifth. I’ve always liked both these actors, and they provide two interesting takes as Mason – although neither even tries to embody the character from the novels. Five different actresses played Della over the course of the series. Williams’ Mason even gets to marry the girl (played by Claire Dodds) in his final film – and then Cortez starts from scratch! The real downside for me is Paul Drake. While he is often used for comic effect in the novels, in the movies he was usually given the clown treatment by Allan Jenkins (his name is changed to “Spudsy” Drake!), or aged up as he is here by Joseph Crehan, who was 53 when he played Drake here.

For Stuttering Bishop, Mason has undergone a final recast. Donald Woods wasn’t a bad actor, but despite a lengthy career in film and television, he never made much of an impact. Woods is miscast here, even at thirty seeming too young and earnest, and that pencil moustache does him no favors. But Ann Dvorak is nice and snappy as Della, and Crehan plays Paul Drake as a competent detective. Unfortunately, the role of the house dick from the novel is expanded and played for laughs – not good sardonic Warner Brothers humor but dumb, goofy Warner Brothers humor. The character is played by Tom Kennedy and, for good reason, is renamed McGooney.

In his compendium The Detective in Film, William K. Iverson  to be the weakest of the six films by far. It is talky, but it is also extraordinarily faithful to the plot, lifting whole swaths of dialogue from the novel and providing an accurate, if uninspiring, visual depiction of the story. It even makes one improvement on the book by moving the unmasking of the killer from that character’s home to the courtroom. Here, Mason browbeats one witness on the stand to force a confession out of another, and when the culprit jumps up and cries, “Stop it! Stop it!! I did it!!!” you see the template for the TV series that would arise twenty years later unfold before your eyes.

“The Case of the Stuttering Bishop” debuted on March 14, 1959, as the twentieth episode of the second season of Perry Mason. It was a cinch that the series would make alterations, but the way the teleplay shifts and replaces aspects of the book is an object lesson in how to adapt one formula into another. Both the defendant and the murderer from the novel are excised and minor characters are given prominence. Sadly, all the delicious rain-soaked atmosphere from the book is missing, as is the action-packed murder that centers it. And don’t get me started on what happens to the poor stuttering bishop!!! The saddest thing is that the episode takes the novel’s plot and makes it dull – and then it ends with the weirdest plot error involving a name! It makes me wonder who was or wasn’t paying attention this early on in the series.

I will say, however, just to impress you with my own cleverness, that when a certain character first appeared in the book, I said to myself, “In the TV show, this would be the killer” – and it was!! I may not be a great detective, but I have the series’formula down cold!! Also, I have to share this incredible book cover that I found on my search: there’s no sign of a bishop anywhere, which isn’t a surprise because whenever possible, Perry Mason covers emphasized the cheesecake! But look at the guy on this cover – seem familiar???

And with that, I’ll leave you. Thanks for indulging me in my continued thirst for the genre’s greatest defense attorney. Our next regularly scheduled installment will appear on June 14 as promised. Ah, June . . . the month favored by young brides. How ironic, then, that the heroine of our next installment is a spinster – and a spurious one, at that!