Golden Age of Detective Fiction

Hello readers! Today, we’ll dive into my third pick for Reading the Meow 2024. This inclusive event, hosted by Literary Potpourri, celebrates cats in books, and it’s a breeze to participate. Just read a book with a cat and share your thoughts on your blog, Instagram, Twitter, or Goodreads. I’ll be sharing about cats in mysteries, but you can contribute about cats in any genre: fiction, poetry, or whatever you fancy. Reading the Meow runs from June 10 – June 16; you can find more details about the event and its participants here.

Today, I’ll review The Erle Stanley Gardner classic, The Case of the Careless Kitten, published in March of 1942. This book holds a special place in my heart as it was one of the first mysteries I ever read. The version I read is part of the American Mystery Classics series, which reprinted this iconic mystery in 2019 and includes an introductory essay about Erle Stanley Gardner and his prolific career written by the publisher of the American Mystery Classics imprint, Otto Penzler. The Case of the Careless Kitten is a thrilling ride, filled with love affairs, break-ins, shootouts, and a missing banker. Hold on to your hats, because a poisoned kitten is just the beginning of this heart-pounding mystery.

Plot Summary

Helen Kendal plays with her new kitten, Amber Eyes, and reminisces about her Uncle Franklin B. Shore saving another kitten on the roof of their house ten years earlier. Soon after saving the kitten, Uncle Franklin disappears without a trace, and his wife, the imperious Matilda Shore, maintains that Franklin is not dead, having merely run off with a harlot and will eventually come crawling back to her to gain access to his vast fortune. Until his return, Matilda keeps an iron grip on his money and refuses to pay out any legacies he set upon his heirs. Helen Kendal sincerely wishes she could convince her aunt to give her the money she’s entitled to so she could marry her sweetheart, a penniless soldier and not her aunt’s favorite, George Alber, the son of her old boyfriend.

Helen Kendal is woken from her reverie by a strange phone call. The man on the other end of the line says he’s Franklin B. Shore and recounts stories from Helen’s childhood that only he would know. He begs her to contact the lawyer, Perry Mason, and his contact will meet the two of them and bring him to Shore’s hideout.  Kendal agrees to the plan but feels a little uneasy about whether this whole thing is a setup, so she confides in her uncle Gerald Shore- a lawyer, and he agrees to put her in touch with Mason.

Before Kendal and Gerald Shore meet with Mason, Matilda Shore notices that Amber Eyes is ill. The poor little kitten is having convulsions, and Helen rushes Amber Eyes to the vet, who says it’s been given strychnine tablets in balls of meat. The vet, worried about Amber Eyes’s life, suggests that the kitten be given to a friend for a few days. Helen gives Amber Eyes to the gardener for safekeeping and meets Perry Mason.

Mason listens to the whole rigamarole and believes there’s something fishy about the poisoned kitten aspect and agrees to go with Gerald Shore and Helen Kendal to meet the mysterious handler, with Della Street in tow. When they get to the lonely spot in the hills to meet the handler, he’s dead in his car with a .38 caliber in his head. His car holds some valuable clues that Mason sees, but Tragg continuously overlooks them.

Tragg also has some exciting news for the little group. Matilda Shore has also been poisoned. She claims she accidentally took too much heart medicine, but after further investigation, her story doesn’t hold up. Matilda Shore stays in the hospital, and Helen Kendal goes home.

Upon arriving home, Helen is accosted by her boyfriend, who has been trying to reach her for hours. They are trying to figure out how to move forward in their relationship when they hear a thud, like a piece of furniture tumbling over, and then someone imitating Matilda Shore’s distinctive walk—however, Matilda Shore is still in the hospital after her poisoning scare.

Helen and her boyfriend rush into Matilda’s room, where a mysterious assailant tries to shoot Helen and then shoots her boyfriend before fleeing. Helen accompanies her boyfriend to the hospital- they operate on him, and his life hangs in the balance.

Perry Mason and Della Street are discussing their next move over a cup of coffee and then go their separate ways. Della runs into the gardener who has been taking care of the kitten. He says that Franklin Shore is currently bunking at his house, and Della, desperate to detain him, pretends to have car trouble to stall until Mason can meet her at a service station.

Mason meets up with the gardener and returns to his house to see Franklin Shore. However, he’s nowhere to be found. All that’s home is the kitten, Amber Eyes, curled up on a bed. Amber Eyes had a fun romp around the kitchen and left some floury paw prints. As Mason watches Amber Eyes slumber, he pieces together the whole plot and the two most vital clues are courtesy of Amber Eyes.

Mason whisks the gardener away to a hotel and registers him under a false name. Mason gives the kitten to Della for safekeeping.  Not long after stashing him away, a tip comes to Tragg about the gardener’s whereabouts, and he takes him in as a material witness. The gardener spills the beans about Della’s attempt to keep him away from the District Attorney, and the DA sends Tragg to investigate. Tragg shows up at Della’s apartment, and she deftly handles his attempts to search her apartment- but the whole thing goes up in flames when Amber Eyes cries out.

Della Street is under arrest for kidnapping a material witness, and Perry Mason must defend her in court, unravel the poisoning of the careless kitten, and put a deadly killer behind bars.

