My traversal of the the Perry Mason TV series has continued very slowly. I’m still in season four.
When I saw that the next episode was based directly on a book by Erle Stanley Gardner, I decided to read, or in this case re-read, the novel before watching the TV adaptation.
I recall reading The Case of the Waylaid Wolf back during the 60s, although I had forgotten all the details of the plot. It turned out to be a pretty typical convoluted Gardner mystery. I’m not really sure if I’d classify it as a whodunit or not, because in the denouement, just as Mason seems to be zeroing in on the culprit and has it narrowed down to two suspects, the guilty party jumps up and confesses. Though, thinking back, I guess there were enough clues that the reader could have made the final leap.
The wolf of the title is Loring Lamont Jr, the son of the owner of an engineering corporation that employs stenographer Arlene Ferris. Devilishly handsome wolf Lamont has designs on Miss Ferris (it turns out later that he helped get her the job for that very purpose), and he tampers with her car so that she has no choice but to accept his offer of a ride.
Once in his car, the smooth talking wolf makes a detour to his country retreat where he convinces Miss Ferris to help him prepare a meal while he waits for a business associate so he can deliver some papers, or so he says. But an unexpected phone call puts a crimp in his plans, and instead of a slow evening of seduction, he opts for a quicker and more violent approach.
Miss Ferris finds his overtures unacceptable, so she throws a chair at him and runs out the door and down the muddy lane. Wolf Lamont pursues her in his sports car, but when she veers off into the woods, he leaves the motor running to follow her on foot. She doubles back, jumps into his car, drives away, and parks it in front of his apartment building directly next to a fire hydrant.
The next day she consults Perry Mason to find out what her options are, only to discover that shortly after she left the wolf, somebody stabbed him in the back.
That’s the Gardner novel, and it gets quite complicated after that, with one plot twist following another until near the end District Attorney Hamilton Burger is accusing Mason of planting evidence. But it all works itself out in the end.
The novel was published in 1960 and even then Gardner was aware of a problem with a certain kind of evidence:
“Sometimes,” Mason admitted, “I wish I had a greater margin of safety, but…well. I can tell you this much. I try to give a client all the breaks. There’s a popular belief that circumstantial evidence leads to injustices. Actually, circumstantial evidence is some of the best evidence we have, if it is properly interpreted.
“The evidence that is really responsible for more miscarriages of justice than anything else is personal identification.”
“And I take it this has to do with personal identification?”
“It does,” Mason said. “I have reason to believe that a certain witness is going to identify anyone the officers point out to him as being the person he saw in a certain car with a certain party.”
This leads to one of the most delightful scenes in the book where Mason ends up flummoxing Lt. Tragg who was trying to outfox Mason, and as it turns out both Tragg and Mason are later surprised by yet another twist in the story.
Needless to say, to adapt this into an hour TV show (actually about 50 minutes) required a lot of pruning of the plot. I’m not sure I approve of the changes which involve jettisoning some characters, replacing some of them with other characters, rewriting motives, etc. At least the teleplay did keep the same culprit, and it retained the flummoxing of Lt. Tragg, but I think a viewer of the TV show would have even less chance of figuring out the solution than a reader of the book would.
For a change of pace, instead of Mason treating his confidential secretary Della Street and his detective Paul Drake to dinner at some fancy restaurant, Della rustles up a meal for them at Perry’s apartment. That scene is definitely not in the book.
