Stewart G Bedford loved his wife (even if he did insist on calling her Ann Roam, her maiden name) so when he was approached by Binney Denham, an apologetic middleman for a blackmailer, with threats to expose secrets from her past, he has no choice to go succumb to the villain’s threats.

But when arrangements are made to hand the money over, things take a turn for the worse when Bedford, spirited away to a motel to act as neutral ground, finds Denham shot dead. All the evidence is bound to lead to Bedford being the guilty party – so it’s a good job that Bedford’s secretary has already called Perry Mason…

Well, I promised at the start of the year that I’d be diving back into the Perry Mason back catalogue, so of course it took me two and a half months to get round to it. I bought a few random selections of titles so I’ve got about twenty to get through. And on the basis of this one, it won’t be long before I’m back.

This one is about halfway through the third quartile of the Mason titles, book 51 out of 82ish, and it’s a bright and breezy tale with Perry apparently willing to tamper with evidence and some interesting problems caused by, among others, the client that while not meaning they are necessarily guilty, it provides extra complications. Also worth noting that the actions that cause these problems do make sense, they don’t feel as if they’ve been put in for the sake of complication.

And there was a genuine surprise at the end, too. I thought I had it all sorted in my head, but Mason, who seems to have spotted the baddie from the start, completely caught me out.

One reason that I’m enjoying these books now is that I’ve got my head round the fact that Mason isn’t a sleuth, he’s a lawyer and so he plays a different game than most literary detectives, while still getting to unmask the guilty party. It makes an interesting change from the standard sleuth and works really well.

No idea if this one has been reprinted recently- The Murder Room paperback from 2014 is for sale on Amazon but it’s not cheap, whereas the ebook is only a few quid. Or just browse the second hand sites, there are probably more than a few knocking around.