The Case of the Moth-Eaten Mink

This may be the only episode in which Lieutenant Tragg, who is usually so genial and courtly, loses his cool and uses a degrading insult to refer to another person. He calls someone a "fink", and he puts more fury and hatred into the word than actors today put into much stronger four-letter (or longer) words.

And then he delivers one of the most satisfying funny lines on any screen. The bad-guy has been shot but not mortally. Tragg tells Perry "You'd better go get an ambulance," and as Perry goes to obey, Tragg adds, sotto-voce: "Don't -- uh -- hurry."

CotMEM goes way beyond the usual courtroom dramatics and theatrics we normally associate with the show, especially in the way Mason solves the case. I like this episode a lot because we get to see the true S1 tension that exists between Tragg and Mason and yet Tragg does the right thing in the end - Tragg becomes somewhat more buffoonish as the seasons unfold but here in the first season he goes toe-to-toe with Mason in grand fashion - we get to see more of the close relationship between Drake and Mason as well and really see Mason's relationship with Della - over the years there has been lots of talk of a gay subtext to the characters and one can certainly sense that in this episode in particular (pinky rings anyone?) - Della certainly comes off as knowing she'll never be able to be more than Mason's friend and confidante, and their relationship will never be anything more than a platonic closeness - as if she knows something but can't tell the audience - this episode comes across as much more 'complicated' than the preceding eps and the cast is uniformly quite good, especially Than Wyenn as Hoxie and Douglas Kennedy as Jaffrey and the scene with Mason, Drake and Roxanne Arlen as Mae is priceless - one of Hopper's best in the series (as is his interrogation by Jaffrey and Tragg in the hotel room later) - but what's with the weird haircuts? Although aired in '57 it looks like it carries a 1958 date - maybe there was a break in the shooting and Burr and Hopper went to the barber shop in their spare time - a very enjoyable episode with much more tension than we normally expect from the show

This episode which we learned was actually taken from an Erle Stanley Gardner novel has a good deal more action to it than a lot of the Mason TV episodes. While Perry Mason and Della Street are having what looks like a real good dinner at Robert Osterloh's restaurant one of the servers catches sight of someone and abruptly runs out of the restaurant with shots being fired after here into the street where she's nearly run down in traffic.

The waitress Kay Faylen is someone Osterloh has taken a personal interest in and he pays his friend Raymond Burr a thousand dollar retainer. As Burr correctly surmises Osterloh is in a jackpot with Faylen involving a several month old cop killing. Faylen left behind a moth eaten mink coat that has a pawn ticket with a clue to said cop killing.

Ray Collins and fellow cop Douglas Kennedy are pretty ruthless in investigating this and Burr gets right into the investigation of his own with William Hopper far more than the normal episode.

The killer is pretty obvious here, but the unmasking is not in the usual venue of a trial. A twist on the Perry Mason paradigm.

This is a very unusual episode of Perry Mason. While eating a steak dinner at a local restaurant, Perry and Della are approached by the restaurant's owner, Morrey. One of his waitresses has just been run down by a car in the street, and Morrey for some reason is very concerned about the presence, in her locker, of a mink coat. He begs Perry to take the coat and also begs Mason to represent him. Perry cannot figure out why a situation that would at most get his restaurant some negative publicity would require the services of an attorney.

But then the waitress disappears from the hospital bandages and all as does Morrie. And a pawn ticket is found in a pocket of the mink coat. The ticket redeems a gun which was used to shoot a L. A. cop several months ago. Now Lt. Tragg is really breathing down Mason's neck because he thinks he is knowingly covering for a cop killer, and Perry thinks that maybe he has been set up and had by his client to take the fall in all of this.

Without getting into too many details, the big reveal comes not in a courtroom confession this week, but in a hail of bullets in Perry's office, with veteran Tragg showing he still has some Dirty Harry in him in spite of the snow on the roof.

The atmosphere is very much like the film noirs of the time, which was normally not the ambience of an episode of Perry Mason. You have plenty of men with hats talking tough and gangsters hanging about both dead and alive with cryptic messages written in lipstick on the bottom of tables in seedy hotel rooms.

This episode of Perry Mason was actually filmed in 1956, about a year before the series started. Thus you may notice a particularly thin Raymond Burr with a much more closely cropped head of hair than he has even in the series' actual premiere.

This is a very good episode among other great episodes in Season 1. Perry took great interest in helping his friend with a fur coat and was fascinated with the pawn ticket. The cast was very good and as others have noted the film noir aspect was played out through-out the episode. Della was intentionally kept away from some of the action when Perry and Paul Drake went to the hotel. I was too young to watch Perry Mason when it was on television and never saw the re-runs either, however watching them in 2019 impresses me most with the quality of the character actors appearing in each episodes casts. This was no exception.