The Case of the Wooden Nickels

Won 't recount the plot discussed elsewhere except that Paul Drake was entrusted with a rare coin someone murdered to possess. So, in a nightspot, he mistakenly gives the coin to a cigarette girl before retrieving it. Then Perry has the coin examined by an expert who the viewer but not Perry knows would move heaven-and-earth to secure.

You description of the fugio coin is wrong!!! You wrote that there's no such coin and that you couldn't find it anywhere!!! If you look up "fugio coin" on wikipedia, you would find that it DOES EXIST!!! In 1787, George Washington designed the coin!!! Wikipedia has the whole story behind the coins!!! So, you should do better research before you write your comments about the shows you're watching!!!

A very rare coin is at the center of this tale. It is listed at 50,000 dollars and is desired by a famous collector. Enter a man who can make near perfect copies of collectible coins. The story fizzles at the end, however.

This episode of Perry Mason finds Raymond Burr defending Phyllis Love on a charge of murdering Jack Betts. Betts was both courting her and blackmailing her uncle Will Kulava over making counterfeit coins.

All kinds of people, coin collectors are involved here with Kulava and there's a real rogue's gallery of suspects in the cast.

Even if this wasn't a Perry Mason story it is a given that only innocent clients get his services, I'd be hard pressed to believe mousy Phyllis Love could murder anybody. William Talman looks like a real bully in prosecuting her.

The perpetrator who is a real smooth article tried to pull something on the witness stand. Foolish man. You have to see what he tries.

Perhaps it's because I collected coins myself when I was a kid, or having read Sherlock Holmes stories so many times, but this one gave the viewer JUST ENOUGH info to lead him/her to deduce the ending, yet have to solve the puzzle how all the clues fit together. Reminds me more of an Ellery Queen episode from ten years later. (Had Mason broken the fourth wall, turned to the camera and said "Think you got it solved? - let's find out!" I wouldn't have been surprised.) If that's not enough - Berry Kroeger is in it, too! - he of the slimy, lugubrious manner and the face perpetually drenched in sweat. Why he was not in the Indiana Jones movies is beyond me. He's one of the best Perry Mason bad guys ever; whenever he appears, you just KNOW he's in some scheme up to his eyebrows.

I was led away from my original deduction a few times; this show had more twists, turns, and dead ends than an Iowa corn maze. Far from being a disappointment at the end, the way it fell together at the end was quite well done. Let's just say that, had the guilty party not been betrayed by one close to said party, his or her plan would have been airtight.

The only thing that made me laugh was the reference to a gold Fugio cent. No such gold coin exists, now or ever. If you've ever seen a gold dollar coin (about the size of a dime), imagine a coin one-one hundredth of that size..it'd be a waste of time and specie to make them!