Customer Reviews

The Case of the Counterfeit Eye (Gardner, Erle Stanley, Perry Mason Mystery.)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Erle Stanley Gardner is a wonderful author. He has created a case that splendered me, and freiends. I've read the book 6 times in two months because I can't get enough of it. It is one of the best in the "Perry Mason" series if you ask me. I couldn't think of a better gift for any mystery fan. It has everything; Mystery, thrills, espionage, comedy and romance

The Case of the Counterfeit Eye

Mr. Peter Brunold visits Perry Mason because of a problem with his glass eye: it was stolen! Brunold keeps spares for when his eye is bloodshot, and this was taken. He suspects it will be planted to implicate him in a crime. Perry figures out a scheme to prevent this. Next Bertha McLane and her brother Harry visit Perry Mason. Harry has embezzled money from Hartley Basset, who "makes all sorts of loans", and Harry wants to return the money if Perry can arrange it (Chapter II). Perry advises Harry to straighten out his life. In Chapter III Perry meets Hartley Basset and learns of his character. Perry also meets his wife, who is dissatisfied. A midnight telephone call summons Perry; Mrs. Sylvia Basset has trouble at home between Hartley and his son Dick. Hartley drove away after hitting Dick's secret wife Hazel Fenwick. Perry calls the police, then learns of a mysterious man with one eye. A search of the other rooms finds a dead Hartley Basset! When the police search they find two guns. How could that be suicide (Chapter IV)?

Sergeant Holcomb questions Perry about his presence (Chapter IV). The police found a third gun carried by Basset. There is another complication: Dick's secret wife did not drive to Perry's office. Peter Brunold is called to Perry's office, and answers questions. Sergeant Holcomb shows up and arrests Brunold for the murder of Hartley Basset (Chapter VI). Perry learns the facts discovered by Paul Drake's investigation (Chapter VII). Bertha and Harry McLane show up; Harry's story about repaying the embezzled money has a problem (Chapter VIII). Perry and Paul use a ruse to talk to Sylvia Basset (Chapter IX).

District Attorney Hamilton Burger visits Perry and ask him to produce Hazel Fenwick in 48 hours (Chapter X). In the next chapter we learn the shocking news about Hazel Fenwick! She was married three times before. Perry gets a call from Harry McLane who wants a secret meeting. When Perry goes to the hotel room he finds Harry will never talk to anyone. Peter Brunold's release is a new complication (Chapter XII). The Preliminary Examination begins with a new surprise (Chapter XIV). Then the Reno police catch Paul Drake handing papers to the stand-in hired by Perry Mason. It appears that Perry Mason stumbled, but we know what happened in Chapter XIII. When Thelma Bevins is questioned, Perry must tell all that he found out about the missing Hazel Fenwick. This produces pandemonium in the courtroom, and exonerates Perry from any witness concealment charge (Chapter XVI). Perry explains why he used a double for Hazel Fenwick, and what he hoped to accomplish. It worked as planned (Chapter XVII).

In this story Perry Mason often acts as a detective, and certainly plays very close to the foul line. The appearance of a "serial murderer" in this story is a first (they don't use that term).

I found this Mason mystery to be a notch above the rest. Most Perry Mason mysteries are what I call "fair mysteries", in that you have a fair chance to solve the crime with the same information the author provides to Mason.

In this book you'll learn some interesting information about glass eyes, and have to maneuver through a dizzying cascade of suspects to come to the correct conclusion. Yet the information is all there for you. I don't always solve Perry Mason mysteries before the ending revelation. In this case I did.

This book introduced Hamilton Burger, the famous DA foil and fall guy for Perry's amazing proofs. There are some amusing exchanges between Burger and Mason, and Paul Drake gets in some funny licks too. There are even two attempted romantic interludes between Perry and Della Street, each interrupted inconveniently. LOL

A fun read, and a solid entry in the series.

This is the 6th Perry Mason mystery written in 1935. It might not be so good as a mystery, but it contains several impressive scenes such as Mason's grandstand play at the court, the sad romance of the client with the counterfeit eye, and the "infiltration operation" of Mason and Drake to the hotel guarded by the police.

