Audio
Recordings of Dictation
Audio Clip 1.1 This is where the manuscript form of the story
The Case of The Spurious Spinsterbegins. This part never made
it into the book or the TV show. Courtesy Harry Ransom Center
at The University of Texas at Austin.
Audio Clip 1.2 This is where the book form of the story
The Case of The Spurious Spinster begins. This clip runs to the end
of the chapter. Courtesy Harry Ransom Center at The University
of Texas at Austin.
Audio Clip 1.3 This is a brief clip of Erle Stanley Gardner
dictating the dictation scene from The Case of The Spurious Spinster.
Courtesy Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin.
The audio dictation of this chapter is more than 40 minutes long and contains more than 10 minutes and 30 seconds of material before it reaches the point where the book version of the chapter begins.13>The length is due largely to a back-and-forth dialog between Mason, his secretary Della Street, and an old miner named Ken Lowry. In a segment just under 15 minutes long, Gardner introduces Perry Mason to miner Lowry. Lowry had refused to talk to him about a defunct mine that was still reporting profits on the books of a company managed by a man named Endicott Campbell and owned by a wealthy woman named Amelia Corning of South America. Both Corning and Campbell have disappeared and Mason and Street have gone to the Mojave Monarch Mine to find out what Lowry knows.
Lowry refuses to “talk business with strangers.” Three factors urge him to change his mind and begin talking. All three factors can be attributed in part to Street. Lowry first starts to crack when she exhibits “a quick flash of generously displayed nylon.” He cracks more when she beings to take dictation at the request of Mason. And he talks even more when she suggests that he is not his own boss or an independent man. (Mason praises Street for the latter, saying, “That was good psychology.”) While all three factors contribute to getting Lowry to talk, the dictation has the most profound effect. Just before she begins to take the dictation, Lowry says, “Nope, I’m not talking” and right after the dictation, Lowry says, “Now wait a minute...since you are writing that down, you just put in there that I said I’m not covering up anything. I’ve simply been instructed not to discuss the matter with anyone and particularly with Perry Mason.” Mason then asks who gave those instructions and Lowry tells him it was Campbell. Since Campbell is, at this point in the story, suspected by Mason of defrauding the company, that information leads to a line of questioning that later gets Lowry killed but gives Mason the leads he needs.