Case of the Perjured Parrot

In The Case Of The Perjured Parrot, an eccentric millionaire is found murdered in his mountain cabin, his parrot loose from it's cage. Famous Lawyer Perry Mason is hired to represent the victim's son, who expects an inheritance battle with his father's ex-wife, Helen Sabin. Mason, his competent secretary Della Street, and Private Eye Paul Drake investigate, turning up another parrot in the home of another woman named Helen -- Helen Monteith. And this parrot repeats the phrase: "Drop the gun, Helen . . . Don't shoot . . . My God, you've shot me." Mason decides to protect this second Helen, and has Della take her away. The police, as yet unaware of the second parrot, find that the murder weapon came from Helen Monteith's work place, and accuse her of the murder. She claims to have been married to the victim recently, though his divorce wasn't final. She knew nothing about his other marriage. This one is very well-written and readable, a real page-turner. The set up is very effective, keeps you reading to figure it out, and Mason's final solution of the case depends more on the clues than on breaking down witnesses like on the TV shows. There's also another big plot twist at the end, other than the murder revelation. The conclusion is consistent with the clues yet surprising, not a disappointment in any way.

Perry Mason tells Della Street that he never takes a case unless he is convinced his client is innocent. Then he explains the discrepancies in the evidence to free his client. A new client shows up for a consultation, his father's murder was in the day's newspapers. This millionaire father set up trust funds to help the crippled, the aged, and the infirm; those who had their health deserved nothing more. Fremont Sabin was shot with an obsolete derringer, only his pet parrot was alive in Sabin's isolated hunting cabin. Charles Sabin wants to prevent his father's widow from destroying the will that left the bulk of the estate to him. Charles Sabin also wants the murderer brought to justice. Fremont married his housekeeper after his wife died, but became very unhappy. Charles Sabin explains why the parrot found in the cabin was NOT his father's pet parrot, and this may be important to solving the murder. Perry and Della drive to the mountain cabin to view the scene; the police are there. The time of death was estimated as the morning when the fishing season began. Fremont's secretary, Richard Waid, received a telephone call from Fremont the night before and was told to fly to New York (he has an alibi). The alarm clock, set for 5:30, had run down at 2:47. Sheriff Barnes estimated the itme of death from the caught fish and the canned beans eaten for lunch. When leaving, Perry notices an almost hidden wire; someone was tapping Fremont's telephone! Fremont Sabin had been donating to the group that was investigating official corruption; scores of people would murder him if they found out about this (Chapter III). Perry gets Paul Drake to track down parrot sales; they are a rare bird. They find the shop that recently sold a parrot, and the woman who bought parrot food. Now complications arise. This woman was a librarian who was recently married. Her parrot can be seen and heard on the back porch, and provides a clue. The murder weapon was part of the collection at the Public Library?s museum, and was taken by the librarian, Helen Monteith (Chapter IV)! Perry tells Helen that she will be arrested for suspicion of murder as soon as the police find out about her. Perry meets the widow, Helen Watkins Sabin, who is very combative. Did she secretly go to Reno for a divorce? Was the divorce granted before the murder, or after (making her a rich widow)? Does the parrot offer a key to the solution (Chapter VI)? Wire-tapping is a felony in California, private detectives don't do it. "You'd be surprised to know how often the police do it" says Paul Drake (p.140). And so the rest of the book tells how Perry Mason solves the murder and frees his client. By now you must have picked up the hints and the question about time of death and divorce. But what if the divorce decree was forged? Can a parrot testify in court without committing perjury? Circumstantial evidence is the interpretation drawn from the known facts (Chapter IX). Questioning Sergeant Holcomb about h

The hook was baited. Mason was summoned from the dead of night to his office, where he received $2,000 in cash, and the small end of a $10,000 bill. The client was a masked woman, and he had no way of knowing who she was, and how to prepare her defense. Mason stumbles around trying to figure out how to protect his mystery client. Then even after he unmasks his client, he finds himself the victim of a frame-up by a suspect who tells a story which the district attorney is happy to believe.

This book is about a Perry Mason Mystery. One rainy night Robert Peltham calls Perry Mason out of bed and asks to meet him at once. Accompanying him is a masked women whom Peltham wants Mason to represent. mason asks wha she is charged with. "Read tomorrow's papers," Peltham says, then he cuts a $100,000 bill in half, gives one half to Mason and the other half to the masked woman. The bait. When Albert Tidings, a financier, is found murdered, Mason knows his client will be indicted. But who? Is it Adelle Hastings , the heiress with no money, whose charities Tidings administered? Or is it Byrl Gailord, whose trust fund Tidings managed. And why must Mason begin his investigation without knowing who retained him? With the top-notch, crakcerjack help of his secretaryDella Street and Private detective Paul Drake, Mason seeks answers to these intriguing questions. This mystery is one in a million. You will love it.

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 Perjured Parrot": AThis is one of the strongest entries in the Perry Mason series. Written in 1939, when Gardner was at the height of his limited creative powers, this well-constructed mystery is full of baffling clues that set the reader to thinking and speculating. The story is fast-paced, founded in authentic human behavior, and - best of all - the characters remain true to themselves. The mystery is quite mystifying, and the solution quite satisfying - the sort that brings to your lips a smile combining approval and acknowledgement of being outwitted.Multimillionaire Fremont Sabin is mu