The Case of the Borrowed Brunette Read online

  THE CASE OF THE

  BORROWED BRUNETTE

  ERLE STANLEY

  GARDNER

  Introduction by

  OTTO

  PENZLER

  AMERICAN

  MYSTERY

  CLASSICS

  Penzler Publishers

  New York

  OTTO PENZLER PRESENTS AMERICAN MYSTERY CLASSICS

  THE CASE OF THE BORROWED BRUNETTE

  ERLE STANLEY GARDNER (1889-1970) was the best-selling American author of the 20th century, mainly due to the enormous success of his Perry Mason series, which numbered more than 80 novels and inspired a half-dozen motion pictures, radio programs, and a long-running television series that starred Raymond Burr. Having begun his career as a pulp writer, Gardner brought a hard-boiled style and sensibility to the early Mason books, but gradually developed into a more classic detective story novelist, showing enough clues to allow the astute reader to solve the mystery. For more than a quarter of a century he wrote more than a million words a year under his own name and numerous pseudonyms, the most famous being A.A. Fair.

  OTTO PENZLER, the creator of American Mystery Classics, is also the founder of the Mysterious Press (1975), a literary crime imprint; MysteriousPress.com (2011), an electronic-book publishing company; Penzler Publishers (2018); and New York City’s Mysterious Bookshop (1979). He has won a Raven, the Ellery Queen Award, two Edgars (for the Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection, 1977, and The Lineup, 2010), and lifetime achievement awards from NoirCon and The Strand Magazine. He has edited more than 70 anthologies and written extensively about mystery fiction.

  INTRODUCTION

  ALTHOUGH THE Perry Mason depicted in the enormously popular television series that starred Raymond Burr was not very sexual, the Perry Mason in Erle Stanley Gardner’s novels certainly had an eye for the ladies.

  In The Case of the Borrowed Brunette, first published in 1946, his client is Eva Martell, a pretty young woman struggling in her career as a model, whose aunt smells a rat and hires Mason to unearth what is really going on.

  A mysterious man named Mr. Hines has advertised a job for a woman who has to fulfill very specific physical requirements, including her hair color and exact measurements. Some readers may be reminded of “The Red-Headed League,” a Sherlock Holmes story in which a man is hired for a nonsensical job based on the color of his hair.

  Eva will be well paid, get to live in a lavish apartment complete with a closet filled with fine clothes in her size. She will have to assume a new identity, including taking the name of another woman. Although she is permitted to bring a chaperone, she is forbidden to bring luggage or personal belongings. Her companion, Aunt Adelle, fears something is wrong about the set-up and goes to Mason.

  It doesn’t take long for Aunt Adelle’s fears to be realized when Mr. Hines turns up in the apartment—with a bullet-hole in his head.

  Although it is a strange case, it is typical of the situations in which Perry Mason finds himself, placed there by the ingenious storytelling abilities of Gardner, who enjoyed both popular and critical acclaim throughout his long career.

  In 1934, only a year after Gardner’s first novel, The Case of the Velvets Claws, was published, G.K. Chesterton wrote admiringly of his work. Sinclair Lewis, in an article on writers in 1937, wrote, “…the magicians are the authors of literate detective stories: Agatha Christie, Francis Iles, Erle Stanley Gardner, H.C. Bailey.” The mystery aficionado W. Somerset Maugham in the early 1940s wrote that he read “Dashiell Hammett and Bret Halliday for rough stuff; Rex Stout, Ellery Queen, Gardner, Christie, and H.C. Bailey.” In the same decades, the Time magazine reviewer of The Case of the Cautious Coquette quoted Evelyn Waugh, a close friend of Graham Greene, as saying he wished he could “write whodunits like Erle Stanley Gardner and Margery Allingham.”

  To talk about Gardner, it is inevitable that large numbers come into play. Here are a few:

  • 86—Number of Perry Mason books; eighty-two novels, four short story collections.

  • 130—Number of mystery novels written by Gardner.

