The Case of the Deadly Toy by Erle Stanley Gardner
Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)
Horace Livermore Selkirk didn’t get to be a rich banker in San Francisco by being an agreeable fellow. Though granting he didn’t like the scrapes his son got into, he tells Perry Mason that he intends to avenge his son’s murder. The cops have Perry’s client, the son’s ex-fiancé , in custody but Horace wants the killing pinned on the son’s ex-wife, because he wants custody of his son’s son, the only one carrying on the Selkirk name. Thus, this was first serialized in 1958 as The Case of the Greedy Grandpa in The Saturday Evening Post.
Gardner was a writer that touched on serious issues in his novels in order to give them heft and realism. First, he brings in the scary practice of stalking in this one. There’s also poison pen letters.
Second, Gardner brings up the influence of TV watching on kids. While interviewing persons of interest, Mason pries out of a babysitter that on a whim she allowed her seven-year-old charge to play with a .22 with the shells removed. Under the influence of “pistol performances” on TV, the boy, she admits, might have gotten hold of the gun and loaded it with a shell.
Third, Mason gets a witness on the stand to admit that she was coached by the police to make her identification, having been allowed to observe the defendant surrounded by police before the witness identified her in a line up.
This is not one of the best Mason novels I’ve read. But the subtext about when and how children should be allowed to handle weapons was interesting to me, since this is an issue that has hardly gone away in the fifty years since this mystery was published.
