Showing posts with label Pulp Fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pulp Fiction. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 18, 2023

Geekerati Reviews Erle Stanley Gardner's THE CASE OF THE VELVET CLAWS

 

The Preamble

Like many fans of genre fiction, mystery and suspense fiction in particular, I was excited to watch the new Perry Mason series on HBO. I really enjoyed the series and found that for me the episodes could not be released fast enough. In an era where streaming services like Netflix drop entire seasons of shows, having to wait a week to watch the next episode of a show can add a kind of excited tension to a show. This was certainly true for me with the new Perry Mason show, a show which provided an interesting mystery with rich characters.

It also presented a vision of Perry Mason that was entirely new to me. Though I was familiar with how many represented Raymond Burr's version of Mason, I had never watched an episode of the original 1957 series in which he starred (this has changed recently). I had also never read a single volume of Erle Stanley Gardner's long running series that began in 1933 with the publication of The Case of the Velvet Claws. My understanding of the character was that he was morally forthright and facilitated cross-examination confessions from the actual perpetrators of crime. In fact this image of the cross-examination confession had become so deeply engrained in society that it has become a trope of the legal procedural genre, the genre that Gardner helped to found.

Instead of the modern day elderly knight in shining armor, a kind of legal Obi Wan, the HBO series showed a character who was not yet an attorney and who was far more hard boiled than the character in the TV movies. In fact, hard boiled references abound in the show and especially alludes to the fiction of Dashiell Hammett. Mason's status as a veteran and work as a Private Investigator evokes Dashiell Hammett's real life biography and the use of the name Effie for Mason's mom in the HBO show evokes Hammett's classic novel The Maltese Falcon. Such connections are clearly intentional and they show a reverence and knowledge of Erle Stanley Gardner's original novels and an appreciation for the American detective fiction genre. The first season of Perry Mason presents an origin story for Perry Mason and it ends with a woman named "Eva Griffin" walking into Mason's office with an offer of employment. This moment is the opening scene of The Case of the Velvet Claws.



The Case of the Velvet Claws was published in 1933 and marks Perry Mason's introduction to the wider world. Though Erle Stanley Gardner had been writing for the pulps for years, it was the publication of The Case of the Velvet Claws that vaulted him into a long and successful career as one of the most widely sold authors of all time. Perry Mason stories also provided the fertile soil from which the genre of Courtroom Procedural grew. It wasn't the first Courtroom Procedural, Arthur Cheney Train's character Ephraim Tutt predates Mason by over a decade. In fact, The Case of the Velvet Claws doesn't even involve a trial and it presents a Mason far different from my elderly knight in shining armor assumptions. 


What The Case of the Velvet Claws does is establish a core cast of characters and a plot formula that provides a solid foundation that is entertaining and easily adapted by other authors. In a way, Perry Mason and Crew are the Justice Society/Justice Inc. of mystery fiction. Where Sherlock Holmes introduced the "sidekick" to mystery fiction, The Case of the Velvet Claws added the "team" and the "legal system" to the genre. Yes, Holmes dealt with the police, but Mason and his team navigate mysteries from before the inciting incident through the full legal resolution.


We know that Erle Stanley Gardner became a successful writer and that Perry Mason has become one of the most popular and influential characters in mystery and suspense fiction, but how well does The Case of the Velvet Claws stand up as a work of fiction? 

The "TL;DR" answer is that the book is fantastic and that you should pick it up immediately. The longer answer follows and includes comparisons to the Perry Mason of the HBO Show and the 1957 series (which I've also begun watching post-HBO series).

The Plot


The Case of the Velvet Claws opens with "Eva Griffin" coming to Perry Mason's office with an appeal that he represent her in a delicate matter. It so happens that the night before visiting Mason, Eva Griffin had been attending a private dinner at the Beechwood Inn and that there had been a hold up at the location. She had been attending the event with a politician who's name had been left out of the list of those interviewed at the robbery and that a scandal magazine called Spicy Bits has received information that this politician was there and that his name had been held back and will likely publish this information in their next issue. 


Ms. Griffin has two main concerns. The first is that the politician's life will be ruined when it is discovered that he was having dinner with a mysterious woman and that police were willing to cover up this fact to protect him. The second is that her husband will find out that she's having an affair. She wants to protect the politician and herself and wants Perry Mason to work it out with the scandal rag that they take a payoff to not run the story. Mason agrees to take the case.


