We’re nearly halfway through our celebration into the Girls! Girls! Girls! of Perry Mason. The truth is that I selected a dozen novels that, title-wise, fit the thematic bill, but the titular ladies abound in the 82-novel canon that comprises Mason’s career. The feminine gender even seeps into the four novelettes that Erle Stanley Gardner wrote, and as a bonus we present to you the very best of these: 1948’s The Case of the Crimson Kiss. Actually, this story first appeared in June 1948 in The American Magazine, which means it came out one month earlier than the last Mason I reviewed, The Case of the Vagabond Virgin. Technically, then, I have committed a faux pas in terms of the order of these things. Please forgive me!

The last time I read one of these I was left with a deep foreboding that the novelette form simply didn’t provide Gardner with enough room to include all the elements that make this series so readable; however, the author manages to do pretty well here! His relationship with Della Street and Paul Drake is solidly represented, albeit in briefer form. Paul still finds time to slouch sideways on his favorite armchair in Mason’s office, and Della actually leads her chief right to this case when an old hometown friend, Louise Marlow, gives Della a frantic late-night call. 

It seems that Louise has arrived after midnight for a visit with her favorite niece, Fay Allison, after the girl announces a sudden imminent marriage to the wealthy Dane Grover. Louise stumbles upon a shocking scene: both Fay and her roommate Anita Bonsal are lying in their beds, heavily drugged. This is when Louise summons Della and her boss, who get a discreet doctor to administer to both girls. When Della discovers the key to an upstairs apartment in Fay’s purse, she and Mason investigate and, as they do in so many beloved novels, they walk in on a corpse. 

The evidence indicates that Fay was playing house with the playboy lying poisoned on the floor. How does this square with her engagement to Dane or with the idyllic portrait that Louise paints of her niece? Only a few other people knew that the dead man kept this love nest; did one of them kill him? How about his wife, who desperately wanted a divorce? And why on earth did the killer plant a big crimson kiss on the victim’s forehead?!? Lieutenant Tragg of Homicide has his own theories: he soon arrests Fay for murder, and Mason finds himself facing off against one of the best attorneys in the D.A.’s office. 

If this sounds like a typical Mason mystery in miniature, it’s not – and that is one of the most intriguing things about Crimson Kiss. Gardner alters his structure in order to give the reader both a whodunnit and an inverted mystery that run side by side until, with the deft hand of a master, Gardner provides clever and satisfying endings to both threads. This is a fast-paced and enjoyable read, and while the author may have to cut back on all the red herrings and camaraderie between his series characters that enliven his novels, he does manage to include some juicy character work about America’s Favorite Defense Attorney:

“Della stood quietly in the doorway, watching the tall, lean-waisted man, pacing back and forth. He was granite-hard of face, broad-shouldered, flat-stomached; the seething action of his restless mind demanded physical outlet in order to preserve some semblance of internal balance, and this restless pacing was but an unconscious reflex.”

Hubba hubba! This is the dreamiest depiction of Perry Mason I think I’ve ever read! Frankly, though, I fear this is the best that Gardner gets with the shorter format, and I’m grateful he only wrote four of these. Well . . . three for sure, and I’ll get to The Case of the Irate Witness one of these days. The fourth, “The Case of the Suspect Sweethearts,” was never published in a collection of Gardner stories, at least to my knowledge, and word has it that Gardner himself probably didn’t even write this one.

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“The Case of the Crimson Kiss” debuted on November 9, 1957, as the eighth episode of the first season of Perry Mason. Before rewatching, I distinctly remembered one thing about it: Louise Marlow was played by Frances Bavier, Aunt Bee herself from The Andy Griffith Show. The other notable casting was Jean Gilles, of whom you probably know nothing. She played a host of bad girls in a long list of film and television credits and displayed her versatility in 1956’s The Invasion of the Body Snatchers as the hero’s nurse-assistant, who transforms from nice to nasty when the pods get her!!

The series was more rigid in its patterns than the books could ever be, so it was a cinch predicting that the episode would ignore the unusual structure of the novelette and revert to a traditional whodunit. It’s too bad, but other than that, this adaptation hews closely to the original story – although I must say that Della Street is given short shrift here. This is likely due to the series’ decision to keep the Perry/Della friendship strictly platonic. Too bad!

We now return to our original programming. Our regular monthly Mason review will be here on the 17^th as always, and after a slew of sulky, dangerous and vagabond women, it’s almost a relief to say that the girl Mason confronts this time is a cautious one!