Perry Mason Research Articles

The Typewriter Century: A Cultural History of Writing Practices by Martyn Lyons (review).

Reviewed by: The Typewriter Century: A Cultural History of Writing Practices by Martyn Lyons James Inglis (bio) The Typewriter Century: A Cultural History of Writing Practices By Martyn Lyons. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021. Pp. 261. Written by historian of reading and writing practices Martyn Lyons, this book explores the relationship between creative writers and their typewriters. The "Typewriter Century," as Lyons defines it, began in the 1880s with the widespread commercialization of the typewriter and Mark Twain's claim to be the first novelist to use a writing machine. The century ended in the 1980s as word-processing technologies superseded typewriters. Although, as noted, the typewriter is experiencing something of a comeback in the twenty-first century. This work expands on Lyons's 2014 article in Quærendo, which looked at the use of typewriters by Henry James and Jack Kerouac. In addition, there are sections on the typing practices of George Simenon, Erle Stanley Gardner, Enid Blyton, Agatha Christie, and many other authors. This book has been released at a time of renewed scholarly interest in the history of typewriters, with Thomas Mullaney's The Chinese Typewriter (2017) a shining example. The most significant contribution made in this work is in shedding light on the variety of ways creative writers interacted with writing machines. For some, the typewriter created a "distancing effect," as Lyons puts it. For these writers, typewriters produced text that was both detached from their thoughts and impersonal to the reader. Helpfully, Lyons identifies several examples of writers who expressed their guilt at writing private letters "with the machine" but were obliged to do so because of the sheer volume of their correspondence. In stark contrast, other authors had a "romantic" vision of their typewriter, believing that the machine was irreplaceable in enabling rapid, instinctive, and spontaneous composition. Here, Lyons draws an improbable but fascinating comparison between children's author Enid Blyton and the Beat poet and novelist Jack Kerouac. Despite writing for very different audiences, both are said to have typed in a trancelike state, with their ideas flooding through the keys onto the paper in a stream of consciousness. Lyons links the automatic writing styles of Kerouac, Blyton, and others with typing practices in clerical work. In office settings, typists were sometimes expected to transcribe documentation rapidly without engaging with the content. The links between office work and creative writing are also drawn out in Lyons's chapter on Erle Stanley Gardner, the author of the long-running Perry Mason detective series. Gardner's creative output was prodigious. So to keep up with his writing, he set up a "Fiction Factory" with a permanent typing pool, fitted out with the latest typewriters, Dictaphones, and office technologies. Here Lyons presents a new perspective on general user practices in clerical work, for which there is considerable scholarly interest. [End Page 1216] As this is a trade book, Lyons has chosen to devote considerable space to general interest topics, including a potted history of the typewriter. However, this chapter is based on a seemingly cursory reading of the secondary literature resulting in several inaccuracies. For example, Lyons writes that early typewriting historian George Mares "could not foresee the advent of the electric typewriter" in The History of the Typewriter, published in 1909. In fact, in this very book, Mares included a detailed description of the Blickensderfer Electric, one of the earliest commercially manufactured electric typewriters. These mistakes have a bearing on the overall argument as when it comes to engaging with the artifacts themselves, readers from a history of technology background may have wished for greater engagement with the array of designs that emerged throughout The Typewriter Century. At times, Lyons comes tantalizingly close to such an approach. For instance, it is noted that Henry James was spurred on by the clicking of his Remington and that his inspiration dried up after his typist upgraded to a quieter Oliver typewriter. But such references to different designs are thrown in by Lyons anecdotally, with little analysis. Perhaps this work can serve as a starting point for a detailed exploration of the impact that different styles of typewriter had on writing practices. As a whole, this book...

The Case of the Option Agreement: Erle Stanley Gardner, Intellectual Property Management, and Radio's Perry Mason

The Case of the Option Agreement: Erle Stanley Gardner, Intellectual Property Management, and Radio's Perry Mason

Seria powieści Erla Stanleya Gardnera o Perrym Masonie i ich ekranizacje: recepcja przez współczesnych odbiorców polsko- i anglojęzycznych

This paper offers an overview of the reception of Erle Stanley Gardner’s series of novels about lawyer Perry Mason and the numerous film adaptations based on that series. It seeks to analyze their reception by contemporary Polish- and English-speaking readers and viewers. Accordingly, the statistics of readership and viewership of books, films and series based on the novels by Gardner are presented and discussed. The article is divided into five sections that deal with the following: Gardner as author; Gardner’s contribution to the development of serialized novel; editions of Gardner’s Perry Mason novels in the United States and in Poland; reception of Gardner’s Perry Mason novel series by Polish- and English-speaking readers, and reception of TV and film adaptations of these novels.