While the 1990s Perry Mason movies included stories that featured Spicy Bits style papers, the thought of Mason being used as a go between to stop the publication of a story didn't quite seem to match with my memories of how people presented the character. However, this story very much fits with the Mason of the 1957 series I’ve been watching over the past year and especially fits the Mason of the HBO show. One can see echoes of this basic plot in the Hammersmith Pictures storyline in the first episode of the new show. HBO's Mason understands the motivation of blackmail and how to deal with blackmailers because he's been one himself. The Mason of The Case of Velvet Claws has probably never attempted blackmail himself, but he's used to dealing with the kinds of people who engage in blackmail. 

The Pugilist

Contrary to my earlier assumption that Perry Mason was a morally forthright character who was squeaky clean and honest, the Perry Mason of the books is a hard boiled character. He is as morally ambiguous as any character Dashiell Hammett or any of the authors of Black Mask wrote to thrill readers. Rather than being presented only as a passive academic character, Mason is described as a ruthless and efficient fighter:

 "He gave the impression of being a thinker and a fighter, a man who could work with infinite patience to jockey an adversary into just the right position, and then finish him with one blow."

Gardner, Erle Stanley. The Case of the Velvet Claws (Perry Mason Series Book 1) (p. 8-9). Della Street Press. Kindle Edition.

Gardner refers to Mason as a fighter more several times in the novel and has Mason refer to himself that way as well, but Mason's fighting spirit is more than just in words and descriptions. It's also made manifest in his actions. His actions in defense of his client, in defense of himself, and when punching reporters for Spicy Bits in the face:

“Don’t get hard,” he said, “because it won’t buy you anything.” “The hell it won’t,” said Perry Mason. He measured the distance, and slammed a straight left full into the grinning mouth. Crandall’s head shot back. He staggered for two steps, then went down like a sack of meal.

Gardner, Erle Stanley. The Case of the Velvet Claws (Perry Mason Series Book 1) (p. 42). Della Street Press. Kindle Edition.

Let’s just say that a Perry Mason who slugs someone so hard that they go down like a sack of meal is vastly different from my expectations. The Perry Mason of The Velvet Claws is a man of intelligence, to be sure, but he is a man of action and so is the private eye he most frequently hires, Paul Drake. Not only is Mason a man of action, he’s also shady as hell. I won’t get into particulars, because I don’t want to spoil the story, but the Perry Mason of the books pushes legal boundaries as far as they can go without breaking the law…and I’m pretty sure he breaks the law a couple of times.

The early episodes of the 1957 series don’t have Mason get physical, though the younger Raymond Burr in the show looks like a linebacker and they certainly could have, but they do have him act shady from time to time. Not shady enough to justify the continued skepticism of the police, but shady nonetheless. Literary Mason though? Oh yea, I get why the police don’t trust him. He’ll have a client “go on a trip” as quick as shit to prevent them from testifying. He’ll alter a crime scene to make a point about a witness and he’ll go even further.


The only thing that justifies Mason’s actions is the fact that universally, in The Velvet Claws and every other Mason novel, the client is not guilty of the crime they are accused of. Read that sentence again. Not guilty of the crime they are accused of. They might be guilty of something else, but it’s not the crime for which Mason is defending them. They also have often had their rights violated by the police. While the police in the Mason novels aren’t as incompetent as the police in the 1957 show, OMG is Tragg bad at his job, but they are just as willing to bend the rules as Mason. That’s why Mason is willing to bend the law in defense of his clients.


Mason tells his clients continually not to lie to him, to be honest so he can give them the best defense. Like Dr. House though, he knows they are all liars…even the innocent. When the truth can set them free, they still often choose to lie and Mason has to find out why and in finding out why he typically finds the way to win.

The Prognosis

The Velvet Claws is one helluva good novel and the closing scene of the book is the opening scene for the second. Gardner writes the first few books as if they are a serial. You get the mystery solved by the end of the book, but the book ends at the edge of a cliff with a new problem. We don’t often know what the problem is, but we know it’s lurking right out side Perry’s office waiting for Della Street to invite them in.


Monday, June 03, 2019

From the Archives (09/03/2007): The Pulps and Their Modern Legacy -- An Interview with Win Scott Eckert Discussing Barsoom, Hyboria, and Urban Mean Streets.


Listen to this blast from the past as the Geekerati panel discusses Win Scott Eckert's book Myths for the Modern Age and the long lasting legacy of pulp fiction. It's a conversation about John Carter of Mars, Tarzan, Doc Savage, The Shadow, French Pulps, and Dashiell Hammett. Who could ask for more?


