The Case of the Borrowed Brunette: A Perry Mason Mystery (An American Mystery Classic)
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Publisher Description
A classified ad finds Perry Mason's client drawn into a murder plot, and only the sleuthing attorney can save her.
When Perry Mason stumbles upon a classified ad for a brown haired woman with very specific physical attributes, he takes note of the seemingly suspicious circumstances surrounding the job posting. Then the woman hired for the job gets in touch, describing the strange requests of her new employer—who pays her and her chaperone to stay inside an apartment and answer to another woman’s name—and Mason knows there’s a more knotted plot at play. But by the time he works out the first mystery, a second, with murder, is just getting started, and that’s only the first twist that awaits him as he endeavors to prove the innocence of “the borrowed brunette.”
Together with his crime solving team of Paul Drake and Della Street, Mason winds his way through one of the most puzzling cases of his career, involving separated ex-lovers, a tangled series of impersonations, and scores of private detectives. In order to clear his client of the charges, though, he’ll risk getting a few himself, before, in a final courtroom scene, breaking the case apart to the judge’s satisfaction.
Reissued for the first time in thirty years, The Case of the Borrowed Brunette is one of the most beloved whodunnits featuring the iconic Perry Mason character, inspiration for multiple hit television series bearing his name.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A chance sighting of an oddity—eight look-alike brunettes, all wearing dark clothes and a fur around their necks, standing on consecutive corners of the same street—involves legendary L.A. defense attorney Perry Mason in one of Gardner's cleverest puzzles. Mason approaches one of the women, Cora Felton, who says she's there in response to a newspaper ad offering lucrative employment for a woman age 23 to 25 with certain physical measurements. The successful applicant would have "colorful, adventurous work" for up to six months with a choice of chaperone. In the end, Cora's roommate, Eva Martell, is selected, and she learns she's to stay inside an apartment and pretend she's the real resident of the rooms, Helen Reedley. Eva's chaperone, the roommates' honorary aunt Adelle Winters, fears the bizarre directions mean that Helen has been killed. Mason intervenes to protect Eva and Adelle from any legal difficulties from going along with the assignment, which leads to a homicide. Gardner (1889–1970) keeps credible twists coming en route to a satisfying reveal. First published in 1946, this worthy addition to the American Mystery Classics series is a nice homage to the Conan Doyle Holmes story "The Red-Headed League."
