I Dreamed I Married Perry Mason Read Free

according to Annie, totally rocked. Better yet, it was unwrinkleable. And high-heeled Prada Mary Janes that didn’t hurt. But, alas, no Hermès bag. Even on eBay, those babies went for triple my mortgage payment, plus some. Champagne taste and a beer pocketbook, as my mother used to say.
    I sidestepped the gift shop, stuffed to the rafters with things I could afford but didn’t want ( I Love Lucy lunchboxes and Three Stooges backpacks, for example), and went upstairs to get my tapes.
    On the menu for today were “The Case of the Moth-Eaten Mink,” “The Case of the Howling Dog,” “The Caseof the Twice-Told Twist,” and “The Case of the Dangerous Dowager,” the latter of which—had Gardner’s publisher had his way—would have been titled “The Case of the Pig-headed Widow,” which tells you about how much publishers know. Writing as much as he did, Gardner developed a standard meter for titles: la la la la la la la la. The last word had to be short and naturally emphasized, unless it was a two-syllable word, in which case the first syllable was customarily slurred over, as in “brunette.” Gardner took a lot of heat for referring to himself as a “one-man fiction factory,” but I admired the economy of it all. When everything is systematized, there is no wasted energy. As the reluctant champion of the chicken-with-her-head-cut-off approach to life, I realized I could learn a thing or two from this guy.
    There were twenty-four TV-watching cubicles in the main room, and they were almost always empty. How depressing it must be to work here, kind of like being alone in a movie theater. Today there was a man in a Jackson Five T-shirt two seats over from my favorite cubicle, absorbed in the Apollo 11 moon landing, and an old lady next to him watching what I guessed was an early episode of Dragnet . Everybody loves a mystery.
    My daughter had become one, overnight. This was distressing. Ah, well. She’d called from Lael’s at the crack of dawn to tell me I could come over later in the afternoon, but only if I swore not to talk, just to listen. Listening is not my best event. But I’d give it a shot. Right now, though, I had to get to work.
    I laid out my pens and pencils in neat little rows. I sorted and resorted my note cards. I was in the middle of an exquisite Post-it note collage when I realized just how nervous Iwas about this project. It was August, the manuscript was due in three months, and it was full of loose ends.
    I had the literary analysis all tied up, having sat for years at the feet of the master—my ex, the world’s second-most-renowned James Fenimore Cooper scholar. What a dubious honor, not that he’d see it that way. The great so often go unrecognized in their own time. Anyway, I will grudgingly admit that he taught me how to deconstruct a text. And, yes, our endless fights about feminist theory were inspirational. They made me realize I had to dump the misogynist bastard, for one thing. Also, that what had been left out of the Erle Stanley Gardner literature was any discussion of the centrality of women in his books.
    After reading a dozen or so, I had become convinced that with the Perry Mason series Gardner had pioneered a new kind of soft-boiled pulp written specifically for a female audience. Which is to say the prurient appeal of all those sulky girls, leggy vixens, and glamorous widows throwing themselves at Perry Mason was merely a ruse. In fact, those dames in distress almost always served to undermine his mastery, in subtle and interesting ways.
    No, what was hard-going was not analyzing the work. Nor was it figuring out Mason’s place along the continuum of amateur gumshoes, cops, and spies skulking their way across the American mystery landscape. That’d been my turf since I’d turned eleven and discovered Nancy Drew. Nope, what was causing all the trouble was Gardner himself.
    Descended