Win Scott Eckert is one of the leading experts in pulp fiction and one of his major contributions to the continuation of pulp fandom has been his work on the Wold Newton Family and its universe of tales. The Wold Newton Universe was a creation of Science Fiction Grand Master Philip Jose Farmer who asked an interesting question, "What if many classic tales of fiction, literary and pulp, all happened in a shared universe?" Farmer uses the real world occurrence of a radioactive meteor landing in Wold Newton England as the cornerstone event of his shared universe, a universe in which Tarzan, The Lone Ranger, Elizabeth Bennet, John Carter of Mars, Doctor Jekyll/Mr. Hyde, and many more reside. Our conversation with Win begins with a discussion of his book on the topic, but expand into a conversation about what made the pulps successful and why they continue to inspire creators today.

During the Overtime segment, Shawna Benson discusses an unaired pilot for a new Phillip Marlowe show. It is currently available on YouTube if you are interested in seeing whether you think the networks should have picked it up.

In this archive episode, I've re-edited the episode into segments using Anchor.fm's functionality. All future episodes will be edited into segments and new episodes (our first one is coming next week) will have distinct segments with unique and consistent introductions.

Thursday, February 23, 2012

Why "The Brave" Trailer is Superior to "Wrath of the Titans" Trailer

Before I post the two trailers in question and critique the "Titans" trailer, I just want to state for the record that I am jazzed to see both of these movies. They both look like fun and appeal to my inner child.

Now take a minute to watch the trailer for "The Brave." It's only a couple of minutes long.



The trailer is essentially 2 minutes, or so, taken straight out of the film. Two minutes that encapsulate a story on their own, that hint at the stakes surrounding the situation, and that entertain. I now want to see the movie now more than ever, and have the sense that the film will make me weep as its twists are revealed.

Now take a minute to watch the trailer for "Wrath of the Titans."



From the opening BWAAAAAM -- straight out of "Inception" -- there is cut scene after cut scene of ever escalating action that reveals that our hero will have to battle many mythical beasts over the course of the film. Never mind that a releasing of the Titans, and their war against humanity, would make for an exciting series of films let alone a single picture. A fact that makes it appear as if this film will be trying to do too much in too little time, and at the expense of creating an actual narrative. The action scenes are compelling, and heighten my desire to see the spectacle of the film, but they do little to invest me emotionally in the film.

Both trailers make me want to watch the films, but one demonstrates that the film I will be watching will make me feel something emotionally while the other bludgeons me with spectacle.

I can't help but feel that the reliance on a spectacle oriented trailer, rather than an emotional one, for the upcoming "John Carter" film is a bad move. There is action in the John Carter series of tales, to be sure, but there is also a great romance. It is a mythic romance and the trailers have done little to convey that fact. I would even go so far as to say that the Super Bowl trailer made me want to watch the film less.

Compare the "John Carter: Virginia" clip to the Super Bowl ad. The Virginia clip makes me want to watch the movie, the Super Bowl ad makes me believe that Disney doesn't really believe in the story or that the characters are worth highlighting. Thankfully, the Virginia clip exists and lets me know that there will be character development -- even if it is apocryphal -- and not just spectacle.





I'll take Virginia over spectacle any day, and I'll take a short continual glimpse into the world over clips featuring the soundtrack of "Inception."

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

[Blogging Northwest Smith] "Dust of the Gods" (Reprise) Moore at the Mountains of Madness


"I have graven it within the hills, and my vengeance upon the dust within the rock." -- Edgar Allan Poe, Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym

Catherine Moore's fourth Northwest Smith story is one which continues a noble tradition in Weird Horror fiction, that of the Antarctic/Arctic expedition. This tradition has included some of my favorite horror and sf tales and movies. A list that includes Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, John W. Campbell's Who Goes There?, and John Carpenter's The Thing, based on Campbell's tale. These stories combine mankind's natural curiosity, the desire to explore the unknown, with mankind's natural fear of that same unknown. Given the lifeless wastes of the Antarctic/Arctic environment, it is the perfect setting for a scary story.

It is a particularly perfect location for the "post-mythological" horror story, the kind of horror story that leaves superstition and mysticism to the dust bin of history and creates supernatural horror that might exist in a rational and material universe. This is the perfect horror for a scientific age. Kenneth Hite, in his [Tour de Lovecraft] entry for At the Mountains of Madness describes this kind of tale as "remythologization." As he describes it, horror that provides a "plausible entryway for 'adventurous expectancy' not through a world-view that saw everything as magic but through a new world-view, one that saw everything as rational." It is horror for a world where "God is Dead," and where traditional spooks don't provide the chills they once did.

One can also see the line of "remythologized," or "post-mythological," horror represented in film franchises like SAW, HOSTEL, LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, MANHUNTER, and TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE. Films like these, themselves descendants of Grand Guignol, provide the shocks and chills that thrill the imagination without the need of "mystical" events.