  • 1,200,000—The number of words that Gardner wrote annually during most of the 1920s and 1930s. That is a novel a month, plus a stack of short stories, for a fifteen-year stretch.

  • 2,400,000—The number of words Gardner wrote in his most productive year, 1932.

  • 300,000,000—The number of books Gardner has sold in the United States alone, making him the best-selling writer in the history of American literature.

  What cannot be quantified is what magic resided in that indefatigable brain that made so many millions of readers come back, book after book, for more of the same. Not that it was really the same.

  The Perry Mason series appeared to have a template, a model, a formula, if you like. But the series changed dramatically over the years. Gardner started his career as a writer for the pulp magazines that flourished in the 1920s and 1930s. Authors were famously paid a penny a word by most of the pulps, but the top writers in the top magazines managed to get all the way up to three cents a word. This munificent fee was reserved for the best of the best of their time, some of whom remain popular and successful to the present day (Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich), some of whom are remembered and read mostly by the modest coterie that avidly reads and collects pulp fiction (Carroll John Daly, Arthur Leo Zagat, Arthur J. Burks). One who earned the big bucks regularly, especially when he wrote for Black Mask, the greatest of the pulps, was Erle Stanley Gardner.

  Gardner had learned and honed his craft in the pulps, so it is not surprising that the earliest Perry Mason novels were hard-boiled, tough-guy books, with Mason as a fearless, two-fisted battler, rather than the calm, self-possessed figure that most readers remember today. Reading the first Mason novels, The Case of the Velvet Claws, published in 1933, and The Case of the Borrowed Brunette, published twenty-three years later, it is difficult to remember that they were written by the same author. Both styles, by the way, were first-rate, just different.

  Gardner was born in Malden, Massachusetts, in 1889. Because his father was a mining engineer, he traveled often as a child. As a teenager, he participated in professional boxing as well as promoting unlicensed matches, placing himself at risk of criminal prosecution, which gave him an interest in the law. He took a job as a typist at a California law firm and after reading law for fifty hours a week for three years, he was admitted to the California bar. He practiced in Oxnard from 1911 to 1918, gaining a reputation as a champion of the underdog through his defense of poor Mexican and Chinese clients.

  He left to become a tire salesman in order to earn more money but he missed the courtroom and joined another law firm in 1921. It is then that he started to write fiction, hoping that he could augment his modest income. He worked a full day at court, followed that with several hours of research in the law library, then went home to write fiction into the small hours, setting a goal of at least 4,000 words a day. He sold two stories in 1921, none in 1922, and only one in 1923, but it was to the prestigious Black Mask. The following year, thirteen of his stories saw print, five of them in Black Mask. Over the next decade he wrote nearly fifteen million words and sold hundreds of stories, many pseudonymously so that he could have multiple stories in a single magazine, each under a different name.

  In 1932, he finally took a vacation, an extended trip to China, since he had become so financially successful. That is also the year in which he began to submit his first novel, The Case of the Velvet Claws. It was rejected by several publishers before William Morrow took it, and Gardner published every mystery with that house for the rest of his li
fe. Thayer Hobson, then the president of Morrow, suggested that the protagonist of that book, Perry Mason, should become a series character and Gardner agreed.

  The Mason novels became an immediate success so Gardner resigned from his law practice to devote full time to writing. He was eager to have privacy so he acquired parcels of land in the Southwest and eventually settled into the “Gardner Fiction Factory” on a thousand-acre ranch in Temecula, California. The ranch had a dozen guest cottages and trailers to house his support staff of twenty employees, all of whom are reported to have called him “Uncle Erle.” Among them were six secretaries, all working full time, transcribing his dictated novels, non-fiction books and articles, and correspondence.

  He was intensely interested in prison conditions and was a strong advocate of reform. In 1948, he formed the Court of Last Resort, a private organization dedicated to helping those believed to have been unfairly incarcerated. The group succeeded in freeing many unjustly convicted men and Gardner wrote a book, The Court of Last Resort, describing the group’s work; it won an Edgar for the best fact crime book of the year.