The Practice: Debunking Television Myths and Stereotypes

The Practice was a revolution in legal television. Although other modern serials had begun to explore some of the realist difficulties of the legal system, The Practice embraced and explored those dilemmas in a postmodernist way. It turned many of the conventions of legal television on their heads. The legal system was portrayed as arbitrary and subject to manipulation by the players-lawyers, judges and clients-who were shady, scheming, and in conflict with Hollywood stereotypes. This characterization of The Practice is not a criticism - its cynicism made it interesting and unpredictable. You could never be sure of the guilt or innocence of an accused, and even if you thought you knew, that person's culpability did not govern the outcome of the narrative. To be fair, some representations were so extreme that they approached satire. Nevertheless, many of the criticisms were justified. The legal system is not perfect. Guilty people are set free, innocent people are convicted, and lawyers sometimes act unethically. While the legal system of The Practice is not very close to reality, it is certainly closer than the sterile and flawless system portrayed in the iconic Perry Mason in the 50s and 60s. The Practice was in many respects a reaction to and the antithesis of L.A. Law, which stopped airing three years prior to The Practice's debut. David E. Kelley, the creator of The Practice, was a major creative force involved in L.A. Law. He created The Practice to contrast with the glamour of L.A. Law by showing the nuts and bolts of legal practice. The Practice is much different than L.A. Law's McKenzie, Brackman which was a successful civil law practice with beautiful high-rise offices and affluent attorneys. The Practice struggles to make ends meet. It is behind on its rent for a gritty, urban space where there is only one private office. The firm handles small or difficult civil cases, but its bread and butter is criminal defense work.The narratives of The Practice also represent the antithesis of L.A. Law. While L.A. Law recognized some difficult legal and social issues, and occasionally left the viewer a little uncomfortable with the outcome, those were the exceptions to fairly traditional plot resolutions. With The Practice, such discomfort is often the point. Where L.A. Law touches on an issue, The Practice delves into it and puts the dubious outcome directly in the viewer's face. Their differences were also reflected by their respective titles with L.A. Law suggesting that outcomes are governed by the law, while The Practice suggests an on-going effort to get the result that the client wanted, regardless of the law. These general themes and their postmodern character will be explored in more detail in the following two sections. The first section will consider three illustrative narratives and the second will examine three main characters.

‘End of the Goddamned thing!!’

The mystery fiction writer Erle Stanley Gardner and his publisher Thayer Hobson of Morrow devised an unusual procedure for connecting the first ten Perry Mason novels with ‘leads’ to provoke the reader’s curiosity, and so promote the sale of the succeeding book. The genesis of these ‘leads’, and the contrasting views of author and publisher on the requirements of endings in mysteries, is documented through their correspondence. The paper examines Erle Stanley Gardner’s resourcefulness in triggering different types of curiosity, and the issues that could arise when publishers substituted or curtailed these ‘leads’ in reprint editions. In translated editions the endings of these books became especially liable to modifications according to the expectations of the target culture. Differing conventions and fashions for the concluding textual threshold are exemplified from the manuscript evidence (including novels written by Erle Stanley Gardner under the pseudonym A.A. Fair) and from the very extensive dissemination of these best-selling works in book form.

