Title

The Book

Chapters 5 and 6

Slideshow 1.1 This is a facimile of the book The Case of The Spurious Spinster. In order to provide context, the selection from the book begins at chapter 5 and continues through chapter 6. The analysis below is of chapter 6.

HHere is the dictation scene as it is printed in the book:

There was silence for several seconds, then Lowry again shook his head. ‘Nope,’ he said, ‘I’m not talking.’

‘All right,’ Mason said to Della Street, ‘get your notebook, Della.’

Della Street took a notebook out of her purse. ‘Put down the date and time,’ Mason said, ‘and take this statement: this is dictated in the presence of Ken Lowry, manager of the Mojave Monarch. We called on Mr. Lowry and asked him to tell us something about the operation of the mine. We pointed out to him the young woman was being charged with crime, that she was innocent; that circumstances have conspired against her and that she was quite possibly the victim of a frame-up. Mr. Lowry would make absolutely no statement. He wouldn’t tell us anything about the operation of the mine, he wouldn’t divulge the location of the mine, he wouldn’t tell us how long it had been shut down; he refused to discuss anything, thereby indicating his own bias and that he was trying to cover up the true facts.’

‘Now wait a minute,’ Lowry said. ‘Since you’re writing that down you just put in there that I said I’m not covering up anything, that I’ve simply been instructed not to discuss the matter with anyone particularly with Perry Mason.’¹⁷

At the beginning, Lowry will not talk. But then Mason calls on Street, who is ready with her notebook. Mason seeks to ground the words in temporal reality by beginning with the date and time. He also seeks to implicate Lowry by including him in the metadictation. Then he repeats the details of the last few minutes. But in the repetition and recording of the events, Mason turns Lowry’s taciturnity into evidence of bias and cover-up. By speaking the words aloud and having Street record them, Mason is, in a sense, creating the “true facts.” But there is also a performative quality to this act of dictation. Speech for the record has more power than unrecorded speech. Lowry knows that and it makes him nervous. He wants to revise the record to eliminate the implications of bias and cover-up that Mason has embedded in the account.

Gardner’s dictation of Mason’s dictation suggests that dictation is—for Mason and Gardner—a powerful speech act. The recording of Gardner’s words bring about, and encodes, a text. In the same way, Perry Mason’s dictation to Street is brings about and encodes a text. Gardner’s text is a fiction but Mason’s text is an inscription of the “true facts” and an accusation against those who would obscure them. Lowry’s recognition of the power of dictation brings about the turning point in a case. It is not only Gardner’s characters who recognize the power of dictation. Hughes suggests that it was dictation that allowed Gardner to make the jump from pulp magazines to novels:

Between his commitments to the law and to the magazines, there was never enough time in which to write a novel. Not until it occurred to him that he could dictate one, as he did the real-life cases in his office, did he make the grade. It took three and a half days. He admitted freely and frequently that it would be more accurate to say four days, as he spent an initial half day ‘thinking up the plot.’¹⁸

Dictation was, for Gardner, the key to professionalization, both in his law practice and in his novel writing. But if dictation held power for him, that power only went as far as the printed book. In the TV version, the entire dictation scene at the mine is gone.