I am always happy to "find" an author whom I have never read before, happier when I enjoy the book, and happier still when I realize that this author has a whole series of books that are there for my future reading pleasure.
Such was the case a few weeks back when I found the book you see above, "I Dreamed I Married Perry Mason" by Susan Kandel while scanning the Northland Library stacks. This was the first in a series of books written by Ms. Kandel featuring a character named CeCe Caruso. The gimmick is that CeCe is an author herself who specializes in writing biographies of famous mystery writers. In this book, as you no doubt have guessed, she is writing a book about Erle Stanley Gardner, the creator of Perry Mason. Naturally, CeCe finds out about a 50 year old murder in which Gardner may or may not have become involved, she investigates it herself, and, as always happens in such stories, opens up a fifty year old can of worms and places her own life in danger. Oh, and you do learn a lot about Erle Stanley Gardner in the process.
Along the way we learn that CeCe is forty-ish, divorced, has a 21 year old married daughter, a mother with whom she butts heads, an oddball friend named Lael, a passion for vintage clothing, and an on-again/off-again romance with a local police detective. All the ingredients for you basic popular fictional amateur sleuth. Is this great literature? No, but it's light, fun, and entertaining reading. Not to be sexist, but this series is probably targeted to female readers (think Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series), but, hey, I liked it. What can I say?
"I Dreamed...." was published in 2004, and some Internet research tells me that Kandel has published four subsequent novels that feature CeCe doing biograpies on Carolyn Keene, Dashiell Hammett, Agatha Christie, and Alfred Hitchcock. I shall be checking them out.
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