The Review

The Case of the Careless Kitten is a first-rate Perry Mason mystery that takes the prompt of a cat-centric mystery seriously. Sometimes, when authors set out to write a mystery with an animal character, they use the animal to incite an impossible or extraordinary event and then abandon using the animal in favor of the more complex character beats and more accessible to empathize with human characters. However, The Case of the Careless Kitten starts with the poisoning of Amber Eyes and is solved by Amber Eyes’ actions in the gardener’s house. Amber Eyes is why Tragg can place Della Street with the gardener- despite her adroit obfuscation of his ambush interview. Amber Eyes also provides several of the emotional beats of the story: she’s a vehicle for which we can enter the loving reminisces that Helen Kendal has of her Uncle Franklin when the other characters are more ambivalent about his true nature, and she provides quick insight into Matilda Shore’s haranguing nature when after she scratches Helen the cat is equivalent to a rabid dog that needs to be put down. Matilda Shore’s extreme cruelty is displayed early, establishing her as a wholly unsympathetic character. Amber Eyes, while not in every scene, provides emotional insight into her human compatriots and is the thoroughfare of the story. The Case of the Careless Kitten is a cat mystery- not just a mystery that happens to have a cat. 

Gardner’s decision to explore having an animal as the most important character and the reason the entire mystery of what happened to Franklin B. Shore shows considerable growth from when he wrote The Case of the Lame Canary, which started incredibly strong with a distressed damsel walking into his office with a hurt caged canary, which he quickly abandoned and barely spoke of the canary again. Gardner decided to write a cat mystery and stuck with it. The Case of the Careless Kitten shows Gardner’s mastery of his craft; he embeds the pulpy magnetism of his early short stories, with lots of gunplay, the shooting of the heroine and her lover, and keeps the whole thing chugging along at a breakneck speed- The Case of the Careless Kitten takes place over 18 hours. It’s whizzing by in a flash. We’re going to vet clinics, hospitals, far-flung hillsides, and seedy hotels punctuated by lots of sparring between Tragg and Mason.

Tragg, usually a minor adversary, is easily eschewed by Perry Mason’s misdirection, careful speech, and quick thinking, which is quite the thorn on Mason’s side. He wants to solve the case of what happened to Franklin B. Shore and to snare Mason in skirting too close to the wrong side of the law. Tragg makes no bones about it: Perry Mason has gotten away with too much, has used the law to shield himself from blatant felonious acts, and he’s going to get him disbarred. The beefier role for Tragg leads to some excellent tete e tetes and some monologuing from Mason about the erosion of the rights of the individual because people believe institutions want what’s best for them. Mason usually keeps his sights on discussing the law as it pertains to a single case- and shares his views on national law, the role of the Supreme Court, and how the individual must be protected from the over-legislating of personal freedom.

The Case of the Careless Kitten is heady with the atmosphere of war. Several of the characters refer to the war in Europe, the increased call for American Troops to enter combat zones, and the personal sacrifice of each individual during wartime. This patriotic layer about the rights of each individual gets a bit convoluted when paired with the incredibly xenophobic and racist treatment of the Korean houseboy named Komo. He is often referred to by a slur for a Japanese person, and when he protests that he’s not even Japanese, the other characters roll their eyes and shrug- it’s all the same to them. I think this thread in the story reflects the real-world increasing mistrust of Japanese and American attitudes of complete hatred and fear of Asian countries in the months leading up to Pearl Harbor. It is an ugly mark on the book and adds an uncomfortable subtext- we must protect individual freedom for the right kind of people, namely white, naturally-born American citizens. It’s an unfortunate aspect of reading wartime literature, and I’m not sure if these attitudes will pervade later series installments.

However, Mason’s patriotic legal moralizing is not the main focus of the book or even the major legal battle in The Case of the Careless Kitten; it’s defending loyal and lovely Della Street from the charge that she kept a material witness from the police. This case is just the first step in Tragg’s plan to take down Mason and get him disbarred systematically. With the help of the District Attorney, they effectively have Della Street nailed to rights. She kidnaps a witness and needs Perry’s help to hide him- which Perry does, and yet, Mason somehow cloaks her with glory, manages to turn integral witness to blackguard suspect, beguiles the jury, and, of course, get’s Della her freedom.

Surprisingly, in a fit of spite- Mason doesn’t solve the case for Tragg and Burger. He lays out all the clues in court but never unmasks the killer because Tragg repeatedly accuses Mason of using the court as a place of showmanship to unmask the killer and get his innocent client off on all charges for the virtue of not being the killer. So, in a twist on the formulaic courtroom scene that defines Perry Mason’s books, he doesn’t expose the killer or wrap up what happened to Franklin B. Shore. 

Even when Tragg apologizes. Even when he begs.
Instead, he takes Della on a relaxing vacation on the Florida coast, surrounded by sun and surf. He explains how a playful little kitten unraveled the whole disappearance of Franklin B. Shore for Della and the reader. The cluing is top-notch, sometimes a shade obvious, but even though I twigged all the clues, I couldn’t understand how the kitten came into it. It’s a clever mystery, and I’m glad Perry Mason was on the case, not Tragg and me. I don’t know if we would have ever solved The Case of the Careless Kitten.

Erle Stanley Gardner Book Reviews

Erle Stanley Gardner Biography

Erle Stanley Gardner (1889-1970) was an American author and lawyer, renowned for creating the iconic fictional defense attorney Perry Mason. Born in Malden, Massachusetts, Gardner moved to California, where he passed the bar exam in 1911 after a brief stint in law school. He began his writing career in the 1920s, contributing to pulp magazines before achieving major success with the Perry Mason series, starting with “The Case of the Velvet Claws” in 1933. Gardner’s legal expertise enriched his storytelling, leading to a prolific career that included over 80 Perry Mason novels, radio plays, films, and a popular TV series. He also created other memorable characters and worked on projects to aid the wrongfully convicted. Gardner’s legacy endures as a significant figure in detective fiction.

Reading the Meow 2024 Reviews