The Case of the Moth-Eaten Mink

A really good forties type whodunnit. A tough guy owns a restaurant and gets involved with a pretty girl waitress. Something is wrong. The waitress is chased and shot at, ending in the hospital. This leads to some neat detective work with the police out there doing their thing. Tragg is really significant in this one. One thing i noticed. Burger's objections are just about always overruled.

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 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.

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 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."