The Case of the Moth-Eaten Mink

This is an episode taken from Erle Stanley Garner novel by the same name, it was also redone in the ninth season with the title of 'The Case of the Sausalito Sunrise'.

It begins when Perry and Della are out to eat at a place that is owned by Morey Allen. While waiting on their food one of the waitresses, Dixie Dayton, sees a man enter the restaurant and becomes scared. She runs out into the street and is hit by a car. But before being hit, two shots ring out from an alley in the waitress's direction. Someone wants the waitress dead.

When Perry finds a pawn ticket in the mink coat of the injured waitress, it starts a journey that will find people dead and a link to a gun that killed a cop over a year ago. Before long we learn that Dixie Dayton and Morey Allen are involved up to their eyeballs in a crime ring that are run by some rough dudes that will eliminate everyone in their way. And now Morey Allen and Dixie Dayton has been set up on a charge of murder that will also lead to the charges of murder of the police officer. Perry will defend both people for the charges leveled by Hamilton Burger's office.

There are some good lines by Lt Tragg against Perry in this show but it will be the team-up of the two that will lead to finding the true murderer and bring this case to a close. In the novel, Lt Tragg shoots and kills the murderer but in this TV show he just wounds the man before telling Perry to call an ambulance but "don't hurry".

The novel was one of the best reads- and it played out well when it went to the small screen. A very well done show that was entertaining to the end.

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 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.

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 ! :-)

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