Polly, Nancy, and Torchy Crack the Case: Those Relentless Women Reporters

WORLDLIT.ORG 9 photo : laura rodríguez / argentina / rnw . org / flickr Features “We are neither museum pieces nor part of a distant and harmless folklore. We are a living people, we exist. We are still alive.” – from the inaugural address of Petü Mogeleiñ (Mapuche Community Radio), El Maitén Chubut, Argentina, March 2008 To read an essay and poem by Mapuche poet Liliana Ancalao, turn to page 59. 10 WLT JANUARY–FEBRUARY 2018 O ne of the most implausible failures of realism that mystery readers generally accept is one posed by the series detectives, particularly the amateur sleuths in traditional mysteries. In novel one, Lord Fotheringale goes on holiday. A guest is murdered in the hotel, and Fotheringale unmasks the killer. In two, Fotheringale takes the train to London. An acquaintance is murdered in the next compartment . In three, he attends a dinner at stately Popham Grange, and—wouldn’t you know!—the heir of the estate is found dead in his locked bedroom. In story after story, the mere presence of Lord Fotheringale brings on murder like ragweed brings the sniffles. The amateur detective is an angel of death, and, not only that, the police even more implausibly put up with his or her meddling. The characters may grumble a bit to put a patch on it, but an amateur meddling in their work? No police force or prosecutor’s office of merit would in reality tolerate it. Nonetheless, the Sherlock Holmes template set the pattern, even to the point of justifying the illogical meddling by making the detective an adviser to the police. Holmes is called the world’s first “consulting detective.” Cases rap on his door. S. S. Van Dine’s Philo Vance is a friend of the district attorney, and James Runcie’s Sidney Chambers is a friend of a detective inspector. Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple and Jessica Fletcher of Murder, She Wrote annoy the police but still nudge them to the crime’s solution. As the traditional detective evolves into the private eye from the late 1920s on, the gumshoe exceeds almost every legal limit on private investigation, even though in the real world, murder is strictly police business and meddling has serious legal consequences. At least the fictional premise justifies their role. In the late 1940s, the authenticity of the police procedural began to assert itself more powerfully, so presently most murder stories are set in the world of police work. Despite many errors about police procedure, they avoid the credibility issue—at least for the average reader. The legal thriller also regularly offers prosecutors and defense attorneys as investigators, which is totally credible, except to actual lawyers. Even Perry Mason pays Paul Drake to do the legwork. Almost from the beginnings of the modern mystery , fictional reporters have been used to provide a character whose occupation can put him or her in proximity to crime, offering a motivation and compulsion to dig up the hidden facts and the pretense to knock on doors and butt into other people’s business. In a sense, Watson and the unnamed narrator of Poe’s mystery stories function like reporters with exclusive access to Holmes and Dupin. Gaston Leroux, most famous for The Phantom of the Opera, was one of the French pioneers of the mystery and exploited his experience as a correspondent. Among other stories, he covered the 1905 Russian Revolution. When he turned to fiction, he created the eighteen-year-old reporter Joseph Rouletabille to solve Le mystère de la chambre jaune (1907; The Mystery of the Yellow Room) and continued with Rouletabille stories until 1922. The device of using women reporters as detectives appeared early in the rise of the mystery as well. Journalism was relatively open to women, compared to most other professions in the late nineteenth century. The first municipal female detective in New York City (and possibly the world) wasn’t hired until 1912, but reporters, particularly the legendary Nellie Bly, became the inspiration for dozens of fictional female sleuths. The fantasy of an exciting, independent life must have been almost breathtaking to many women in the decades leading up to the Roaring Twenties. Nellie Bly Polly, Nancy, and...

Evidence of a Third Party's Guilt of the Crime that the Accused is Charged with: The Constitutionalization of the SODDI (Some Other Dude Did It) Defense 2.0