Unlike these human-o-centric tales of mass murder the Antarctic/Arctic expedition tale does include elements of the "supernatural," but it is only "supernatural" in the sense that what is encountered goes beyond what we currently understand about nature. The supernatural element isn't something that violates the laws of nature, rather it is something that man has yet to encounter that evolved according to the laws of nature in a manner different than previously encountered. Poe is the possible exception here -- the one that proves the rule. Like the monster in ALIEN, and the Couerl of A.E. Van Vogt's Voyage of the Space Beagle (which are expedition tales that substitute space for Antarctica), the unstoppable horrors are material and not mystical.

This is a fun genre and it is nice to see Moore dip her toes in with "Dust of the Gods."

"Dust of the Gods" begins, like many Dungeons and Dragons campaigns and too many fantasy stories, at an "inn" where our protagonist and his loyal companion sit in search of something to do. Northwest Smith and his trusty Venusian sidekick Yarol are broke and down to their last drop of whiskey. They are in need of adventure and finances...not necessarily in that order.

While they are commiserating about their lack of liquidity, Yarol notices two men entering the establishment. He describes them as "hunters" to Smith, and hints that they might know where he and Smith can get some work. It doesn't take long for Yarol to notice that there is something different about these two men than Yarol remembers. They are more paranoid than usual. Smith sarcastically proposes that the reason the two men are so skittish is that they may have found what they were looking for and are now haunted by the experience. This is in fact, as it turns out, the case. The two men were hired to go into the arctic regions of Mars to find the "Dust of the Gods" and bring it back, but after finding it have returned to civilization psychologically scarred.

China Miéville argues convincingly in his introduction to Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness that it was a retelling of Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and not in any way a sequel. I think he is right, but I think that Moore's "Dust of the Gods" is a sequel to both the Lovecraft and Poe tale. It is also, if Miéville's account of the politics of Lovecraft's tale is correct, a political response to the Lovecraftian version. The two "hunters" are the men who have returned from Lovecraft's Antarctica forever changed by the experience, Lovecraft's Antarctica has merely been moved to Mars so that Northwest Smith and Yarol can follow in the footsteps of those who have been broken, like Lovecraft's Danforth and Poe's Pym, and succeed where the others have failed. Smith seeing once brave men, now jumpy and frightened, has intrigued his own sense of adventure. He wants to know what could shatter the psyche's of once brave men.

Smith doesn't have to wait long, for he is quickly approached by an old man of indeterminable race. His features are described as follows, "under the deep burn of the man's skin might be concealed a fair Venusian pallor or an Earthman bronze, canal-Martian rosiness or even a leathery dryland hide." The old man's race, and the true color of his skin, is obfuscated by time and wear (an important contrast to the clear black/white dichotomy of both the Poe and Lovecraft version).

It turns out that the old man is the person who hired the other hunters and that they indeed found what they were seeking (or at least "where" they were seeking), but that they failed to return with that which the old man seeks. Smith and Yarol listen as the old man gives them his sales pitch. He wishes Smith and Yarol to travel to the arctic in search of the remains of the god Black Pharol, of whom all that remain are a pile of dust. Pharol was one of the three original gods, on whom all others are based, and the only one to leave behind any physical essence. As the old man describes them:

There were gods who were old when Mars was a green planet, and a verdant moon circled an Earth blue with steaming seas, and Venus, molten-hot, swun round a younger sun. Another world circled in space then, between Mars and Jupiter where its fragments, the planetoids, now are. You will have heard rumors of it -- they persist in the legends of every planet. It was a mighty world, rich and beautiful, peopled by the ancestors of mankind. And on that world dwelt a mighty Three in a temple of crystal, served by strange slaves and worshiped by a world. They were not wholly abstract, as most modern gods have become. Some say they were from beyond, and real, in their way, as flesh and blood.


In one paragraph, Moore has transformed a theological construct into an alien and material one -- following very much in the footsteps of Lovecraft by making her "gods" ancient trans-dimensional aliens. The first two alien gods, Saig and Lsa, disappeared so long ago that not even legends of them exist, but Pharol -- "a mighty Third set above these two and ruling the Lost Planet" -- continued to exist after the other two had faded away. Eventually Pharol too passed from this dimension leaving behind a pile of dust that still contains some of his essence, and which the old man seeks so that he can reach Pharol and control him. The old man knows tht for "the man who could lay hands on that dust, knowing the requisite rites and formulae, all knowledge, all power would lie open like a book. To enslave a god!"

