Bit of Ivory

Alright, I just made a major breakthrough, and I just had to share it.

Okay, so maybe it’s minor in terms of things that are actually important, but I feel quite proud about it. Anyone who bothers to scroll all the way down and notice what I’m reading right now (I think I want to change the location on that. No one scrolls down that far EDIT: I changed it. ) will notice that I’ve embarked on Perry Mason books by Erle Stanley Gardner. Actually, I’ve been reading Perry Mason for about 8 years now, but I still haven’t read all of the books. Not surprising, considering he wrote 84 of them. I’ve read all the ones that are available in my local libraries, so I’ve been stuck for quite a while now. But since I’ve started working in the BYU library, I’ve discovered that they have a whole bunch of them that I’ve never read. It’s extremely exciting .Anyway, I decided to print out a list of all the Perry Mason books and check them off as I read them, so that I can say I’ve read them all. BYU still doesn’t have all the ones I need, but there’s this wonderful thing called Interlibrary Loan where I can borrow books from other libraries. It’s great. So I found a list, and it had a book on it that I’d never heard of before–The Case of the Murderous Bride. This particular list was by a guy name Len, and it was HIS list of which Perry Masons he’s read. He’d read all but that one, because he said he couldn’t find it.

Well, that intrigued me, so I started searching. My first stop was RLIN, which catalogs books from all the libraries in a particular consortia. There wasn’t a record of it. So I went to WorldCat (another consortia website). Nothing there, either. So I went to the Library of Congress. No dice. That REALLY surprised me. If a book has been printed in the United States, the Library of Congress has a record of it. I was beginning to think it didn’t actually exist. As a last-ditch effort, I typed in “Erle Stanley Gardner” as an author, and started browsing through his books. There, after The Case of the Lucky Legs, was a book– The Case of the Murderer’s Bride and Other Stories. No WONDER that guy couldn’t find it. He had the wrong title!

I went back to RLIN, and found 9 libraries that had a 1977 edition, and 6 that had a 1969 edition. I’ve ordered it through Interlibrary Loan. I also emailed that guy with the list and told him what the real title is. I don’t know if he’ll be all that interested, but hey, I’m a librarian. I like to give people accurate information.

Can I put in a plug for the Perry Mason books, while I’m at it? If you’ve ever seen the TV series and thought it was boring– well, it kind of is. I still enjoy it, but the books far outstrip the series. The early ones were all made from the novels, and they had to cut SO MUCH out of them in order to make them fit into 45 minutes. The books have so many twists and turns that you’re never really sure where it’s going to end up– not to mention the fact that Perry doesn’t always follow all the rules. He tampers with witnesses, plants false evidence (once he went out to the road where a car chase/shootout/murder happened and shot a bullet into a guide-rail post, hoping that the police would find that one instead of the actual bullet), and just basically gets himself into deep holes. One of his favorite tricks is mailing incriminating evidence against his client to himself, therefore putting it out of his possession while at the same time keeping it out of the hands of the police (because even they can’t tamper with the mail). He never does anything really illegal–well, I take that back, he has committed a few breaking-and-entering crimes– but some of his escapades aren’t entirely ethical. And the courtroom scenes are always spectacular.

Believe it or not, Erle Stanley Gardner is the best-selling mystery author of all time– He beats Agatha Christie cold. In the mid-sixties, his books were selling at an average of 26,000 copies per day! And yet nobody reads him anymore. It’s very sad, really.

Read Perry Mason!