At a rough estimate, I reckon I’ve read 40 to 50 of Erle Stanley Gardner’s books featuring Perry Mason.  Precisely which ones?  Yeah, I’m vague on that.  But The Case of the Rolling Bones (1939) — which I make the fifteenth time Mason sallied forth to lock legal horns on behalf of some wronged party — I definitely remembered…until I was about halfway through it recently and realised that, no, I probably hadn’t read this before. In a way, then, it’s lovely to be able to find more classic-era Mason titles which I can treat as completely ‘new to me’ reads, and this is a strong entry in Gardner’s output that has a very clever idea at its core, warranting its recent reprinting in the American Mystery Classics range.

We open with Mason lamenting the absence of anything interesting in his case load — “I want meat, red meat, and lots of it.” — and having to sustain himself with all that’s on offer: family concern over septuagenarian Alden E. Leeds’ recent betrothement to the younger Emily Milicant. Far from being asked to find a legal wrench to throw into this machine, Mason is approached by Miss Milicant and those sympathetic to her situation raising concerns about a possible blackmail attempt on Alden Leeds. These opening stages are a little confused, it must be said, with it not immediately easy to summarise precisely what Mason’s involvement is meant to be, but things soon settle down as we move into the finely-honed groove that is Gardner’s skill with thumbnail sketched of people and places, like…

The living-room had shades but no drapes. New rugs were on the hardwood floors. The furniture seemed stiff and unreal as though it had not as yet become accustomed to its new surroundings and settled down to homey comfort.

…or…

Barkler took a pipe from his pocket with the manner of a man who intended that his contribution to the conference was to be an attentive silence.

Soon, someone turns up dead, everyone has a motive, and a few questions of identity are being thrown around in a way that will make your head spin. What’s so clever about Gardner, especially in this phase of his career, is how easily he piles on the complications and how easily he dismisses them all come the end. His fixation with minor points of law is magnificent to behold, and the way it’s applied here — including a most superbly subtle clue, dropped in pure Golden Age magnificence — is top drawer stuff.

It builds to a humdinger of a courtroom showdown, and one that once again shows Mason sailing so perilously close to the wind that you wonder how he ever kept his licence. Nevertheless, the man has a point when he turns on the complaints raised by Deputy D.A. Bob Kittering:

“If I’d [used your underhand tactics] or hired a detective agency to do it, you’d have had me arrested and instituted disbarment proceedings.”

“Occasionally,” Kittering admitted to Judge Knox, “we have to condone certain irregularities in order to combat criminal activities. It’s a case where the ends justify the means.”

“The ends in this case,” Mason observed, “would have been the conviction of an innocent man of first degree murder.”

The only real criticism I can level at this is that it’s not fairly clued throughout, with Mason occasionally making a leap of pure faith which happens to land in the bull’s-eye and which, had he not just intuited the right interpretation, would have messed everything up. It’s undeniable that he pulls off “a most remarkable piece of detective work, an example of sheer deductive genius” in realising the truth of the watertight situation he has found himself facing, and we can be very glad indeed that his mind is “certainly not geared to a conventional groove”, for we would have missed out on some magnificent loop-hole jumping had that been the case.

Littered through this are plenty of points of minor interest, too, such as the idea that it’s unusual to eat the jackets from baked potatoes (??!), notions about how to diagnose senility, some superb minor character descriptions (“[A] colourless chap who’s never found himself because there isn’t anything to find.”), and one of the great accidental double entendres of the era (in chapter nine, if you’re curious). Mason’s response to the challenge that one day he’ll find himself defending a guilty man is simply perfect, too, and demonstrates perhaps the key idea at the core of this long-running series.

It’s interesting how little the eponymous bones have to do with the plot overall, and I’m intrigued how one can roll two six-sided dice and have “the figures five and seven show up with amazing regularity” — aren’t they numbered 1 to 6? — but, that aside, this is another great example of why Gardner was such a joy in this genre, while also being yet another example of why he’s under-appreciated: you can put this alongside probably 20 or 30 other books that are equally ingenious, so there’s no obvious single ‘best’ place to go when trying to get into his output. Weird that too much high quality work should have this effect, but why else is he so largely out of print and pushed aside in favour of the TV show spun from these books? His stock may be on the rise again, however, and this is really not a bad place to start if you’re moved to invest.