![]() ![]() Tragg’s wife, Harriet, as she says to her neighbor, Martha….” The next twelve minutes have Harriet and Martha discussing whether Martha should remarry after the death of her husband in the war. In a typical episode, Mason and Tragg are trying to capture Killer Bill Barker and, as they knock on his door, the announcer breaks in with: “But let’s join Lt. Tragg and arrresting bad guys–in other words, he wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty, much closer in fact to Gardner’s early novels than the sanitized courtroom figure of Burr’s TV persona. But since this was a soap, there was little time wasted on male action. Perry wasn’t in the courtroom a great deal, as he was usually knocking down doors with Lt. It wasn’t written by Gardner (although he got royalties for every show), so various other script writers handled this task, including Ruth Borden and Irving Vendig. His secretary, Della Steet, was voiced by Gertrude Warner, and later, Jan Miner and Joan Alexander. Numerous actors played Mason over the years, including Barlett Robinson, Santos Ortega, Donald Biggs, and John Larkin. Like most soaps, it ran a very long time, from October 1943 to December 1955. Burton and Lone Journey, sponsored by “the new Tide, the amazing washday miracle.” In other words, it was a soap opera! ![]() The 15-minute episodes aired Monday to Friday on CBS at 2:15 pm, sandwiched between The Second Mrs. But radio’s Perry Mason was very different. Nearly everyone is familiar with Mason and his ten year run on CBS television starring Raymond Burr. Ricardo Cortez got to play Mason once, as did Donald Woods, in the final Warner flick, The Case of the Stuttering Bishop. Warner Bros did six films between 19, and while the first four, all with Williams, were decent, grade-A entertainment, the last two were done on the cheap. He was tough, thoroughly professional, and more-or-less honest (though not always exactly ethical). In these early films, Mason was quite similar to the Mason of the books. The first novel, The Case of the Velvet Claws, appeared in 1933, and the first film, The Case of the Howling Dog (based on the fourth novel of the series - that’s how fast Gardner wrote) appeared in 1934, starring Warren William as a rather dashing attorney with a definite eye for the ladies, who knew his way around a courtroom. It certainly didn’t take long for Perry Mason to hit the silver screen. I’m referring, of course, to Drake, whom reader Frank Patterson has quite rightly taken me to task for overlooking. And even if one argues that Mason isn’t really a private eye, it’s hard to ignore the fact that most of the novels do feature one of the most enduring fictional private detectives of all time, even if he is always playing second fiddle to his famous client. Many claim, however, that his greatest creation was the mismatched pair of Bertha Cool and Donald Lam. In fact, Gardner created a slew of characters for the pulps, private eyes and otherwise. Although Mason never appeared in its pages, Gardner published a six short stories starring a crusading defense lawyer named Ken Corning who fought against injustice in a corrupt city, serving as a rough template–and some say a trial run–for Mason.īut as good as the Corning stories were, they lacked the compelling supporting cast Gardner assembled for the Mason series, including Della Street, Perry’s long-suffering secretary and sometime love interest, his favoured private investigator Paul Drake, and his perpetual legal punching bag, District Attorney Hamilton Burger, with whom he regularly wiped the courtroom floor, case after case. Gardner was one of the leading writers for Black Mask, the legendary hard-boiled crime fiction magazine. I like Gardner’s work generally - he’s a wonderfully readable author - but later books are much tamer, ‘medium boiled’, if anything.” Mason is definitely seen as a sort of Sam Spade-like character, willing to twist the law to serve his own higher ideals of justice. In the first ten or so books by pulpmeister Erle Stanley Gardner, Perry comes off as a particularly hard-boiled lawyer/detective, throwing his weight around, breaking and entering, and other private eye shenanigans, not above keeping a bottle of whiskey in his desk or roughing up a suspect or two - one of Gardner’s long line of corner-cutting heroesĪs Doug Bassett pointed out on Rara Avis once upon a time, “The first Mason, The Case of the Velvet Claws, in particular, is certainly hard-boiled. P ERRY MASON is Raymond Burr as a Defense Attorney, right?
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