Defense counsel have employed a version of the SODDI defense for decades. The late Johnny Cochran successfully employed the defense in the O.J. Simpson prosecution, and the legendary fictional defense attorney Perry Mason used the defense in all his cases.However, in most jurisdictions there are significant limitations on the availability of the defense. In an 1891 decision, the United States Supreme Court announced that evidence of a third party’s misconduct is admissible only if it has a “legitimate tendency” to establish the accused’s innocence. Today most jurisdictions follow a version of the “direct link” test. Under this test, standing alone evidence of a third party’s motive or opportunity to commit the charged offense is inadmissible unless it is accompanied by substantial evidence tying the third party to the commission of the charged crime. Moreover, the evidence that the accused proffers to support the defense must satisfy both the hearsay and character evidence rules. If the defense offers out-of-court statements describing the third party’s conduct, the statements must fall within an exemption from or exception to the hearsay rule. If the defense attempts to introduce evidence of the third party’s perpetration of offenses similar to the charged crime, the defense must demonstrate that the evidence is admissible on a noncharacter theory under Federal Rule of Evidence 404(b)(2).However, a new version of the SODDI defense has emerged – SODDI 2.0. When the defense relies on this theory, the accused makes a more limited contention. The defense does not contend that reasonable doubt exists because there is admissible evidence of the third party’s guilt. Rather, the defense argues that there is reasonable doubt because the police neglected to investigate the potential guilt of a third party who was a plausible person of interest in the case. Two 2014 decisions, one from the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and another from an intermediate Utah court, approved this version of the defense. Even more importantly, both courts ruled that the trial judge violated the accused’s constitutional right to present a defense by curtailing the accused’s efforts to develop the defense at trial. The advent of this new version of the defense is both significant and controversial. The development is significant because the defense can often invoke this version of the defense when the restrictions on the traditional SODDI defense preclude the accused from relying on the traditional defense. As the two 2014 decisions point out, when the defense invokes the 2.0 version of the defense, the hearsay rule does not bar testimony about reports to the police about the third party’s misconduct. Under the 2.0 version of the defense, those reports are admissible as nonhearsay to show the reports’ effect on the state of mind of the police officers: putting them on notice of facts that should have motivated them to investigate the third party. Similarly, when the defense relies on the 2.0 version of the defense, the prosecution cannot invoke the character evidence prohibition to bar testimony that the third party has committed offenses similar to the charged crime. The prohibition applies only when the ultimate inference of the proponent’s chain of reasoning is that the person engaged in conduct consistent with his or her character trait. In this setting, the prohibition is inapplicable because the ultimate inference is the state of mind of the investigating officers.Since the restrictions on the new version of the SODDI defense are much laxer than those on the traditional defense, the advent of this defense is also controversial. Are the inferences from the 2.0 version of the defense so speculative that as a matter of law, the defense is incapable of generating reasonable doubt? Moreover, is it wrong-minded to recognize a version of the defense with such minimal requirements when the prevailing view is that traditional version is subject to much more rigorous requirements?This article addresses those questions and concludes that it is legitimate to recognize the SODDI defense 2.0. In the past few decades, there has been a growing realization of the incidence of wrongful convictions. In the late Johnny Cochran’s words, some of those convictions were a product of a “rush to judgment” by the police. The recognition of the SODDI defense 2.0 will provide a significant disincentive to such premature judgments by police investigators.

Competition in Failure Analysis?

To the readers of the Journal, it might seem a bit odd that I am discussing competition in the failure analysis community in the forthcoming October 2012 issue. I must confess, however, that this editorial was written in July 2012, at the time of the summer Olympics. It could be said that there is no place for competition in the failure analysis community. While our purely design-focused colleagues are the most easily identifiable engineers with competition as part of their charge, their mission looks a bit different than ours. Their mission, while oversimplified, can be stated for the purposes of my thesis as ‘‘make something new, make something better.’’ Our mission, again a gross oversimplification for the purposes of my thesis, is ‘‘figure out why that happened.’’ Extending beyond the inter-engineering comparisons, one might just as reasonably as possible suggest that there is no place for competition in failure analysis. There is no outcome to determine, only a truth to be found. I would suggest that, commerce aside, it is a gross oversimplification. While systematically investigating an event is a simple search to uncover the truth, the process and landscape are ripe with competition. I have been very fortunate in my career thus far to have been able to visit literally hundreds of failure analysis laboratories of widely varying sizes and scopes. Labs that are purely investigative, labs that are ad-hoc, and labs that are supremely funded and granted mandates to conduct their work by government entities. The spectrum of apparent capability is massive. It is not hard to see the parallel with sport. In any particular sport contested at the Olympic level, there are always favorites and underdogs. Teams with massive resources and those with meager resources. The outcome in competitive sport is often governed by the resources, but is more clearly linked, in my opinion, to the level of effort expended in the effort toward preparation. The parallel in failure analysis is often the identification of the critical link or piece of evidence that makes the others fall into focus. I have heard it being referred to as the ‘‘Perry Mason moment’’ by some, but we all know it when we recognize it. These moments are not a simple function of the budget. They are not a simple function of the technological capability or vintage of the laboratory where the inquiry is being conducted. They most certainly are not a simple function of the talent level of the investigator. The efficiency, accuracy, and precision of getting to that moment in the investigation of a failure, when it occurs, are not merely the products of a simple step-by-step process either. They still, in my opinion, revert back to the focus and preparation of the investigator(s). This returns to the broader competitive landscape in many ways. As ours is not a craft of cookbook execution, but a combination of many things, competition among us drives growth of the whole. Just like the technical aspects of any particular sport over a period of decades will shift, M. E. Stevenson (&) Engineering Systems Inc., 6190 Regency Parkway, Suite 316, Norcross, GA 30071, USA e-mail: mestevenson@esi-atl.com

