I Dreamed I Married Perry Mason, by Susan Kandel

This is the first in a series of five mystery novels featuring the beguilingly named Cece Caruso. Cece is a 39-year-old resident of Los Angeles, a biographer of classic crime writers and an aficionado of vintage fashion. Now that’s a pie full of juicy plums if ever there was one. And there are more.

The book, which was published in 2004, is crammed with information about the history of California, art, architectural and sartorial styles, social observations about life in West Hollywood, and, of course, a plethora of facts about Erle Stanley Gardner (1889-1970), the lawyer and author who is best known for creating the character of Perry Mason. The narrative is first-person and the tone is bright and sassy as Cece wisecracks her way through the unravelling of a case involving a decades-old crime which has life-and-death implications for present-day characters.

Cece’s biography of Gardner is not going well and she is experiencing something of a writer’s block. It has to be said that this is not a totally convincing plot device, given the extent of fascinating facts she presents about Gardner’s life and work, more than enough to sustain such a book.

She is looking for a way of ‘humanising’ her subject, which leads her to focus on Gardner’s creation of The Court of Last Resort. The purpose of this project was to gain justice for prisoners who had been wrongly convicted of capital offences. Through a series of articles for Argosy magazine, Gardner presented the public, the Court of the title, with the evidence he had uncovered.

In the course of her research, Cece examines the so-called ‘heartbreak files’ of prisoners’ letters to Gardner asking for his help, and comes across one which has slipped through the net. In 1958, a man convicted of killing his wife wrote to Gardner proclaiming his innocence and asking him to find the real perpetrator. Gardner had noted that the letter should be followed up, but this never happened.

So, as you do, Cece decides that she will investigate this case as a route to putting a human face on the subject of her biographer. Hmm. Does it, to reflect the legal ambience, stand up in court? Probably not. Does it matter? Probably not.

Even as Cece runs this idea past her best friend Lael, the narrative is punctuated with reference to Lael’s former husband’s doomed feng shui business and his flight back to Dusseldorf to escape the IRS. We know from the start that the intricacies of the case, which involves oil fields and leases and tidelands and double-crossing by living people with much to lose should the truth about the past emerge, provide a hook on which to hang a cast of entertaining characters and a series of engaging observations and encounters.

The scattergun approach and lack of focus are a small price to pay for an enjoyable romp through a colourful landscape. It is well worth pausing to savour, for example, the description of buying groceries at Gelson’s on Santa Monica Boulevard.

This is a diverting evocation of shopping as theatre with its references to the Rolls-Royce-driving customer base in search of a single luxury branded avocado or lemon. The Thursday public performance of a boy in white apron and chef’s toque cutting up and slicing freshly cooked meats to order draws a regular audience of screenwriters and showgirls and dog owners.

On a more cerebral note, we are drawn into a discussion of Richard Dadd, the fascinating and deeply disturbed Victorian painter of fairies and other supernatural beings, or we pause for history of the Ojai Valley or the building of mansions in Montecito.

Details of Cece’s background and family add even more texture to the narrative. Her daughter Annie’s marital complications provide a running thread. Her Italian brothers became cops, just like their father, but the route taken by our heroine to her involvement with crime is far less predictable.

Her entry into the public eye is as beauty pageant winner Miss Asbury Park, New Jersey. However, a future in this world was not to be, and Cece is introduced to more intellectual activities by the professor from whom she is now divorced, who happens to be the world’s second-most-renowned James Fennimore Cooper scholar. (That ‘second’ carries a lot of weight.)

The pupil becomes master. Precipitated into marriage with baby Annie on the way, Cece does research for her hubbie’s lectures in Genre Fiction. While reading up on police procedurals she rattles off a hundred pages on Ed McBain, no problem, and her first book is published shortly after. Well, that’s what happens when you open your child bride’s eyes to deconstructionism and feminist theory. The professor’s misogynistic nature has been revealed, and Cece dumps him.

Surprisingly, I found the fashion theme to be the least successful. Cece’s eclectic taste takes us through a dizzying array of names and fashions, but she doesn’t establish a sense of her own style identity. One day she wears a powder-blue 1940s halter dress with matching patent-leather ankle straps, and on another, she buys a cherry-red silk chiffon dress with bell sleeves and a keyhole neckline, designed by the wondrous Ossie Clark. Now call me picky, but there is no consistency here. The former is dressing up, playacting. The latter must be wish fulfilment. Cece refers in passing to her height and weight, and believe me, she is not a typical Ossie girl. Have you seen the width of his sleeves, even?

Then, immediately after, she expresses her longing for a wrap-around denim dress with oversize patch pockets called a Popover. Classic and collectable no doubt, but surely from a historian’s point of view rather than something a person who wears Ossie Clark would actually put on? In keeping with the vintage fashion element, names such as Chanel, Schaperelli, Yves St Laurent, Nina Ricci, Oscar de la Renta sprinkle the pages, but without any real sense of personal engagement.

However, the clothes theme offers some delights. What a world Cece inhabits, where her work involves considering ‘the sociosexual implications of Della Street’s (Perry Mason’s secretary) seamed stockings’, where someone admiring her skirt says ‘I love that it’s Pucci but not jersey’, and where a fashion student comments on Cece’s outfit, ‘You’re making me think more broadly about synthetics.’