There are certain characters that it seems impossible were once not a part of popular culture: Superman, say, or James Bond, or Miss Marple. With a mystery bias to my reading, it seems incredible that most of Queen Victoria’s reign passed sans Sherlock Holmes, and, with over 80 books and countless hours of television devoted to him, how could there something so prosaic as a beginning for Perry Mason?

Nevertheless, a beginning there was, and The Case of the Velvet Claws (1933) it is, Gardner’s first novel after penning approximately eight billion stories for pulp magazines. And, perhaps understanding the need to start strong from all those pulp stories, this begins in the manner that would mark out much of Gardner’s work, whether in this series of when writing as A.A. Fair: a client walks in needing help, and straight away there’s something fishy going on. Mason’s secretary, the incomparable Della Street, is suspicious from the off, referring to the woman as someone “who claims to be a Mrs. Eva Griffin” — and, sure enough, the young lady in question, is keen that Mason not know her identity or provenance, suggesting any future contact be made through the classified ads section of the Examiner newspaper.

So far, so sketchy.

Her problem is simple enough, however: she was at the scene of a shooting a few evenings ago in the company of one Harrison Burke, a man running for political office, and is rather keen that the tittle-tattle-publishing rag Spicy Bits not publish this piece of information. Police at the scene were willing to get Burke off the premises without noting him down as a witness, but Frank Locke, the ostensible head of Spicy Bits, has gen from somewhere concerning Burke’s presence, and it could be awkward if it was known he was out on the town with a married woman — this, apparently being more damning than vacating the scene of a crime without providing your details to the police as a witness (aaah, morals). All Mason needs to do is contact Locke, find out how much it will take for him not to publish the story, and a fee is as good as his.

From here, well, there are Developments but, just as Cool and Lam recently got a bit simpler than usual, Gardner hasn’t quite found the fit of his plotting boots — don’t worry, he soon would — and the various complications don’t quite dazzle in the way they should. Sure, there’s a good little twist early on concerning our client’s identity, but there’s a certain looseness around events that speaks of a man not yet fully confident about filling the page count of a longer form story. One late development sees Perry go to some lengths to frame someone for a murder, for instance, and then that’s just sort of forgotten and the character — and, indeed, the lawyer falsifying evidence against them — is never referred to again. Hell, this being Gardner, I was sure the shooting which Mrs. Griffin and Burke has been present at tied into things somewhere but, nope, my memory was faulty and Gardner was, it seems, a mere mortal before he became the God of the Switchback.

Most of the curiosity here, then, will come from seeing Gardner in tyro form rather than as the assured wrangler of people and plot we laud him as today. His experience in the pulps shines through, with some lovely descriptions catching people and their behaviour beautifully…

The two women maintained toward each other that air of aloof hostility which characterizes two dogs walking stiff-legged, one around the other.

…and he can paint you a character on the head of a pin…

His skin didn’t have the tanned appearance which comes from outdoor sports, but looked rather as though it had absorbed so much nicotine that it had become stained.

…but in the double-take department his plot telegraphs itself a little too clearly — in fairness, only because he’s trying to give the reader all the information for later — and, perhaps realising this, he later obscures so much information from the reader that the denouement might as well be anything from any book. The conclusion is true because Perry says it is, but there’s nothing to convince anyone, and certainly nothing to put our dogged champion of the down-trodden on the correct path except that he’s the main character and so has to be right. This, you’ll remember, would become a running theme.

As a character, Perry is rather more of a hot-head here than he would soon become, perhaps in an attempt to cash in on the rock ’em, sock ’em nature of those pulp stories where private eyes led with their fists. He’s also rather more mercenary here, again possibly to rob his actions of any of the sentimentality the likes of Dashiell Hammett had heard of but decided not to look up in the dictionary: sure, the guy doesn’t want to give his services for free, but, wow, does Perry ever and repeatedly go on about getting paid in this. Sheesh, my dude, if it’s that important to you maybe join one of the big firms, eh?

And, just to add to the buffet of unusual occurrences, he’s weirdly moral here, bordering on judgemental when a young woman admits that she was going to divorce her husband and then probably go and look for someone else to marry. And when said woman admits that there’s an element of financial security in that decision, well, one starts to feel Gardner himself had a problem with this, especially as it cropped up as a theme in Some Women Won’t Wait (1953) two decades later. Even investigator Paul Drake feels the need to put his oar in, and there’s something a little uncomfortable all these years later with how down everyone is about this — especially as it’s far from the worst thing this woman does in the course of this book (aaah, morals).

Rereading this after a couple of decades was an enjoyable experience, but had it, back then or now, been my first encounter with our rough-and-tumble lawyer I might have delayed my return somewhat longer. Incredible, given how much more confident Gardner would get at this in the years ahead, that this was one of two books of ESG’s chosen for the Haycraft-Queen Cornerstones list, but, well, that list is weird at the best of times and maybe we can take it as an acknowledgement of how great these books would become in time. There’s definitely gold in these hills, but you have to do a little more digging before you find it.