Perry Mason and The Case of the Crooked Candle

Look, I’m not embarrassed to say that I am a huge fan of Erle Stanley Gardner’s lawyer-detective, Perry Mason. And I’m a bigger fan of the Raymond Burr portrayal of the character. Many of the Perry Mason TV episodes were based on Gardner’s books. Among them is the subject of this post (the novel and TV episode), The Case of the Crooked Candle.

Let me be clear, I am a fan of the Perry Mason in the TV show and not so much the Perry Mason of the novels. The author, Erle Stanley Gardner, was a successful lawyer in 1920s California. He wrote of a world of wealth, privilege and racial stereotypes. And I’ll be blunt. I don’t read the books because Gardner was a great novelist, he wasn’t. I read the books because Raymond Burr was such a great actor and he is the Perry Mason I see in my mind’s eye when I read the novels.

So why did I chose to write about this particular novel? I selected it because it is a typical Gardner story and a typical Perry Mason TV episode. The difference? Robert Tallman’s teleplay and story editor, Gene Wang’s guidance.

The Novel

Published in 1944, the novel unfolds in a typical Gardner (complicated) fashion:

1.  Mason’s office (his law clerk) is working an auto accident;
2.  The people responsible for the auto accident own real estate and are interested in buying land owned by another Mason client;
3.  Mason settles the auto accident case and deduces who exactly is trying to buy the land owned by his other client. Mason thinks there may be oil on the land;
4.  He visits the home of the person trying to buy the land. He meets the wife of the man and while there, Lt. Tragg calls on the wife to inform her her husband is dead;
5.  The victim has been murdered on a boat; the position of the body is important to solving the case;
6.  Another woman calls on Mason and tells him that her father will be accused of the murder, but he has an alibi;
7.  From there, we get motel visits, visits to a sheepherder, visits to a boat, a discussion of high and low tides and the boat being blown up;
8.  The murderer is the wife’s boyfriend, but that is not revealed in court. It is actually solved in the judge’s chambers between the judge, Hamilton Burger and Mason.

Gardner tries to present a methodical legal puzzle. However, most of the time, his stories were overly complicated.  For example, in the novel, the defendant is named Burbank and the killer is named Burwell. I mean even changing the name of one of these characters might have helped make the story a little easier to read and follow. Also, Mason, in the novels, is always the smartest man in the room – any room he’s in.   Yet, Gardner doesn’t make it easy to follow Mason’s “strategic thinking” most of the time.

The TV Show

By contrast, the television adaptation—produced for a one-hour time slot on CBS—streamlines the narrative. This is where Robert Tallman’s teleplay and the story editor, Gene Wang, work some serious magic. Subplots (and there are a bunch of them in the novel) were reduced or eliminated.

1.  There’s no auto accident or real estate seller client;
2.  The defendant is the murder victim’s wife;
3.  We do visit a sheepherder and the boat (the boat does not blow up);
4.  Timing of the tides (high and low) is important;
5.  The murderer is the victim’s business associate and (in typical Perry Mason TV fashion) he confesses on the witness stand.

I can not overstate how much the Perry Mason TV show benefited from its three story editors (Gene Wang, Jackson Gillis and Samuel Newman) over its nine year run. They reduced Gardner’s sometimes rambling writings to watchable television.

In the novels, Mason is sharp-tongued and scary ruthless in his legal tactics. He is willing to push ethical boundaries within the limits of the law to secure justice for his client. On television, as portrayed by Raymond Burr, Mason projects a calmer and more professional presence. Particularly in the first three seasons, Burr’s performance emphasizes steady authority, superior legal knowledge and moral certainty. While still brilliant and calculating, Burr’s Mason has more compassion – and is much more likeable.

Ultimately, The Case of the Crooked Candle demonstrates how a good screenwriter was able to clean up a messy novel and adapt it to the black & white small screen media of 1950’s television.  I would argue that the best way to absorb an Erle Stanley Gardner Perry Mason novel is to watch the syndicated Perry Mason TV show. Believe me, the characters and the story are better told on TV than in the novel.