User Reviews

The episode begins inside the college class room of Professor Hewes English class. During an staged experiment, the Professor comes very close to being murdered when someone replaces blank bullets with the real ones. Professor thinks someone is trying to kill him.

The Professor is right to be suspicious since he plans on getting a divorce from his wife and also has stolen a manuscript, from a former female student that has recently died, and published a book, 'L'Affaire Annabelleas' as his own. And now the dead student's sister, Sally Sheldon, has found out that the Professor has claimed he wrote the book and used a false name as the author. Sally is putting the squeeze on Professor Hewes.

When Professor Hewes ends up stabbed to death much evidence points to his wife, Laura, as the suspect. It was just days before the divorce became final and now Laura is set to receive a large amount of money that was going to her ex-husband. And with her fingerprints on the murder weapon, it does not look good for Perry's client, Laura Hewes.

An entertaining mystery that was well written and well acted by the people involved. A notable thing in the show is that we actually get two gallery spectators that stand up during the trial making confessions to testimonial evidence- both are standing at the same time. The episode was interesting from beginning to end which always makes for a good watch.

An English professor stages a stunt in which he has paid someone to enter his classroom and shoot him at point blank range. A student pushes him out of the way. The professor then tells the class to spend the next 25 minutes writing about what they remember seeing as an assignment. Later he is informed by the shooter that somebody had replaced the blanks in the gun with real ones and had the "hero" not pushed the professor out of the way he would have been killed.

The professor has other troubles too. His divorce is not final, and since their separation he has racked up ninety thousand dollars in royalties for a trash romance novel he penned. His wife wants half of that money as part of the property settlement, except the trash romance novel was actually the work of a deceased former student that he plagiarized. Except the deceased former student plagiarized it too - Her sister wrote the actual text. Very much alive, she wants that money too and she has the original notes to prove she is the author.

The professor goes to Perry Mason to help him with the property settlement problem, but thinks he can settle the plagiarism on his own. Things get permanently settled when the professor ends up murdered.

Perry has taken on poor clients before, and he has taken on clients that have to have the absolute truth pulled out of them. But here, Perry is dealing with a cold, arrogant, unlikable client in the person of the professor, at least up until he dies. The professor is quite the womanizer too, having romanced at least one student. And let's not even get started on what would happen today if a professor staged a shootout in a California classroom. I doubt that would even go over in Texas. Charges of plagiarism and his ex-wife's financial demands would be the least of his problems. As usual, it's a pleasure to see Perry reason his way through a case.

We start with an exercise in a college classroom, where a gunman comes in and fires at the professor. It's the old bit where the students need to show how observant they are. The gun had blanks, but we find out there is more to it. Our professor is a lowlife who has divorced his wife because it's a way of making big bucks. Of course, she ends up sitting to Perry's left at a trial because she was on the scene when a letter opener was found stuck in the prof.

About the midpoint of this episode ( S6, E15), Della Street walks into a hotel lobby and then disappears into the telephone room. Paul Drake walks in from a different door. He is seeking info on a person of interest. It is never explained in the story line why Della Street was at the hotel, or if Paul Drake even knew she was there.

Patricia Breslin is Perry Mason's client in this episode. She's the wife of the late Barry Atwater a professor of English at the college where Kent Smith is the president and it seems as though he's written a novel that's a real Peyton Place kind of Sexpose. It's making a lot of money now and if Atwater had lived three more days a divorce from Breslin would have been final. Now as his widow she inherits all those book royalties and that makes her look good for the murder according to William Talman and Wesley Lau.

Of course Breslin left him because Atwater was a rat and he manifested rat like behavior in his dealings with others, in fact writing the book itself. The suspects are a plenty. But I have to say even Raymond Burr feels sorry for the real perpetrator offering to take the case when it comes to trial.

Nicely written and nicely performed.