A Treasure Trove For Perry Mason Fans

In every person’s young years there is a phase in which he or she is obsessed with a particular genre of literature. Mystery and Suspense were my obsession during those callow years.  The regular diet was made up of the likes of Earl Stanley Gardner (remember Perry Mason?), James Hadley Chase, and Agatha Christie.  It was out of curiosity and nostalgia that I was searching the net for electronic versions of the Perry Mason mysteries, and I stumbled upon in this website a treasure trove for those who love these mysteries. Here is the link: http://bpsc.bih.nic.in/Books.htm.  You will find almost all of Earle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason books there in neatly paginated electronic format. 

The website belongs Bihar Public Service Commission (BPSC). It is a greater mystery than the ones solved by Perry Mason that these electronic books should appear in a staid government website in India! But there it is. Free. 

I am still a great fan of mystery and suspense, though I believe I have outgrown the pulp variety. Some of the greatest writers in world literature have contributed to this genre of fiction. The list includes the greatest novelist of all time Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the world’s foremost semiotician Umberto Eco, and the genre-hopping omniscient Isaac Asimov. But most of the stories in this genre were written by the writers of pulp, who sold their stories for compensation by the count of words. Over the years some of their works, especially those now recognized as classic noir fiction, have passed into the heritage of world literature.

Earl Stanley Gardner

Middle-brow literature that made nods to some pseudo-philosophy was always popular with the campus crowd of 60s-80s.  The most prominent examples that come to mind are Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics, Robert Heinlein’s Stranger In a Strange Land, Collin Wilson’s Outsider, and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. To be certified as ‘well-read’ was almost a rite of passage for those aspiring to be counted among the elite.  Being ‘well read’ meant you have to be up-to-date with the ‘latest’ popular fiction in English. The college going teens’ ambitious reading experience traced a familiar pattern. It started with the obsessive consumption of popular paperbacks, which included the mysteries of Earl Stanley Gardner, Agatha Christie, the pseudo-American noir fiction of James Hadley Chase, and then the thrillers of the likes of Alastair Maclean, Robert Ludlum, or Frederick Forsyth. Romance that the girls consumed by truckloads (such as the sado-masochist fantasies of Barbara Cartland, and the syndicated outputs from Mills & Boon, Harlequin and Silhouette) and horror a la Stephen King, were indulged in but not easily admitted to lest one should be accused of having poor taste. A dash of P G Wodehouse rounded up the whole experience. 

JH Chase (RLB Raymond)

The aspirant who wanted to enter the elite club of the ‘well-read intellectuals’ had to complete the final blood ceremony by determinedly plodding through the Ayn Rand toms, the Fountainhead and the Atlas Shrugged.  

Most people gave up reading fiction once they enter the serious business of life, and live out their years missing the pleasure of real Literature. Some of them turn to ‘serious’ reading, ‘serious’ here meaning the ‘self improvement’ books whose dry as gravel contents and bullet points (these books have a predilection for the bullets) are the endless regurgitations of old Samuel Smiles.

I am not arguing that the above authors and their works do not represent good literature. I leave it to the learned critics. By the way, re-reading some of these authors recently, I now realize that the lowly-rated but the then most popular James Hadley Chase (real name René Lodge Brabazon Raymond), whose hallmark was simplicity, the short sentence, was a far better writer than the rest including the verbose misanthrope Ayn Rand.  If any proof of the popularity of Chase in the sub-continent is required, consider this: the most widely read English daily in South Asia, the Times of India, even deigned to write an editorial paying homage to this foreign writer when he died in 1985, normally a rare honor reserved for a few Nobel prize winners!

It was the nostalgia about those times that prompted me to search for the electronic versions of the Perry Mason books. The above BPSC website has it all, neatly laid out for you. 

If you are an aficionado of these mysteries, enjoy it while you can (before some bureaucrat takes it down)!