The Life and Times of Perry Mason: The Evolution of Today's Legal Thrillers

NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2012 9 PHOTO: EVERETTCOLLECTION E rle Stanley Gardner lasted only one month in Indiana’s Valparaiso University law school. More interested in boxing than law, he organized illegal matches and later bragged he was suspended for punching a professor. Whatever happened, the school swiftly showed him the door. This didn’t augur well for a young man who had only completed high school and just entered his twenties. His story, however, took one of those twists stranger than his fiction . Gardner’s wealth and worldwide fame would come about because of his creation of fiction’s most famous lawyer, Perry Mason. Gardner was a tireless man who would accumulate seven pseudonyms and write over 150 novels, but first he studied law on his own while working as a typist. He passed the California Bar exam in 1911, about a year after leaving Valparaiso. He practiced for a while, getting whatever clients he could among the Chinese and Mexican immigrants, took a job as a tire salesman for a few years, then returned to the law, joining a firm in 1921. He began to write at night—thousands of words each night—banging away for two years before getting his first pulp publication . The floodgates opened. He became Black Mask’s most prolific author and appeared in many other magazines, both pulps and slicks. In 1932 he earned $20,000 writing short stories, no mean sum in the Depression and an enormous output in the heyday of a penny a word. Perry Mason’s debut came in 1933 with Gardner’s first novel, The Case of the Velvet Claws, and continued through eighty-nine titles, several of which were published after his death. The first screen appearance of Mason, starring Warren William, followed a year after his debut in The Case of the Howling Dog. Three others with William and then one TheLifeandTimesofPerryMason The Evolution of Today’s Legal Thrillers CRIME&MYSTERY INTERNATIONAL J. MADISON DAVIS Raymond Burr as Perry Mason in the CBS series that aired from 1957 to 1966. 10 WORLD LITERATURE TODAY with Ricardo Cortez followed. (Both of these actors share the distinction , coincidentally, of playing the Sam Spade character in pre-Bogart adaptations of The Maltese Falcon.) Warner Brothers played loose with Gardner’s characters. Perry Mason became a gourmet and a sophisticate, more like S. S. Van Dyne’s popular Philo Vance. Mason even marries his secretary Della Street in one of these movies, destroying the will-theywon ’t-they game Gardner played so successfully through years of the television series. Forawriterusuallymoreobsessed withpaychecks,Gardnerwasnothappy with Warner Brothers. He insisted on control of his characters in the future, a major reason CBS television’s Perry Mason (1957–68) was so successful. There was sufficient romantic possibility in Perry Mason that CBS also proposed a soap opera (which became The Edge of Night) based on the novels , but Gardner refused to let them use his characters’ names. He even exerted control over casting the television series. Raymond Burr generally played a “heavy,” like the murderer in RearWindow, a cop, or other such roles. He supposedly showed up to audition for Hamilton Burger, Mason’s nemesis, but Gardner took one look at Burr and immediately chose him as Mason, over network objections. Burr’s dark sex appeal attracted women viewers, widening the audience, and perhaps producing a significant shift in television to less pure heroes. To create Mason, Gardner had drawn from his own experiences at the inelegant end of the law. Mason never appeared in short stories, but one of Gardner’s continuing characters was attorney Ken Corning, who represents clients framed by corrupt police and officials. American crime fiction from the 1930s casts a skeptical eye on John Law, and police are uncommon as heroes until the postwar period. In 1937, incidentally, Gardner flipped the roles of his main characters by creating a series in which Doug Selby, district attorney, must outwit a crafty shyster. Mason, it must be said, is about 50 percent shyster himself, although he is always on the side of the innocent. As the novel series became more popular, Mason’s toughness softened to make him more palatable for serialization in the...