And it is also notable that Hamilton Burger, the District Attoney of Los Angeles County, Mason's arch-enemy, first appears on the scene. In this book, Burger is described as a respectable opponent who wants to be faithful to his duty. In later books, he gradually becomes an one-track minded, stubborn enemy who wants to get Mason by all means.

I love the Perry Mason series, with its fast-paced movement, bizarre twists, and (now) dated atmosphere. But this entry is weak. There are far too many characters, and the plot is extremely convoluted. Perry breaks the law 8 or 9 times without any justification, tarnishing his image of someone who is protecting justice and not just his clients. The result is that it is simply not as enjoyable as the best in the series. To call any of the novels "believable" would be a stretch, but this one is so far out of bounds that you simply stop taking it seriously. It is the only book in the series that I can remember having to push myself to finish. That is not a good sign for what should be escapist entertainment.

Background: The stylistic heritage of the Perry Mason mysteries is the American pulp magazines of the 1920s. In the early Mason mysteries, Perry - a good-looking, broad-shouldered, two-fisted, man of action - is constantly stiff-arming sultry beauties on his way to an explosive encounter that precipitates the book's climactic action sequence. In the opening chapters of these stories, Gardner subjects the reader to assertive passages that Mason is a crusader for justice, a man so action-oriented he is constitutionally incapable of sitting in his office and waiting for a case to come to him or to develop on its own once it has - he has to be out on the street, in the midst of the action, making things happen, always on the offensive, never standing pat or accepting being put on the defensive. These narrative passages - naïve, embarrassingly crude "character" development - pop up throughout the early books, stopping the narrative dead in its tracks, and putting on full display a non-writer's worst characteristic: telling the reader a character's traits instead of showing them through action, dialogue, and use of other of the writer's tools.

Rating "Ground Rules": These flaws, and others so staggeringly obvious that enumerating them is akin to using cannons to take out a flea, occur throughout the Gardner books, and can easily be used (with justification) to trash his work. But for this reader they are a "given", part of the literary terrain, and are not relevant to my assessment of the Gardner books. In other words, my assessments of the Perry Mason mysteries turn a blind eye to Erle Stanley Gardner's wooden, style-less writing, inept descriptive passages, unrealistic dialogue, and weak characterizations. As I've just noted, as examples of literary style all of Gardner's books, including the Perry Mason series, are all pretty bad. Nonetheless, the Mason stories are a lot of fun, offering intriguing puzzles, nifty legal gymnastics, courtroom pyrotechnics, and lots of action and close calls for Perry and crew. Basically, you have to turn off the literary sensibilities and enjoy the "guilty" pleasure of a fun read of bad writing. So, my 1-5 star ratings (A, B, C, D, and F) are relative to other books in the Gardner canon, not to other mysteries, and certainly not to literature or general fiction.

"The Case of the Counterfeit Eye": D+

A generally weak entry in the Perry Mason series, not even close to such Gardner classics as "The Stuttering Bishop", "The Lame Canary", "The Substitute Face", or "The Perjured Parrot", to name entries that were published in successive years after 1935, when "The Case of the Counterfeit Eye" first came out, and when Gardner's fertile imagination was approaching its quirky peak.

This somewhat "forced" and very artificial mystery has an other-worldly, disconnected air, more removed than most mysteries from the real world - like a mystery gimmick that Gardner dreamed up and simply didn't want to pass up turning into a novel-length story. "The Counterfeit Eye" is his unsatisfying attempt to put the gimmick into story form. Unsatisfying, because it still feels like a gimmick imposed on the situation and characters, forcing them to behave in ways that satisfy the needs of the gimmick, but not the readers' need for a coherent story in which the characters display a modicum of rational behavior, and the police do not exhibit the blinkered stupidity so characteristic of the drawing room mysteries that were so antithetical to the more "realistic" roots of the pulp mysteries that are the Perry Mason series' progenitors.

In "The Counterfeit Eye" the basic situation that precipitates the murder and its mystery relies on a tangle of coincidences and are unlikely enough on their own, but surpass any possibility of suspended-disbelief when they coincide the way the author forces them to on the fateful night of the murder. And - the most irritating aspect of this story - resolution of the daunting case against Perry's client is achieved by trotting out the most far-fetched coincidence that Gardner has ever had the temerity to use.

All in all a far-fetched, disappointing early effort by Gardner in the midst of one of his most creative periods.