“Perry? Paul. I just spoke with Tragg. They found a body — in the canyon, a man, probably in his fifties, looks like he was strangled with a bow tie. That’s right. Yeah, a philologist of some kind. Tragg said the wife identified him from his clothes — said he was wearing his second-best tweed jacket. And get this: there was a pipe in the jacket pocket, but the wife says it wasn’t his briar. Can you meet me in about twenty minutes? At the last house on Academia Drive.”
Related reading
All OCA Perry Mason posts (Pinboard)
[We passed Academia Drive while taking an avoid-the-freeway route to the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles last month. I immediately thought of Paul and Perry and invented this bit of dialogue. “The canyon”? I think it sounds like something from the Mason world. In real life Academia Drive is a dead-end street — I mean, a cul-de-sac.]
Wednesday, August 15, 2018
On Academia
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comments: 6
Kudos to you for inventing believable Paul Drake patois! I bought it as scripted dialogue. You are good, friend!
Was it the bow tie that tipped them off that the killer was a philologist? Or was it the victim's tie?
Chris, I suspect that the bow tie (two words, I just discovered) is the killer’s, and something of a calling card. Paul will have his men check all the haberdasheries in the city.
Thanks for the compliment, Martha. Paul Drake is my television-series-detective idol. :)
Re: Paul Drake - yep, he was my idol, too; Columbo was second in line.
For some reason this reminded me of an old Monty Python routine:
S: There's a dead bishop on the landing, dad!
K: Really?
M: Where's it from?
S: Waddya mean?
M: What's its diocese?
S: Well, it looked a bit Bath and Wells-ish to me.
Didn’t know it, but now I do. No tattoos on the philologist though.
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