The Case of the Careless Kitten Read online

  THE CASE OF THE

  CARELESS KITTEN

  ERLE STANLEY

  GARDNER

  Introduction by

  OTTO PENZLER

  AMERICAN

  MYSTERY

  CLASSICS

  Penzler Publishers

  New York

  OTTO PENZLER PRESENTS

  AMERICAN MYSTERY CLASSICS

  THE CASE OF THE

  CARELESS KITTEN

  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 now associated with Grove/Atlantic; MysteriousPress.com (2011), an electronic-book publishing company; 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.

  THE CASE OF THE

  CARELESS KITTEN

  INTRODUCTION

  TO TALK about Erle Stanley 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 the same.

  The Perry Mason series had 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 Careless Kitten, published twenty 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 life. 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 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 giv
en 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 is 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 a decade. More than a half-century later, it is still a staple of late-night television re-runs.

  —OTTO PENZLER

  1

  THE KITTEN’S eyes, weaving back and forth, followed the ball of crumpled paper that Helen Kendal was waving high above the arm of the chair. The kitten was named Amber Eyes because of those yellow eyes.

  Helen liked to watch them. Their black pupils were always changing, narrowing to ominous slits, widening to opaque pools of onyx. Those black and amber eyes had an almost hypnotic effect on Helen. After she had watched them a little while her thoughts seemed to slip. She would forget the near things, like today, and this room, and the kitten; she could even forget about Jerry Templar and Aunt Matilda’s eccentric domineerings, and find herself suddenly thinking about things that were far away or long ago.

  It was one of the long-ago things this time. Years and years ago. When Helen Kendal was ten, and there was another kitten, a gray-and-white one, up on the roof. So high up that it was afraid to come down. And a tall man with kind gray eyes had fetched a long ladder and was standing up at the wobbly tip of it, patiently coaxing the kitten toward his outstretched hand.

  Uncle Franklin. Helen was thinking about him now as she had thought about him then. Not as she had learned to think about him afterward, from other people. Not as Aunt Matilda’s runaway husband, not as Franklin Shore, the Missing Banker, in the big headlines, not as the man who had inexplicably thrown away success and wealth and power and family and lifelong friends, to lose himself, moneyless, among strangers. Helen was thinking of him, now, only as the Uncle Franklin who had risked his life to rescue a scared kitten for a sorrowful little girl, as the only father whom that little girl had ever known, a gentle, understanding, friendly father, remembered, after all these years, with a love that knew and would keep on knowing, against all seeming proofs to the contrary, that it had been returned.

  That knowledge, suddenly rediscovered, made Helen Kendal absolutely sure that Franklin Shore was dead. He must be. He must have died long ago, soon after he had run away. He’d loved her. He must have loved her, or he wouldn’t have risked sending her that picture post card from Florida soon after he disappeared, just when Aunt Matilda was trying so hard to find him and he must have been trying even harder to keep her from doing it. He couldn’t have lived very long after that or there’d have been another message for Helen. He’d have known how she’d be hoping for one. Hė wouldn’t have disappointed her. He was dead. He’d been dead for almost ten years.

  He was dead, and Helen had a right to the twenty thousand dollars he had left her in his will. And that much money now, with Jerry Templar home on a week’s leave—

  Helen’s thoughts slipped again. The Army had made a difference in Jerry. His blue eyes were steadier, his mouth grimmer. But the change in him only made Helen surer that she loved him, and surer than ever, for all his tight-lipped silence on the subject, that he’d kept on loving her. He wasn’t going to marry her, though. Not when it might mean that Aunt Matilda would turn her out of the house, to live on his Army pay. But if she had money, money of her own, money enough to let Jerry feel perfectly sure that no matter what happened to him, she’d never be homeless or hungry—

  There was no use in thinking about it. Aunt Matilda wasn’t going to change her mind. It wasn’t that kind of a mind. Once it was made up, even Aunt Matilda herself couldn’t change it. And it was made up permanently to believe that Franklin Shore was alive, and just as permanently and immovably made up not to take the steps at law that would declare him legally dead and allow his will to be probated. Aunt Matilda didn’t need her share of the estate. As Franklin Shore’s wife, she controlled the property he had left behind him almost as completely as she could hope to control it as his widow and executrix. She controlled Helen, penniless and dependent, far more completely than she would control her after that twenty-thousand-dollar legacy was paid.