John A. Endler

John A. Endler

The Life and Times of Perry Mason: The Evolution of Today's Legal Thrillers

The Life and Times of Perry Mason: The Evolution of Today's Legal Thrillers

Coherent Labyrinths

This essay compares the presentation of evidence in classic detective fiction and in the author's forthcoming interactive digital ethnography. The basis of comparison is the graph, a concept familiar in the study of topology and artificial intelligence that can be used to model explorations of labyrinths and mazes of linked ideas. In the present study of a Perry Mason novel, the essay distinguishes three kinds of research explorations. These have close parallels to the way that users can conduct virtual fieldwork as they investigate audiovisual evidence in the multimedia ethnography, Maasai Interactive. In addition to discussing patterns in the ethnographic data, that application is designed in a way that facilitates users' discoveries of new and unanticipated ideas. [detective fiction, experimental ethnography, hypermedia, interactive media, Maasai, research methodology]

Leopold and Shinner

76 PEGGY SHINNER LEOPOLD AND SHINNER 1 J une 2, 1957: “Should Leopold Be Paroled?” The Chicago Sunday Tribune wanted your opinion. So did Nathan Leopold. Leopold, who, along with Richard Loeb, murdered Bobby Franks in 1924. It was dubbed a “thrill kill,” murder for kicks, “the crime of the century.” Leopold and Loeb: young, smart, wealthy, educated, Jewish, homosexual. At the time of the murder, they were nineteen and eighteen years old, respectively, students at the University of Chicago, and lovers . Loeb was killed in prison in 1936. Now, after thirty-three years, Nathan Leopold would soon be up for parole. “Expiation ? Atonement? Whether I have paid my debt to society? . . . Other people will have to decide.” Other people did. Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of the Perry Mason detective series, and author of the introduction to Leopold’s prison memoir, Life Plus 99 Years, wrote, “Here is a man who [is trying to] live down the tragic mistake of his youth. . . . Will society meet him halfway?” Carl Sandburg invited him to his home. Chicago Sun-Times columnist Irv Kupcinet (Kup) expressed confidence that he would make an “exemplary parolee.” And, noting that his support was not limited to people of influence, Leopold said, “Little John Smith and Mrs. Mary Jones . . . are writing me every day.” My mother was one of the Mrs. Mary Joneses. Harriet Shinner , née Alter. She wrote a letter in support of Leopold’s parole. She was thirty-three, married with two children, ages six and two. Paying monthly mortgage payments on a two-bedroom brick ranch in Peterson Park on the northwest side of Chicago. She wore housecoats, monitored her weight, smoked Marlboros, played mah-jongg. Worried about money. Read popular novels (Peyton Place made the New York Times best seller list for fiftynine weeks in 1956–57). She had fair skin, a sharp nose, melancholy eyes. She was easily hurt. Born in 1924, the same year 77 Shinner as the murder; Jewish, like both the victim and the perpetrators (although Loeb’s mother was Catholic; thus, according to some, Loeb was not Jewish); and her husband’s name, my father’s, was also Nathan. As far as I know, she wasn’t particularly civicminded ; she wasn’t a member of the League of Women Voters or a volunteer at a soup kitchen, nor did she write letters to the editor about local ordinances, like some women did. She wasn’t that kind of woman. Nor was she, as far as I know, the kind of woman who would watch the House Un-American Activities Committee (huac) hearings during the spring of 1951, while she was pregnant with me, but, as she later told me, she did. I know that my mother wrote to Nathan Leopold because I have the letter that Leopold wrote to her. It’s addressed to Mrs. Nathan Shinner, a common erasure of self my mother subscribed to, I suspect, without hesitation. When I was at Stateville , making every effort to win my release, I promised myself that, once freed, I would send personal replies to all who wrote me. In prison I was restricted in ways that made general correspondence impossible, and I longed for the time when I might show my gratitude to all who were friendly enough to write a stranger. It has taken a long time, I fear, to get around to this letter, but finally the day has come. Finally the day has come. Did she await his letter with as much anticipation as he apparently felt before he wrote it? The letter is postmarked Puerto Rico—where Leopold went to work as a medical technician— and stamped with a soaring airplane, whose skyward trajectory seems to highlight the eager flight toward its destination. Postage was seven cents; the name of the return addressee simply n l. The raised punch of the typewritten letters, pounded, it appears, with steady force, comes through to the back of the envelope. I found the letter in a drawer in the hutch in our dining room when I was snooping around for secrets. It was an idle kind of snooping, a listless looking around, propelled by a subterranean, undirected...

