Bird in the Hand - Erle Stanley Gardner

Story: Bird in the Hand

Author: Erle Stanley Gardner

Source: The Adventures of Lester Leith

Theme for the Month: Locked Room or Impossible Crime Stories

Erle Stanley Gardner is not a name that we normally associate with locked room mysteries but he has four such stories to his credit as per Robert Adey’s Locked room bibliography. 2 out those 4 feature Lester Leith, the Robin Hood of detectives who solved baffling mysteries in order to crack down on cracksmen. Instead of robbing the rich to help the poor, Lester robbed the crooks “of their ill-gotten spoils” and gave the proceeds to deserving charities – less “20 percent for costs of collection.” Gardner wrote around 75 stories featuring Lester Leith and 5 of these novelettes are collected in this volume including the 2 locked-room or impossible crime stories. The locked room puzzle of “The Exact Opposite” was featured in the locked room anthology ‘Tantalizing Locked Room Mysteries’ and here is the second one.

An international gem thief has smuggled in a rich booty inside a big trunk with a secret compartment. He clears the customs and enters a very reputed hotel where each guest’s luggage is given a tag and is verified while it’s checked out. One without a tag can’t go out the hotel and the one with the tag has to verified and cleared before checkout. The gem thief is followed in by the police a few minutes later to arrest him but he is found dead inside a locked room (quickly explained - the murderer got in through the fire escape) with his big trunk missing! The trunk is so big that it couldn’t have been taken out of the window, it’s not inside the room and it’s not found in any of the rooms or for that matter in any part of the hotel. And it’s not of the type which could be dismantled and taken away.

The police spy who is undercover (to catch Lester red handed) as a valet to Lester Leith requests him to apply his mind and provide an ‘academic’ solution as he has done before on numerous occasions. Lester’s mode of operation generally is to device a con job in such a way that it provides both a solution to the case and pulls a fast on the police in helping himself to a part of the booty! The scam in this case is not only extremely elaborate but it is diabolic and wickedly funny. He goes in for the combination of a kleptomaniac & bloodhound-canary. What in heaven’s name is a bloodhound-canary (BC) one might ask. Here is what Lester gives as an answer: “The chief trait of BC is that it can trail things through the air – other birds, or airplanes, or falling bodies – anything that goes through the air. That’s due to its wonderful ability to recognize scents. We have canine bloodhounds that trail things across the ground. The rare BC does the same thing in the air a bloodhound does on the ground.”

With these two elements to work as his gargantuan con, he traps the murderer and identifies the invisible location of the trunk. It doesn’t end there – there is another impossible disappearance to contend for - just before the police is about to apprehend both the criminal and the booty, Lester has the chance to pilfer some of the best gems and it disappears as smoothly as the trunk had in the previous instance. Though the police know very well that some of the gems have been robbed right under their noses, no amount of search (including x-raying the canary!) yields them the goods and they have to let him go! The reader is in for a tremendous joy ride in this wonderfully constructed story.

The Case of the Irate Witness - Erle Stanley Gardner

Story: The Case of the Irate Witness

Author: Erle Stanley Gardner

Source: The Case of the Irate Witness and Other Stories

Story Number: 23

One of the most productive authors, his creation Perry Mason outshines all the other three dozen characters that Erle Stanley Gardner created. He has contributed nearly 200 short stories to various pulp magazines but interestingly, wrote only 3 short stories (Crimson Kiss & Crying Swallow being novellas) featuring Perry Mason.

This story has all the typical characteristics of a Perry Mason novel minus the murder – Mason defending a client whom everybody thinks is guilty, district attorney who thinks he is gone lick the defense attorney for a change, antagonizing antics and a court room climax.

Somebody has broken into the Jebson Commercial Company vault to steal the 100,000 twice-a-month payroll, which had been brought up from a bank the previous day. The company has the habit of recording the numbers of all the 20 dollar bills from each payroll as soon they get the money from the bank and one such was made and is safely locked up in a safe for this payroll as well. Frank Bernal, the manager of the company reveals to the police that a man who had a criminal record was fired from his job the previous day. He is found and arrested when two twenty dollar bills from the robbed payroll are found in his possession. He claims that those 2 bills were given to him by the company accountant Ralph in front of the manager.

The irate witness turns out to be George Addey, owner of the garbage collecting business, who stores his money in garbage bins. Mason subpoenas Addey to appear in court with all the 20 dollar bills which he has received in the last one month. He shows that Addey could equally have been guilty as the numbers on some of his 20 dollar bills(30 days old) matches the list of numbers from the bills(tabulated a day before) of the robbed payroll. Mason quickly explains how this was possible by revealing the trick used and in the process identifies the culprit and points out that the clues were all there to figure out the guilty party if one just believed that the defendant was speaking the truth!