For some reason, that old man's maniacal declaration doesn't dissuade Smith and Yarol from taking the job -- apparently they are desperately in need of money and the whiskey it can buy. Besides, if you're drunk enough are you really going to notice the primordial extra-dimensional god destroying the universe as you know it? Smith and Yarol accept the man's offer and travel off to the arctic to find the dust remains of an ancient god.

They eventually arrive at a range of mountains in Mars polar region and follow the directions the old man gave them, where they discover a passage leading under the surface of the planet and -- if the old man is right -- into the heart of the crystal temple that once was home to the Three gods.

As they pass through the tunnels, they encounter two phenomena that are references back to the earlier Poe and Lovecraft tales. First, they encounter a darkness that is impenetrable. Their space age flashlights cannot penetrate the darkness and it is an almost palpable thing. In a way, Moore's inclusion of a physically palpable darkness is reminiscent of Poe's inclusion of dark people in the Antarctic regions, only here Moore refrains from the racist undertones of Poe and Lovecraft by having the darkness itself alive and no more terrifying than the next "thing" to appear. That thing is a white apparition reminiscent of the figure at the end of Poe's Pym. Smith and Yarol are able to determine that this white figure is what the two original hunters fled from and it is this that they fear is chasing them.

It should be noted that while Poe's Narrative ends abruptly with the appearance of a white apparition, it is the narrator's recalling of this apparition that likely causes his untimely death and thus inability to finish the tale. Poe's readers never find out what happened next because the narrator dies, likely from fear, during the retelling. One might say that Smith, after he encounters and passes Moore's white apparition, is continuing where Pym left off. He is certainly continuing beyond where the hunters explored. The appearance of the white apparition pulls on Smith's psyche, but he manages to retain his connection to reality and leap past the apparition and "fall" deeper into the planet. Smith eventually speculates that the apparition may only be able to exist in the palpable darkness.

When Smith and Yarol do find the crystal temple and open its doors, they have yet more one wonder revealed to them. The crystal temple is illuminated by light that behaves like a liquid and their entry has provided a whole by which the light can drain from the room like a crack in an aquarium. This light is the true counterpart to the darkness described earlier and the description of it draining from the room is one of the most interesting descriptions I have read in fiction for sometime. I might venture to say that the concept of "liquid light" is one of the more original ideas I've read.

As the light drains from the room, Yarol walks up to the triple throne and finds the dust of Pharol and is about to pack it up for delivery when he picks up on Smith's thoughts that it may not be the best idea to give a madman this kind of power. They had initially written the "power" of the dust off as superstition, but their journey has made them think better of it. Smith and Yarol finally make their first "moral" decision to date in the NW stories, they decide to destroy the dust if they can. During their attempt, Smith's psyche is overwhelmed as he sees images of the world as it was when it was ruled by Pharol and the others of the Three. He even sees the death of the Lost Planet and realizes that this temple crashed into Mars eons ago where it became a temple for ancient Martians before their civilization decayed and the gods were forgotten. Smith and Yarol leave to return to their lives having encountered darkness, but still whole for the experience.

It is in this ending where Moore breaks most strongly from Poe and Lovecraft. In their tales, the protagonists are broken by an experience beyond their control. In Moore's tale, Smith and Yarol leave having decided to save a world -- possibly a universe -- from horror. China Miéville argues that the Shoggoths of Lovecraft's tale represent the "masses" and their decaying effect on civilization. Lovecraft's protagonist has a mental breakdown while in a subway station, reminded by the sounds of the masses around him of the amoeboid horrors in Antarctica. The masses are the horror in Lovecraft, in Moore it is the dictator who is the horror. All Smith and Yarol need do is to stop one man to save mankind, mankind isn't the villain of the tale. "Dust of the Gods" was written in 1934 and the "Enabling Act" that gave Hitler dictatorial control of Germany had been passed on March 23, 1933. One wonders if the rise of the dictator in general, and Hitler in particular, were on Moore's mind as she wrote this tale. Whatever the case it is certain that by focusing on the evil one man is capable of doing, rather than the terror of the mob, Moore was not merely writing a sequel to Lovecraft. She was also writing a political response to him.

It should also be noted that Moore's use of the dust of Pharol seems to be a reference to the final sentence of Poe's Narrative, which is the quote at the top of the piece, and demonstrates how centrally important story titles can be to the literary conversation that authors participate in with each other as history unfolds.

Previous Blogging Northwest Smith Entries:

3)Blogging Northwest Smith: "Scarlet Dream"
2) Blogging Northwest Smith: "Black Thirst"
1) Blogging Northwest Smith: "Shambleau"