A Tale of Two Murders: The Manhattan Well Case as Source Material for Charles Brockden Brown's "The Trials of Arden"

A Tale of Two MurdersThe Manhattan Well Case as Source Material for Charles Brockden Brown's "The Trials of Arden" Scott Slawinski (bio) Political rivals Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and Brockholst Livingston strode into a New York City courtroom on March 31, 1800, determined to gain an acquittal for their client Levi Weeks. The defendant was accused of murdering his supposed fiancee by throwing her down a well, and though Weeks denied the accusation, the residents of New York had already tried and convicted him in the court of public opinion. Referred to variously over the years as the Manhattan Well Case, the Manhattan Well Tragedy, and the Manhattan Well Murder Mystery, The People v. Levi Weeks attracted a tremendous amount of local attention, arguably becoming the first trial in the United States to become a media circus, and it contained all the drama of an episode of Perry Mason. Nearly all the major players in the trial possessed or would shortly possess national reputations, seventy-five witnesses (twenty-four for the prosecution) testified in court, and the trial lasted some forty-four hours with only a single break during the first night. The trial took place in Federal Hall, the site of George Washington's inauguration. Spectators thronged the courthouse, and the overflow crowded the surrounding streets, all expecting at any time the pronouncement of a verdict of guilty. By the end, the state prosecutor was falling asleep from exhaustion, and Hamilton, Burr, and Livingston had done their best to raise reasonable doubt. Only the jury's verdict awaited. In another part of town, Charles Brockden Brown was working furiously to turn out yet another issue of the Monthly Magazine and American Review, the periodical his associates in the Friendly Club encouraged him to edit. The magazine had been alive for a year by the time the Weeks trial began, but Brown's early expectations for grand financial success had proven elusive. 1 His readers apparently did not pay for their subscriptions, [End Page 365] and by the end of the year, Brown would be announcing that the Monthly Magazine's run had come to a close for lack of funds. His associates in the Friendly Club compounded his problems, for when they encouraged him to undertake editing the literary periodical, they offered him the empty promise of multiple submissions to help Brown fill the magazine's pages. In place of these, Brown had to rely on the inconsistent number of publishable submissions he received and on his own pen. Sometimes he wound up writing all eighty pages of an issue, and since Brown was producing his novels concurrently with the magazine, this was truly the most prolific period of his career. 2 Though seemingly unrelated, Brown's editorship of the Monthly Magazine and the trial of Levi Weeks, I contend, intersect in the form of the short story "The Trials of Arden." Written by Brown and published in the July 1800 issue of his periodical—only three months after the trial—the story's plot contains striking similarities to the circumstances surrounding the Weeks trial and its outcome. Moreover, use of the Weeks trial is consistent with Brown's authorial method, and he also had personal connections with several of the trial's major players. I argue that even though "Trials of Arden" diverges from a strict adherence to the historical events of the Manhattan Well Tragedy, Brown used the case's circumstances as heretofore unacknowledged source material for his story. By making the events of his tale recognizable enough for his audience to recall the recent trial but manipulating the details so as to create an original piece of fiction, Brown presents his readers with a story line calculated to instruct them in the dangers of harboring preconceived notions of guilt and innocence and in the necessity of subduing mob violence and maintaining an orderly society governed by a sound justice system. Set in this context, the story anticipates Brown's increasing conservative Federalism but continues his self-proclaimed quest to be a "moral painter." 3 The Murder of Gulielma Sands On the night of Sunday, December 22, 1799, Gulielma Sands left her Manhattan boarding house...

