"This Arlington situation is getting a little complicated."
-- Perry Mason in The Case of the Careless Cupid (William Morrow, 1968)
The Case of the Careless Cupid was the penultimate Perry Mason novel, published in 1968, two years before Gardner's death and two years after the Raymond Burr TV series ended its nine-year run. The Perry Mason of the novels is not quite the same as the TV character; in the novels he is more willing to do the slightly illegal and slightly unethical in the service of his client. In The Case of the Careless Cupid Mason sometimes misrepresents who he is in order to keep his client out of the hands of the police. Mason is even a bit testy and tempted to be violent.
"If I had hit him I'd probably have regretted it for a year."
"But since you didn't?" she asked.
"I'll regret it as long as I live," Mason snapped.
Mason's relationship with secretary Della Street was as close as he came to intimacy and there was always a sexual tension in the novels that was never resolved. The six movies Warner Brothers made in the thirties were somewhat different --though they followed the novels closely in plot -- with Mason and Street getting married in The Case of the Velvet Claws (1936, directed by William Clemens). Warren William was the star of four of the films and he was more human and more complex than either the Mason of the novels or Raymond Burr of the TV series.
The Case of the Careless Cupid and all the other Perry Mason novels have a plot as rigid in its own way as Japanese Noh drama, with Perry's client being tried for murder and Perry, with the help of Della Street and investigator Paul Drake, finding the true killer. What makes the novels enjoyable is the complexity of each case, the characters involved and Mason's legal maneuvering. In The Case of the Careless Cupid it is all about the struggle of a family over an inheritance and the murder of a man by poisoning the crab salad with Featherfirm, usually used to secure feathers on stuffed and mounted birds.
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