I’ve been watching the Perry Mason TV series lately. Not the sad 80s one, when they brought back the surviving members of the cast and ran through the motions. The black and white Perry, with a slimmer Raymond Burr and prettier Barbara Hale. And I’ve noticed several things I hadn’t before, or maybe I would have before, if I wasn’t 3 at the time the show started in 1957. As the show went on, Mason grew further and further away from the books, written, or dictated by, Erle Stanley Gardner over 4 decades and 80 some books. Gardner began this series with The Case of The Velvet Claws, and never looked back. He made a fortune from these slim, often confusing volumes, and although known