  In the 1960s, Gardner became alarmed at some changes in American literature. He told the New York Times, “I have always aimed my fiction at the masses who constitute the solid backbone of America, I have tried to keep faith with the American family. In a day when the prevailing mystery story trends are towards sex, sadism, and seduction, I try to base my stories on speed, situation, and suspense.”

  While Gardner wrote prolifically about a wide variety of characters under many pseudonyms, most notably thirty novels about Bertha Cook and Donald Lam under the nom de plume A.A. Fair, all his books give evidence of clearly identifiable characteristics. There is a minimum of description and a maximum of dialogue. This was carried to a logical conclusion in the lengthy courtroom interrogations of the Perry Mason series. Mason and Gardner’s other heroes are not averse to breaking the exact letter of the law in order to secure what they consider to be justice. They share contempt for pomposity. Villains or deserving victims are often self-important, wealthy individuals who can usually be identified because Gardner has given them two last names (such as Harrington Faulkner).

  Mason’s clients usually have something to hide and, although they are ultimately proven innocent, their secretiveness makes them appear suspect.

  Clues often take a back seat in the Perry Mason books, with crisp dialogue and hectic action taking the forefront—a structure clearly adopted from his days as a pulp writer. Crime and motivation are not paragons of originality as Gardner wanted readers to identify with his characters.

  Much like the Sherlock Holmes and Nero Wolfe stories, the Perry Mason novels also feature certain other characters on a regular basis. The most prominent is Della Street, Mason’s secretary and the love of his life. Knowing that Mason would not allow her to work, she has refused his marriage proposals on five separate occasions. She has, however, remained steadfastly loyal, risking her life and freedom on his behalf; she has been arrested five times while performing her job.

  Also present at all times in Paul Drake, the private detective who handles the lawyer’s investigative work. He is invariably at Mason’s side in times of stress, though he frequently complains that the work is bad for his digestion.

  Hamilton Burger is the district attorney whose office has never successfully prosecuted one of Mason’s clients. In a large percentage of those cases, the client was arrested through the efforts of the attorney’s implacable (albeit friendly) foe, Lieutenant Arthur Tragg.

  Although Mason is invariably well-prepared, he is so skilled at courtroom procedure that he can think on his feet and ask just the right question to befuddle a witness, embarrass a prosecutor, and exonerate a client.

  The staggering popularity of the Perry Mason novels inevitably led to him being portrayed in other media, including six motion pictures in the 1930s, a successful radio series in the 1940s, and a top-rated television series starring Raymond Burr that began in 1957 and ran for the next decade. More than a half-century later, it is still a staple of late-night television re-runs. The Case of the Borrowed Brunette was televised in its second season, running on January 10, 1957. HBO also created a Perry Mason series in 2020, though the character, played by Matthew Rhys, is very different from the one played by Burr, being younger and more two-fisted.

  It is evident that the character of Perry Mason, in all his guises and permutations, along with the formulaic storyline created by Gardner, will continue his long, irresistible career for a very long time.

  —OTTO PENZLER

  1

  AT THIS hour, Adams Street was a pedestrian’s no man’s land. Stretching between the business and the residential districts, it was far enough from the shopping centers so that people having occasion to use the street walked only far enough to make connections with the nearest streetcar or bus.

  Perry Mason, having concluded a difficult case in one of the outlying courts, was driving slowly, relaxing after the nerve strain of a courtroom battle. Della Street, instinctively knowing Mason’s moods, as befitted a good secretary, remained silent.

  Mason was always interested in people, and his eyes occasionally strayed from the road ahead when breaks in traffic enabled him to scrutinize such pedestrians as were on the street. Now he slowed, moved over to the extreme right-hand lane of traffic. The car was rolling along at a scant fifteen miles an hour.

  “Notice it, Della?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “The street corners.”

  “What about them?”

  “The brunettes.”

  She laughed. “Window-shopping?”

