The Case of the Moth-Eaten Mink

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.

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.

Got to see this tonight on MeTv. A huge fan of "Noir", This is Perry, and Paul and Della at these best. And May (wiggle girl) ain't bad either ! :-)

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.

Actually, this was the very first episode filmed for the famed television series, filmed in 1956. This information was procured on the back cover of a paperback edition of this Perry Mason novel by Erle Stanley Gardner. Since this was filmed a year before the series actually went on the air, this may account for the differences in hair styles on Raymond Burr and William Hopper. Also, I believe it is the only episode where Lieutenant Tragg (played by veteran actor Ray Collins) shoots someone in Perry Mason's office, in order to save the attorney's life. Anyway, since it is an episode based on one of the best Perry Mason novels, it ranks (in my opinion) as one of the top 10 out of the 271 original Perry Mason television episodes!