It seems I've been on an Erle Stanley Gardner roll recently... I read The Case of the Careless Kitten earlier in the month (August), then last week I read my first Doug Selby mystery - and my first 5-star ESG - The D.A. Holds a Candle. Now I'm back to Perry Mason in what is his 8th outing. Overall I enjoyed this one - it took me only two days to read. The whole sleepwalking aspect of it was really interesting - Gardner is able to really make you wonder whether or not defendant Peter Kent is actually guilty. Well, since Gardner promised that none of Mason's clients would ever be guilty, I guess there's really no wondering there, but still it creates the effect. What you also get is a sort of country-house mystery - them murder taking place in a Hollywood hacienda with some of the characters in the house, and others outside the house with good alibis. This is a much more action-packed Mason, with lots of non-murder threads beginning in the first couple of chapters, like a partnership dispute and a divorce from an alimony hound. Of course all these things dovetail as Perry runs back and forth to deal with these problems in ways that are not always completely ethical. I will say that the mystery was actually pretty well-clued - I picked up on some things, and I started to go down the thread which would have led me to the murderer, but I still didn't get it. I would say that this is in the top half of the four Perry Masons I've read so far - the other top-half one being Careless Kitten. I somehow feel it won't be long before I revisit Mr. Gardner.

I was wrong about who done it. That was a lot of new info in the last few pages, but it fit in with the rest of the story beautifully.

A wife who is a professional gold-digger, a business partner who wants to cheat him out of the whole company, and a niece who apparently cares too much about her uncle........and Mason puts all his trust in his clients.
We meet Hamilton Burger and Lt.Holcomb in this book....who will become series regulars gradually.

Not only a completely acceptable mystery, but also a little glimpse at the time in which it was written. "Clues" spelled "clews" is weird. Anyway, certainly worth reading.

"My God, what's the world coming to if a woman can't pull a little justifiable blackmail when she's victimized!"

Not the greatest. Mason’s trickery is very contrived in this one. There’s a bit of misdirection that is awkwardly handled, making it obvious that it is just a red herring.
It feels like Gardner read about sleepwalking, thought about the implications in a murder case and then slapped this together

Just for fun:
In the beginning of the book Mason once again asks Della to call “Paul Drake, of the Drake Detective Agency” as if she didn’t know who he was. An inartful way to identify him to a potential new reader.

There’s a bit of smooching between Perry and Della. Mason says “it’s quite common for a busy executive to kiss his Secretary once in a while”. What is this, the 1930s?