  “No, no,” Mason said impatiently. “Look at them. Every street corner has a brunette standing waiting. They’re all dressed in dark clothes, all wear some sort of a fur around the neck.—Here’s another one at this corner. Notice her now as we pass.”

  Della Street studied the trim brunette who was standing as though waiting for a streetcar on a street where there were no streetcar tracks.

  “Neat,” she said.

  Mason said, “Bet you five bucks there’s another one at the next corner.”

  “No takers.”

  The next corner also held a brunette almost identical in appearance. She too was wearing a dark dress with silver foxes around her neck.

  “How long,” Della Street asked, “has this been going on?”

  Mason said, “I’m ashamed to say I don’t know. I’ve seen five or six of them. Let’s go back and see how many of them there are.”

  Mason watched his opportunity, made a U-turn, and sped back along the boulevard. Della Street, knowing how much of his success was due to his ability to make instantaneous appraisals of character, and to a sympathetic understanding of human nature, saw nothing unusual in the fact that Mason should interrupt a busy schedule to count the brunettes who were standing at corners on the south side of Adams Street.

  “Well,” Mason said at length, “we seem to have passed them. I count eight.”

  “Check,” she said smiling.

  “And Lord knows how many more were ahead of us there when we turned back. What say, Della? Do we take a chance on having this first one cry, ‘Wolf, wolf’?”

  “You can’t be ruled off for trying,” Della said.

  Mason once more made a U-turn.

  “There’s a parking space there right next to the corner,” Della Street said. “We can’t overlook an opportunity like that.”

  “Can’t for a fact,” Mason admitted, swinging his car in close to the curb.

  The brunette flashed them a glance of quick interest, then became studiously absorbed in watching the traffic, ignoring their obvious scrutiny.

  As Mason got out of the automobile he said, “You’d better come along to lend an air of quasi-respectability to this, Della.”

  Della Street slid out of the car with a quick, lithe motion and inserted her hand in Mason’s arm.

  Mason walked up to the young w
oman and raised his hat.

  The girl instantly swung toward him and flashed a smile. “Are you Mr. Hines?” she asked.

  “The great temptation is to say yes,” Mason told her.

  She ceased smiling. Her eyes, becoming wary, sized up Mason and Della Street. “Surely not one of those things,” she said coldly.

  “Hardly,” Della Street said, assuming her most friendly manner.

  The girl said abruptly to Perry Mason, “Is this a joke? I’ve seen you before. I know you . . . Oh,” she said, “now I have it. I saw you in court. You’re Perry Mason, the lawyer.”

  Della Street nodded. “And I’m his secretary. Mr. Mason couldn’t help wondering about all of you being here.”

  “All of us?”

  “Every street corner for blocks,” Mason said, “has a brunette wearing a dark dress and a fur.”

  “How many blocks?”

  “At least eight.”

  “Yes, I’d supposed there’d be quite a few applicants.”

  “Know any of them?” Mason asked.

  She shook her head, then after a moment said, “I know one of them—my roommate and pal, Eva Martell. I’m Cora Felton.”

  “And I’m Della Street,” Della said, and then added laughingly, “And now that we’re acquainted, would you mind telling us what it’s all about? Mr. Mason won’t settle down to work as long as he has an unexplained mystery on his mind.”

  Cora Felton said, “It’s a mystery to me too. Did you by any chance see the ad?”

  Mason shook his head.

  She opened her purse, took out a want ad that had been torn from a paper, and handed it to Mason. “It started with this,” she said. The ad read:

  WANTED: Neat, attractive brunette, age twenty-three to twenty-five, height five feet four and one-half inches, weight one hundred and eleven pounds, waist measurement twenty-four inches, bust measurement thirty-two. Weight and measurements must be absolutely exact, and the applicant must be free for colorful, adventurous work that will pay fifty dollars a day for a minimum of five days, maximum of six months. Successful applicant may select her own chaperone, who will be with her constantly during period of employment at salary of twenty dollars a day and expenses. Telephone Drexberry 5236 and ask for Mr. Hines.