As a follow-up to my general discussion of the various forms of Perry Mason and his colleagues and foes in various forms of media, I've recently finished Erle Stanley Gardner's the 1955 novel The Case of the Sun Bather's Diary, which got me to rewatching Season 1, Episode 17 of the 1957 Perry Mason series, which adapts this same novel, and a direct comparison could be illuminating. Obviously this post will have spoilers for both.
Let's start with some history: the novel came out in 1955, and the episode was first aired in early 1958, about midway through the first season. Furthermore, the whole purpose of Paisano Productions, which Gardner set up with his literary agent and the latter's wife, Gail Patrick Jackson, who seems to have pushed the effort forward, was to give him as much creative control as possible, as he was dissatisfied with previous film and radio adaptations. This is as direct an adaptation as one could hope for between the media, so I feel comfortable focusing on these as creative decisions made by an auteur with some autonomy, but subject to the constraints of the media in question - a 200-page novel vs a 50-minute long television episode.
The main outline of the plot is the same in both instances. It will be easiest to present it chronologically.
Some time before the start of the episode, a big bag of cash was stolen from a bank's armored truck, and replaced by a similar amount of canceled checks. Due to the procedures involved, one of the two employees in charge of transferring the money to the truck was convicted of the robbery, but the money was never found. In fact, it was the driver who did it, helped by the nurse at the doctor's office where all the bank employees were treated getting impressions of employee keys and seals, who then provided these to a forger who was able to create a fake substitute sealed bag to fill with canceled checks, and a key so that the driver could open the cashbox and make the switch. Some of the stolen bills have known numbers, which law enforcement are able to use to try to prove that someone has used them, and hope to track the whole pile.
The accused robber's daughter, Arlene, quit her job to work on proving her father's innocence. She is supported financially by her father's partner, who also believes that he is innocent, and feels guilty, although he was punished by being blacklisted from his profession. Arlene has written down all she's tracked down in a journal which she hides in the trailer she lives out of, and which she often stations near a golf course, where she likes to sunbathe.
The episode begins with her calling Mason from a phone at the golf course, naked, as her trailer with all her clothes was stolen under her. She will not go to the police because she thinks they might have stolen the trailer, and knows they are suspicious of her and where her money is coming from. Mason agrees to help her out, but warns her that he will turn her in if he finds out that she's trying to use him to perpetuate a crime. He starts by helping her find the trailer, while she promises to give him a retainer later. He finds the stolen trailer, which has been put up for sale at a lot - and the trailer is bought rather than involve the police in proving it's hers.
Mason receives the retainer twice, once from a messenger who retroactively draws some suspicion, another by regular mail. As he speaks to Arlene's provider, he finds out that the one bill number he remembers from the day of the robbery is the same as that on one of the bills from the first retainer. He then hides this retainer in the blinds, and leaves. The bank driver, who is the actual killer, who has the same build as him, was watching from outside and saw him messing with the blinds. He comes in, kills Arlene's father's partner, and takes the bills out of the blinds, which some viewer from the outside interprets as him signaling to Arlene, who had incidentally approached the house, and decides to walk around from the back. The killer drives off, while Arlene disappears. When police enters the house, they find the body, and suspect Arlene as the killer, with Mason as the accomplice.
Mason is served with a subpoena which requires him to provide any money given to him by Arlene. He is put in front of a grand jury, where he tells the DA that he did not raise the curtains to signal Arlene or anyone, which has the DA warn him about the potential for perjury. The DA also checks the bills Mason provides, and is disappointed to find that they are not on the list of those from the bank.
Arlene is eventually captured, and put on trial for murder. After a series of examinations and cross-examinations, including one where the doctor in whose office the keys and seals were copied is made to confirm Arlene's handwriting in the journal, and explicate some motive for her, Mason himself is put on the stand. The DA confronts him with the supposed perjury, which Mason explains, and through this examination he is able to eventually explain the entirety of the real plot to the robbery, and point the finger at the driver as the actual killer, along with his accomplices.
As you can see, there is a lot going on here for both instances. The episode doesn't have all that much beyond this - while we do not know most of the information coming in, we find out slowly but surely through scenes between characters - with Mason as the main character, of course, but sometimes he doesn't appear at all, significantly at the start, where we see, rather than being told about, the theft of the trailer. Everything is driven by character interactions, and there's occasional dramatic irony for the viewer.
The novel takes much longer to inform us, as, much like in The Case of the Velvet Claws, everything is fed through what Mason himself experiences. What he doesn't see himself has to be told to him, or he has to find out explicitly. We are given a lot more details about the work of Paul Drake and his detectives, and there's a whole subplot involving the forger and his girlfriend, who is the nurse's sister, a roll of film that gets destroyed by X-rays, which further points the finger at the doctor's office, etc.
The characters are overall much meaner in the novel. Mason is rude and often unsubtle, while the DA, Hamilton Burger, yells and shows repeated contempt towards Mason - on TV, Mason is also much more subdued and amicable, and Burger makes a point of sitting down with Mason after the trial to ask him about some details he did not figure out.
If I had to summarize what the TV adaptation did, I would say that it cut things down to what seems the most significant plot points, it made the characters more pleasant (and, therefore, probably more pleasant to play and to see on TV), and it let the plot develop through more characters and perspectives.
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