The Impact of Popular Culture on American Perceptions of the Courts

After a brief introduction defining popular culture as the commodities and experiences produced by the culture industry for mass audiences, this essay explores the impact of court-related popular culture on what Americans think of and expect from their courts. The Perry Mason effect from an earlier era and the CSI effect from the present are noted, as is scholarly work by Michael Asimow, Philip T. Dunwoody, Kimberlianne Podlas, Victoria S. Salzmann, and others. The essay concludes with suggestions for what might be done in the courthouse, the community, and the family room to control the impact of court-related popular culture on American legal consciousness.

Popular Culture and the American Adversarial Ideology

The adversary system is the nearly unquestioned ideology that animates civil and criminal justice in the U.S. Under the adversary system, lawyers control the trial. Judge have little to do except rule on legal issues and evidentiary objections and pound their gavels. The objective of the adversary system is to provide procedural justice and to find The goal is not to provide substantive justice or to discover the real truth about what happened. This paper asks why the U.S. is committed to the adversary ideology. To some extent the commitment arises out of ignorance of alternatives and reliance on tradition. It also derives from broadly shared commitment to individual autonomy and laissez faire capitalism. Distrust of judges and other bureaucrats is certainly a major factor. Often, distrust of American judges is entirely warranted. This paper suggests an additional reason for our commitment to the adversarial ideology: constant exposure to popular culture models. To some degree, we all sit at the feet of our master trial practice teacher, the immortal Perry Mason. Mason trained us to believe that only lawyer cross-examination could discover the truth. Countless TV series and films have reinforced this message. The model requires lawyers to be in control and judges to get out of the way. A lifetime of pop culture conditioning in the glories of the adversary system makes it impossible for most Americans to consider alternatives.

Lawyer Fiction in the Saturday Evening Post: Ephraim Tutt, Perry Mason, and Middle-Class Expectations

Lawyer Fiction in the Saturday Evening Post: Ephraim Tutt, Perry Mason, and Middle-Class Expectations

Lawyer Fiction in the Saturday Evening Post: Ephraim Tutt, Perry Mason, and Middle-Class Expectations

Part of the Law Commons Publication Information Published as David Ray Papke, Lawyer Fiction in the Saturday Evening Post: Ephraim Tutt, Perry Mason, and Middle-Class Expectations, 13 Cardozo Stud. L. & Literature 207 (2001). © 2001 by the Cardozo School of Law. Copying and permissions notice: Authorization to copy this content beyond fair use (as specified in Sections 107 and 108 of the U. S. Copyright Law) for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by the Regents of the University of California on behalf of the Cardozo School of Law for libraries and other users, provided that they are registered with and pay the specified fee via Rightslink® on Caliber (http://legacy.ucpress.net/) or directly with the Copyright Clearance Center, http://www.copyright.com.

From Nick Carter to Perry Mason: A Historical Perspective on the American Media Presence in Sweden

From Nick Carter to Perry Mason: A Historical Perspective on the American Media Presence in Sweden

The Detective in American fiction, film, and television

Preface Raymond Chandler and American Detective Fiction Anne Riordan: Raymond Chandler's Forgotten Heroine by David W. Madden Order, Error, and the Novels of Raymond Chandler by Steven Weisenburger Raymond Chandler's Pencil by James O. Tate Film in Fiction: Real and the Reel in Elmore Leonard by George Grella Aggravating the Reader: Harlem Detective Novels of Chester Himes by Gary P. Storhoff Murdering Traditional Assumptions: Jewish-American Mystery by Diana Arbin Ben-Merre Gender (De)Mystified: Resistance and Recuperation in Hard-Boiled Female Detective Fiction by Timothy Shuker-Haines and Martha M. Umphrey Detective in Film and Television Bending the Bow: Verdict (1946) and the Hollywood Victorian Detective by Meri-Jane Rochelson The Injustice of It All: Polanski's Revision of the Private Eye Genre in Chinatown by James Maxfield Miller's Crossing: Poetics of Dashiell Hammett by Katherine M. Restaino Very Simplicity of the Thing: Edgar Allan Poe and the Murders He Wrote by Jan Whitt Done to Death?: Formula and Variation in Perry Mason by J. Dennis Bounds Index