The Case of the Crooked Candle

This Perry Mason story is one better than many of the others in that the mystery is solved by thinking through the facts of the location of a dead body, the ebb and flow of tides and the position of a half-burned candle. The combination of the three leads to an inherent contradiction in that not all of them can simultaneously be true yet all are in fact true. Of course it is Mason that is able to see through the contradiction and understand that it all will make sense if one assumption is dropped. A negative is that Hamilton Burger is once again out to upstage Mason and in their zest to nail Mason the police are somewhat blind to the facts of the case. Della Street is set up by the police and taken into custody. Lieutenant Tragg admits to this tactic, something that would have opened him up to legal jeopardy. While official incompetence is rampant in the world, when it is repeatedly used as a prime tactic the use grows thin. Nevertheless, the apparent paradox of irreconcilable facts dominates the official incompetence, making this a story that you scratch your head over as you try to see your way through to the proper conclusion.

24th Perry Mason Mystery written in 1944. You can enjoy very complicated mystery entangled with various circumstantial evidence (a crooked candle, the tide, the corpse's position, blood-stained footprints and so on) and time element.