Back in April 2013, I boldly posted that one of the better written Perry Mason novels, The Case of the Counterfeit Eye, had never been adapted for TV or the movies. I stand here a chastened man to say I was wrong – it was adapted. The story appeared as the first episode of the fourth season under the title, The Case of the Treacherous Toupee.
The Treacherous Toupee story follows some of the basic concepts of the Counterfeit Eye story except it substitutes a toupee for the glass eye. The character names are the same, but their motivation is different. How different? In the book, the murder victim is a loan shark. In the teleplay, he is an absent, but reputable business owner. The bottom line is that instead of learning more than you ever wanted to know about the production and wearing of glass eyes, we learn a great deal about quality toupees.
The Treacherous Toupee marks several milestones. A young Robert Redford makes his only appearance on the series as one of the protagonist and helps Perry solve the case. Whereas, the Counterfeit Eye is the 1935 story that introduces the character of Hamilton Burger, the Treacherous Toupee is one of the last stories the Hamilton Burger actor, William Talman, worked on before he was fired for drug possession. (He was later rehired during the season following a massive viewer letter writing campaign.)
In the Treacherous Toupee, Mason doesn’t break the law the way he did in the book (Counterfeit Eye), but he certainly stretches it to the breaking point. The Case of the Treacherous Toupee is available from Amazon and CBS. As I write this you can listen to the first two pages of the audio book version of the Case of the Counterfeit Eye for free at Brilliance Audio. Among other things, it will make you appreciate how good the screenwriters were that adapted Erle Stanley Gardner’s sometimes messy work to TV.
The bottom line is that I was wrong. All of Gardner’s early Perry Mason works were adapted to the TV series and we are the better for it.
