Murder Room
43 total works
'Why would anyone hire a girl with the figure of a stripteaser and pay her $100 a week to put on weight?' Perry Mason asked Della Street.
'In the course of my secretarial career,' Della said demurely, 'I've seen quite a few approaches, but this is a new one.'
'According to the letter of this contract,' Mason mused, 'if Dianne Alder should marry a millionaire and her husband should die, the party of the first part would be entitled to fifty percent.' Suddenly Mason snapped his fingers.
'You've got it?' Della Street asked.
'I have an explanation. I don't know whether it's the explanation, but it's quite an explanation'.
Who was that masked woman?
That was the question plaguing Perry Mason. No one loves a good mystery more than Mason - but being asked to represent a client who is concealing her identity, not to mention the particulars of her case, has given even the legendary legal eagle a case of ruffled feathers.
Yet the intriguing cloak-and-dagger tactics have Perry hopelessly hooked. As for the silent siren behind the mask, is she heiress Byrl Gailord or penniless Adelle Hastings? Both women have ties to a man named Tidings, a man who may be a protector or predator. A man who could answer a lot of tough questions - if only he hadn't been murdered.
The first woman wouldn't even give her name. But the clear, feminine voice faltered considerably over the question of what Perry Mason's charges would be for a day in court - a day doing nothing but listening.
The second woman gave a good deal more - but the question was, what did she expect to get? Dorla Balfour, lethally lovely and dangerously rich, forced a $1,000 retainer on Mason to deal with a case already tried and decided.
The offense involved appeared to be manslaughter, hit-and-run, but it soon became murder ... with the corpse killed twice.
When Norda Allison saw her husband-to-be slap his young son, she immediately called off the wedding. Now she is terrified. Her ex-fiance has beaten up her new boyfriend, and anonymous newspaper clippings are flooding her mailbox - articles graphically depicting what jilted men do to the women who leave them.
Then Norda's life takes an even darker turn. It begins with a barking dog, a child's scream, a gun shot, and the discovery of a dead body - and takes a further twist when Norda is arrested and charged with brutal murder. Now only the brilliant courtroom strategist Perry Mason stands between Norda and a sentence of certain death ...
Chow Koh Koh was a Chinese philosopher who rode his mule backwards. He claimed it made no difference where he was going. All that counted was what he did along the way.
Terry Clane thought this a serene and comforting way of life. He liked it so much that he bought a small statue of Chow Koh Koh riding his mule, and gave it to his fiancee as a gift. That was Clane's mistake. Instead of a good luck symbol, it proved an omen of evil. For within a short time, Clane's favourite young lady was up to her neck in murder. And Clane's beloved statue of the peaceful and fatalistic Chow Koh Koh was covered with the blood of the killer's victim!
A suspicious personal ad conceals nefarious intent - and eventually lands in the lap of Perry Mason.
It appears that Marilyn Marlow inherited a small fortune from her mother, who got the sum from her wealthy employer. But now the old man's relatives are contesting the will, putting Marilyn on shaky ground.
Whoever sways Rose Keeling, the key witness to the signing of the will, is sure to be the victor. Enter the personal ad. Marilyn intends to find Rose a Mr. Right in order to get the goods on her. But when Rose is murdered, Perry Mason sets out to find a gentleman caller who had a date with death ...
The ingredients were quite simple: one middle-aged tycoon with a lovely young wife; one oh-so-apologetic visitor to the tycoon's office; one devoted secretary, graduate of a correspondence course of How to Be a Detective.
But when these ingredients were combined and brought to the boil with the addition of one inflammable blonde - the result was murder.
And when Perry Mason was called in to clean up the kitchen, he found that too many cooks almost spoiled the broth.
Perry Mason orders a double serving of trouble the night he and Della Street dine at an intimate restaurant after a hard day at law. In the middle of their steaks a waitress flees the premises in terror, leaving the puzzled proprietor holding her mink coat.
Why a humble working girl abandons such a pricey wrap is only the first question in a cop-killer case that traps Mason's client with both an impossible story and the murder weapon, makes Perry himself a prime suspect, and blazes a gunpowder trail that leads straight to the heart of the police department itself.
It was just a routine case. All Bertha Cool had to do was help a fellow in a jam - a $20,000 jam.
But it didn't stay a routine case for long. All of a sudden Bertha's client had a fistful of anonymous letters, a missing wife, and a body in his basement. Bertha Cool had her hands full. The only problem was, her hands were tied - and the murderer's were very, very busy.
