“She’s too busy stealing her sister’s boyfriend.” - Della Street

“No, she’s just giving her sex appeal its morning exercise.” - Perry Mason


The Case of the Green-Eyed Sister is one of Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason novels written in the 1950s, when Gardner was at his zenith in the famous series. This one is surprisingly breezy, in spite of the usual complicated plot involving blackmail and eventually, murder, and a rather lengthy courtroom scene.

It begins like a horse jumping from the starting gate when Della makes certain Perry knows she doesn’t like the green-eyed client waiting to see him. Her name is Sylvia Bain Atwood, and she’s trying to get out of some tricky business being run by a guy named Brogan, that Paul Drake believes is a shady but smart blackmailer. The backstory involves whether the money that her ailing father used to get rich — there’s a lot of money involved — came from an old robbery. Sylvia doesn’t want that, because it could void all that money she and her more subdued sister, Hattie, and her brother will inherit.

Sylvia thinks she’s smarter than Mason, and it jams up the works! Her efforts to stay ahead of the blackmailer — and Mason — muddy things up at every turn. With Della in tow, Mason walks in on a murder scene he’s been set up to find, and has a very disagreeable Sgt. Holcomb looking to catch Perry on the other side of the line he’s always skirting. Tragg lends Mason a hand in this one, tipping him off at one point! But Mason’s not the only one in a jam, because when the father kicks off, the green-eyed sister’s schemes cause Hattie to be charged with murder.

This is really an excellent entry in the series, very enjoyable. Even a protracted courtroom questioning doesn't slow this one down enough to mar it significantly. An ice pick, some very tricky business with the blackmail tape everyone wants, and some even trickier business regarding time of death make this one zip along nicely. Even the lengthy questioning in court of witnesses is involving rather than tedious, and this case has one of the most unusual endings of the entire series.

Will Perry let someone fry for a crime they didn’t commit? Will the green-eyed sister get the last laugh? You’ll have to read it to find out. A good one! ( )

Sergeant Holcomb of Homicide could, when he chose and without apparent effort, be exceedingly nasty, sarcastic and disagreeable.
This time he was in rare form. ( )

Interesting conclusion, but less satisfying than most of the books in the Perry Mason series - although he made Sgt. Holcomb look like a fool, Hamilton Burger wasn't on scene to be made into legal hamburger. ( )

A surprisingly good read. My first Perry Mason mystery made me want to read others. A very fast read. ( )