OH, LADY, BE NO GOOD! The Case of the Dangerous Dowager

For me, part of the joy of reading classic detective fiction is stumbling across lines like this: “Go home and doll up in your soup and fish, Paul, and wipe that worried look off your map.”

Naturally we wear our “soup and fish” when we’re heading to a fine dining establishment. I know that whenever I don a tuxedo, it puts a smile on my map! But then, I’ve been reading a lot of Perry Mason these past few years, so I know my onions; my skill at translating this ackamarackus is all to the mustard! It also means that, early in the 1937 adventure, The Case of the Dangerous Dowager, the latest in our Girls! Girls! Girls! adventures with Perry Mason, we’re treated to Perry and Paul getting all dolled up in their soup and fish, hopping aboard a speed boat that drops them just outside the twelve-mile limit where they climb aboard the gambling ship, The Horn of Plenty, in order to render a service for Perry’s latest client.

That would be Matilda Benson, the titular dowager and a salty broad who has had enough of living a Puritanical life. Nowadays, she travels the world, swears like a sailor and smokes cigars, much to the chagrin of her prim relations. Matilda comes to Mason seeking help for her granddaughter, Sylvia Oxman, whose life is a mess. Her marriage is broken, and she has sought comfort in the outstretched arm of the silver bandit and the roulette wheel. As a result, she has racked up a considerable debt of $7,500 (in 1937 dollars that’s akin to over $168,000 today!) and has several I.O.U.s sitting in the vault of The Horn of Plenty.

Unfortunately for Sylvia, the ship’s owners, Sam Grieb and Charley Duncan, have learned that her husband Frank would gladly pay for those I.O.U.s in order to slam his wife with a divorce suit and assume custody of their six-year-old daughter, Virginia, in order to get his hands on the child’s upcoming inheritance. Grieb and Duncan are odious types: one has a fat stomach, fat fingers, and fat lips, while the other projects a fake smile revealing three gleaming gold teeth that distract from his ice-cold eyes.

Matilda knows that the gamblers want to either blackmail Sylvia or milk Frank for as much money as they can get, and she asks Perry Mason to do whatever he can to extricate Sylvia from this boondoggle. True to form, the attorney devises an overly complicated and legally dubious plan in aid of his client and then ropes poor Paul (“Perry, count me out. I’ve had enough”) Drake into his scheme. The plan goes delightfully wrong, leading to the equally Mason-ian moment where Perry finds a dead body. Only this time, he doesn’t stumble upon the corpse in a deserted bungalow or seedy hotel room; this time, Perry’s timing is a bit off, and he finds himself as Suspect #1.

How I love watching Erle Stanley Gardner’s heroes go down a rabbit hole of trouble and then finesse themselves out of the jams they’re in, usually at the very last minute. Since all the main players seem to have found themselves aboard the gambling ship at the wrong moment, Perry has to figure out which of them managed to do the dirty deed. And since his clients, as per their duties in a Perry Mason mystery, have made themselves look as guilty as possible, Mason has a long list of tasks to perform before all the good guys are in the clear and the bad guys in the slammer.

The first half of this novel makes for a tight little thriller, with Perry essentially trapped in the bowels of a ship, trying to look out for two clients and himself. Ultimately, though, it comes down to who was where at which time doing what – and who is lying about what they saw. I spotted the main liar right away – and I was correct, although not through any sort of deduction. Sadly, there’s no courtroom action, but Perry gets a nice Golden Age moment (rare for him) where he stands in a room with the D.A. and all the suspects and reveals the solution. This is nowhere as action-packed as its predecessor, TCOT Stuttering Bishop, but it is on a par with the one that follows, TCOT Lame Canary, and you could do mighty worse than that!

Best of all, here we get Perry, Della, and Paul in peak form. You could cut the sexual tension between Mason and his secretary with a shiv, but this time around Paul Drake joins in the fray!! Della sends for Paul to come to her apartment to get the scoop on her chief, who has gone into hiding to avoid a subpoena. Once there, Paul lets the little rascal inside come out a bit:

“(Paul) slipped his arm around her waist and said, ‘Gee, Della, you’re a good kid! I wish I could get someone who had just one percent as much loyalty for me as you have for Perry. How does he work it?’
“Della laughed. ‘Take your arm away, Paul. Experience has taught me that when a man sticks around my apartment about daylight, drinking scotch and soda and talking about my wonderful loyalty, he’s getting ready to go out of control.’
“Drake sighed. ‘I see you’re a good judge of character as well as a darned efficient secretary. Going to kiss me goodbye when I leave, Della?’
“‘No. If I did you wouldn’t leave.’”

I like when a person knows how well they kiss!!

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“The Case of the Dangerous Dowager” debuted on May 9, 1959, the twenty-sixth episode of the second season of Perry Mason. The screenplay contains the bare skeleton of the book’s plot, but the setting, the characterizations, the flavor – all of the best aspects of the novel – are muted or changed outright. The episode also illustrates an odd relationship I had with the series: in about 90% of the episodes, I can pick out the murderer from our first meeting. This isn’t due to any cleverness on my part but to the fact that the same subtle nuances in performance occur with nearly every killer. I call it “The Ralph Morgan Syndrome,” and it works for me with most 30’s movie mysteries, including the Thin Man and Charlie Chan series. Thus, when a new character who is not even in the book appeared on the screen and emitted these aforementioned nuances, I knew they were the killer. Call me gifted, but it kind of kills the fun of watching these things!