The smoking Chimney
Erle Stanley Gardner (1889-1970) is the master of American mystery
fiction. A civil rights lawyer, his
mysteries contain intricate, ever-twisting
plots. Challenging and full of surprises, these are whodunits in the best
tradition. He wrote 146 books, 85 of which feature Perry Mason. The
fictional attorney became the basis of a number of television series
(reputedly 271 episodes), and achieved an enviable record for winning his
cases. Erle Stanley Gardner has an amazing sales record: at the height of
his popularity in the mid-1960s he was selling an average of 26,000 copies
of his novels a day, making him one of the world's best selling author's,
easily outstripping at the time Agatha Christie and Barbara Cartland
combined. Born in Malden, Massachusetts, Gardner went on to attend Law
School in Indiana, but this only lasted for around a month, being suspended
because of various distractions to his studies, especially boxing. He moved
to California and became a self-taught attorney before opening his own law
office. However, being bored with this he ended up working in sales for five
years. Returning to the law in 1921, he created another law firm, but again
was not really enthusiastic, other than when acting as a trial lawyer. Writing
was his great passion and eventually he gave up the law completely to
pursue a full time writing career. In this he was prodigious, setting himself a
target of 66,000 words per week. His output under various pseudonyms, as
well as his own, went wider than Perry Mason and also extended to non-
fiction. He became an expert on the early Mexican exploitation of
California. In later life, law did play a significant part in his life once again.
With friends, he set up what they termed 'The Court of Last Resort', aimed
at investigating and attempting to reverse what they perceived as
miscarriages of justice because of poor legal representation, or evidential
problems. Gardner himself once wrote: 'I want to make my hero a fighter,
not by having him be ruthless
to women and underlings, but by creating a
character who, with infinite patience jockeys his enemies into a position
where he can deliver one good knockout punch.'
"The Case of the Smoking Chimney", first published in 1943, was the
second - and, thankfully, final - entry in Erle Stanley Gardner's short-lived
attempt at putting together a series of detective stories about grandfatherly
free spirit, Gramps Wiggins. Neither this book nor its predecessor, "The
Case of the Turning Tide" (1941), give any indication that posterity missed
out on great things by his bringing this series to a quick end.
The second book is the better of the two, but is still very slack, much too
loose in construction and in the writing to hold its own in comparison to
Gardner's two other great series, about Perry Mason, and Donald
Lam/Bertha Cool (written under the pseudonym A.A. Fair).
A crafty businessman arrives
incognito in a small town, where he takes up
residence at a cabin and - under another identity - starts to acquire
property, apparently in an attempt to hoodwink the town's property owners.
When he is found dead in the mountain retreat there is no shortage of
suspects with excellent motives. Gramps Wiggins's granddaughter is
married to the local district attorney, giving him an inside track to the
physical evidence and to the misguided interpretation of that evidence by
the authorities.
This book is something of an anomaly. The clues are good - puzzling, yet
not so obscure that it is impossible to interpret them correctly and piece
them together into the right conclusions. The mystery is good, and its
solution fairly satisfying. Yet the book itself is pretty awful. It is basically
short story material that has
been expanded to novel length, and in doing
so, dissipating tension, focus, and the reader's interest
Gardner tries hard, but in the end can't quite convince us that anybody
could find Gramps Wiggins as adorable as the granddaughter and her
husband apparently do.
Their tolerance of him is a contrivance, a manipulation of the characters
authentic feelings to preserve the structure of the story that Gardner needs
to impose. I suppose that the Gramps Wiggins character can be thought of
as Gardner's abortive attempt at creating an amateur detective who is more
adept and insightful than the pros by virtue of his
no-nonsense
understanding of human nature, much like Agatha Christie's highly
successful Miss Jane Marple. On that level the character - and the two
books - have to be judged as failures.
Gardner was a writer of limited skills, and was certainly a poor creator of
three-dimensional characters. Gramps Wiggins is as an insufferable bore
with a terminal
case of cutesy, that, unfortunately, doesn't reach the
terminal stage nearly fast enough to suit me.