It started as a routine tail - shadowing an oily hustler who'd been courting a well-healed matron. But the assignment soon led Donald Lam to a sleazy hotel room with a sexy barfly.
And now she's left him high and dry with a pair of corpses dumped in his lap. Suddenly he's the cops' prime suspect. And it'll take some fancy footwork to sidestep the law - and the real killer, who intends to leave Bertha Cool partnerless.
Ellen Robb came into Perry Mason's office with a gun in her purse. She had been framed, she said, by her gambler employer because she had refused to help fleece a customer.
The customer had dropped nearly $10,000 in the gambling establishment and then done his best to pick up Ellen. His wife, none too pleased with either shenanigan, ended up dead as a herring.
Della said Ellen was too beautiful to be trusted; Perry thought he could find out by switching guns on her - thus starting a series of explosions that nearly blast him out of court ...
A midnight hit-and-run accident on a mountain road ... a tragic fatality ... the discovery of the missing car ... and Doug Selby, District Attorney of Madison City, finds himself not only up against a most involved case but in the hottest spot of his career.
Featuring an absorbing cast of supporting characters, including genial Sheriff Rex Brandon, the sly, suave A.B. Carr, a strange couple from New Orleans who should be cooperative but aren't, and Inez Stapleton, Madison City's only woman lawyer, who finds the going tough when she tries to be both friend and foe of Doug Selby.
D.A. Doug Selby was in trouble again. An enticing redhead had been murdered; the county newspaper, The Blade, was after his neck; he had an unsolved jewellery theft on his hands and that sly, unscrupulous attorney A.B. Carr was running circles around him.
Selby knew that somehow or other all four of his troubles were tied up in one explosive bundle. But how could he open the bundle ... without setting off more murder?
District Attorney Frank Duryea had more than a simple murder case on his hands. Had someone killed both Addison Stearne and C. Arthur Right and then vanished? Or had it been a murder and a suicide? And, in either case, who died first? A vast fortune depended on the answer.
The obvious suspect was Nita Moline, who claimed she discovered the bodies, rushed up on deck and fainted. However, nobody had seen her come aboard. And through the tangled web of evidence, there seemed to be more than one mystery. Fortunately for Frank Duryea, his wife's grandfather - the black sheep of a wild family - came for a visit and got in everybody's way.
Blond Eve Dawson came to Hollywood to be a star and didn't make the grade. But as a party girl she was much in demand - until someone shot her during a wild party given for a lot of prominent politicians.
Everyone clammed up and pressure was brought to bear - even on popular D.A. Doug Selby. But Selby and Sheriff Brandon wouldn't hush.
The next time beautiful Eve turned up she was a corpse with a carving knife deep in her chest. And even that suave old fox A.B. Carr couldn't stop the D.A. from finding out who killed her and why.
Jacob Mandra had a million-dollar apartment on the fringe of Chinatown ... and a reputation.
Early one morning they found him dead. And a few hours later Terry Clane found himself in the District Attorney's office - by request. The District Attorney began asking strange questions that Terry Clane didn't care to answer, and when Terry finally sailed out of the D.A.'s office he realised that he and some of his friends were involved in the Mandra murder ... up to their necks.
John Dittmar Ansel walked into the Cool-Lam office and asked them to trace a man named Karl, who, six years before, gave him an idea for a story. Donald Lam - always the suspicious one - immediately smelled a rat. And his nose had not betrayed him: investigation proved that Mr Ansel wasn't a writer at all; and Karl had died by a bullet.
Bertha Cool and Donald Lam decided that this was a case worth pursuing, and before long they found they were not the only ones with a vested interest in the six-year-old mystery.
Strange bedfellows can be political poison, and the candidate had picked himself a dilly. She was ruthless and corrupt and had enough on him to smear his shining armour with front page mud.
Donald Lam and Bertha Cool told him not to worry. Women were Donald's speciality, the more dangerous the better. But when the lovely lady turned up dead, the case took an ugly twist. Suddenly Lam and Cool were in the middle of a red-hot race where bullets, not ballots, counted.
Roberta Fenn was every man's dream - a clinging climber with photogenic features and a phenomenal body. She had what it took to get what she wanted, and she wanted a lot.
But one thing she wasn't looking for was an early grave, and that was where she was heading - unless the redoubtable Bertha Cool and the inimitable Donald Lam jumped in, guessed right, and moved fast to save this bedevilled dream girl from a nightmare of blackmail, double cross and murder.