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Title: The Case of the Singing Skirt
Subtitle: Perry Mason Series, Book 58
Author: Erle Stanley Gardner
Narrator: Alexander Cendese
Format: Unabridged
Length: 5 hrs and 15 mins
Language: English
Release date: 04-25-17
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 2 votes
Genres: Mysteries & Thrillers, Classic Detective
Publisher's Summary:
Ellen Robb does more than just sing for her supper - she also dances and sells cigarettes in a two-bit gambling parlor in a one-horse town. But when she hits a sour note with her scheming employer by refusing to help fleece a fat-cat customer in a crooked card game, she finds herself out of all three jobs. That's when she sings her song of woe to Perry Mason, who promises to turn her blues into greenbacks with the help of his crack team, Della Street, and Paul Drake, and a hefty lawsuit.
Things are humming along just fine - until murder interrupts the merry melody of Mason's crafty legal maneuvers. When the vindictive wife of Ellen Robb's not-so-secret lover turns up shot to death, Mason is certain it's a frame-up - and that his songbird client's belligerent boss is to blame. Until his own gun is found at the scene. The cocksure Mason will have to change his tune - and do some quick thinking - or else this case could be his swan song.
Members Reviews:
Best of the Best?
This may be the best of the ten Perry Mason mysteries I've recently read on Kindle. It's got a real mystery, a problem with duplicate guns (not just two, but as many as four) that Mason and the reader both have to concentrate to solve. It has some real-life legal precedents, honest-to-goodness genuine law cases, which carry the story along and get Mason into big trouble, and it has a client who absolutely must be guilty, until Mason discovers the one way she might not be.
Wow.
Let's go into the few bad things that can be said about it. The tv series had been running for a couple of years when this book came out, and the business of somebody jumping up out of the courtroom audience and confessing, just because of Mason's eloquence, was a national joke. Well, there's something like that in the SINGING SKIRT.
The tv series also gives us a DA, Hamilton Burger (Ham Burger, get it?) who is so mad at Mason winning all his cases against him that he wants to get Mason disbarred much more than he wants to win whatever case is presently on hand. The fact that Mason wins all his cases because the DA's office is criminally careless about prosecuting innocent people -- hey, that point never even comes up.
There's an overly confusing plot, which other reviewers here have complained about, but lots of Mason books have those, because they come from the golden era of the detective story, when plots were supposed to be confusing. Writers like Ellery Queen would discuss their plot confusions over and over, and at great length, until they were hammered into their readers' minds, but Mason is an action hero, and while his plots and solutions are often tight and interesting, he doesn't have time to repeat his plot points until they're completely clear; all that would just slow his story down.
In SINGING SKIRT, as in Ellery Queen, the solution requires people to take risks of getting caught that no one would have the nerve to take in real life, so you could call that a typical failing of the golden age detective story.
But on the good side, there's quite a lot. Erle Stanley Gardner did use the kind of gun-substitution tricks Perry Mason uses -- used them in real-life criminal trials where he was the defense attorney.
