Review: The Case of the Lame Canary - Erle Stanley Gardner

THE CASE OF THE LAME CANARY is the 11^th novel in the Perry Mason series, published in hardcover by William Morrow in 1937 and reprinted many times in paperback since then. It starts off, as so many of the novels do, with something odd catching Perry Mason’s interest. A beautiful young woman carrying a canary in a cage visits Mason’s office and tries to hire him to represent her sister in a divorce action. The sister’s husband, you see, is kind of a shady character and has embezzled quite a bit of money from his wife. He’s also threatened to kill her, and that’s why the wife’s sister has the canary. She’s afraid her jerk of a brother-in-law might hurt it. Mason first refuses to take the case. He doesn’t do divorce work, he states flatly. But then he notices that the canary has a sore foot, or claw or talon or whatever you call it, and that intrigues him enough to make him agree to look into the matter.

By now you’re thinking the same thing I was: there’s a lot more to this story than what Mason’s potential client is telling him. Somebody’s going to wind up being murdered, and that canary will turn out to be important. That’s exactly what happens, of course, and we’d all be disappointed if it didn’t. Things get very complicated before the end, as they always do in a novel by Erle Stanley Gardner, but the whole thing revolves around a car wreck, multiple impersonations, a flying trip to Reno, and two, count ‘em, two inquests instead of an actual trial scene.

Since this is one of the novels from the Thirties, Mason is still more hardboiled than he would be in later decades and actually punches a guy and knocks him down. Paul Drake has some pretty funny banter in places, and the whole Perry/Della/Paul dynamic is in good form. Della gets a little tiresome with her constantly badgering Mason to leave the murders behind and take an around-the-world cruise with her, but she also comes through when Mason needs her to pull a stunt that could land her in trouble with the law.

I actually spotted the vital clue and figured out who the killer was pretty early on, which is rare for me when it comes to reading this series. I never figured out the motivation behind everything, though, and I have to admit, the clues were right there in plain sight. Still, I was proud of myself for knowing who the killer was. After that revelation, in an annoying final chapter that could have been left off the book, Gardner makes a rare misstep. This is the book where Mason proposes to Della Street, and it’s no gimmick to trap a killer, it’s the real thing. Thankfully, she turns him down. But even so, none of that rang true to me where these characters are concerned. It’s not enough of a problem to ruin the book or anything like that, but I wish he hadn’t done it.

All that said, I enjoyed THE CASE OF THE LAME CANARY. I’ve been reading this series for 60 years now, and I’ve never read one I didn’t enjoy. I expect to continue reading one now and then for as long as I’m around.