Kandel, Susan: I Dreamed I Married Perry Mason
With five previous books under her belt, Cece Caruso, the protagonist of Susan Kandel's I Dreamed I Married Perry Mason, is stalled on her sixth, a biography of Erle Stanley Gardner. Gardner is best known as the creator of Perry Mason: he penned more than eighty novels featuring the man Raymond Burr would immortalize for a television audience. But Gardner was also an attorney himself, and he made a point in his career of investigating cases in which he believed an innocent party had been wrongly convicted. He received a great deal of mail, in consequence, from convicts hoping to lure Gardner into taking on their cases. His involvement in these nearly lost causes provides Kandel with the hook for her story, as Cece, while poring through Gardner's correspondence, stumbles upon one of the letters that did not manage to pique the attorney's interest. A certain Joseph Albacco Jr. wrote Gardner in 1958, in Kandel's story, shortly after he was convicted for killing his wife on their first anniversary. Perry Mason's alter-ego may not have taken on the Albacco case, but Cece is struck by the convicted murderer's tone in his letter--humble rather than hostile. She hopes to combat her writer's block by walking in Gardner's shoes for a while and looking into the case. Cece visits Albacco, still moldering in prison forty-odd years hence, and takes upon herself the responsibility of righting an old wrong. Unfortunately for her, as old as Albacco's case may be, there are still people eager to see that the true story of his wife's murder remains safely buried.
Comments