  And Aunt Matilda enjoyed controlling people. She’d never willingly give up her purse-string power over Helen, especially not while Jerry Templar was here. Aunt Matilda had never liked him nor approved of Helen’s liking him, and the change the Army had made in him only seemed to make her dislike more explicit than ever. There wasn’t a chance on earth of her letting go of that legacy before Jerry’s leave was up. Unless Uncle Gerald—

  Helen’s thoughts shifted again. Uncle Gerald, three days ago, telling her he was going to force Aunt Matilda’s hand. His brother’s will left him the same sum it bequeathed to Helen. Sixty-two and looking older, still practicing law for his living, he could use his money and felt he’d waited for it long enough.

  “I can make Matilda act, and I’m going to do it,” he’d said. “We all know Franklin’s dead. He’s been legally dead for three years. I want my legacy and I want you to have yours.”

  His eyes had softened and warmed as they studied her, Helen remembered, and his voice had been warmer, too, and gentler.

  “You’re more like your mother every time I see you, Helen. Even when you were little you had her eyes, with the violets in them, and her hair, with the red just showing under the gold. And you’ve grown up to have her tall, slim, lovely body and her long, lovely hands, and even her quiet, lovely voice. I liked your father, but I never quite forgave him for taking her away from us.”

  He had stopped. And there had been something different about his voice when he went on. “You’re going to need your twenty thousand dollars before long, Helen.”

  “I need it now,” Helen had said.

  “Jerry Templar?” Her face must have been answer enough, because he hadn’t waited for her to speak. He’d nodded slowly. “All right. I’ll try to get you that money.” He’d sounded as if he meant to do more than just try. And it had been three days ago. Maybe—

  Amber Eyes had stood it as long as he could. He flashed up in a leap toward that maddening ball of paper, clutching with teeth and claws; then, starting to fall, struck instinctively for Helen’s wrist, clinging with needle-sharp claws trying to save himself from a fall to the carpeted floor.

  Violently startled, Helen screamed.

  Aunt
Matilda called sharply from her room, “What’s the matter, Helen?”

  “Nothing,” Helen said, laughing nervously as she grasped the kitten’s paw with her free hand, disengaging the clutching claws. “Amber Eyes scratched me, that’s all.”

  “What’s the matter with Amber Eyes?”

  “Nothing. We were just playing.”

  “Stop playing with that kitten. You’re spoiling it.”

  “Yes, Aunt Matilda,” Helen said dutifully, stroking the kitten and regarding the scratches on the back of her hand.

  “I suppose,” she said to Amber Eyes, “you don’t know that your little claws are sharp. Now I’ve got to go put something on my hand.”

  She was in the bathroom at the medicine cabinet when she heard the sound of Matilda’s cane; then the door of the bedroom opened, and Matilda stood frowning at her.

  Matilda Shore, at sixty-four, had a full ten years of deferred vengeance behind her. Sciatica had not improved her disposition. She was a big-boned woman. In her youth, she must have had a certain Amazon type of beauty, but now she had lost all regard for personal appearance. Flesh had wrapped itself around her frame. Her shoulders were stooped. She habitually carried her head pushed forward and down. There were deep, sagging pouches under her eyes. Her mouth had taken on a sharp, downward curve. But none of the encroachments of time had been able to eradicate from her features the grim determination of a woman of indomitable will who lived with a single, definite purpose in mind.

  “Let me see where the cat scratched you,” she demanded.

  “It wasn’t the kitten’s fault, Aunt Matilda. I was playing with it, and holding out a piece of paper for it to jump at. I didn’t realize that I was holding it so far from the floor. Amber Eyes just tried to hang on, that’s all.”

  Aunt Matilda glared at the scratched hand.

  “I heard somebody talking a while ago. Who was it?”