After reading Pride and Prejudice I got curious about the issue of entail, which was a main motivator in the story. Briefly, it's a kind of limitation placed on inheritance of an estate which is supposed to make sure that it is not split up - only one person, usually restricted to a male heir, inherits, while everyone else gets nothing. In the novel, this was what made Mrs. Bennet so desperate to find husbands for her daughters, as her husband not having any male heirs, their estate would be inherited by a cousin, and she and her daughters would be destitute once he died.
The institution has been largely abolished since the time of the novel, but I felt that it would be a very interesting motivator in fiction and role-playing scenarios. I then looked at the list of fiction that features this as an issue on the Wikipedia entry, and found a Sherlock Holmes story, The Adventure of the Priory School. Reading it, I realized that it would be interesting to try to rewrite it as a Perry Mason story. In the following, I will spoil the Holmes story, which is short, and available online.
As I did when analyzing the two versions of The Case of the Sun Bather's Diary, I will first sum up the story chronologically, rather than how Holmes deciphered it.
Many years ago, the Duke of Holdernesse, residing in Mackleton, in the North of England, fell in love with a woman far beneath him socially, to the point where she refused to marry him, to avoid ruining his political career - indeed, he subsequently became a cabinet minister, and is otherwise well-regarded and influential. He had a son out of wedlock with her, and she died when he was young. This son, James Wilder, he raised, educated, and kept under his roof. The Duke eventually married and had a legitimate son, Lord Saltire. James found out about the scandal surrounding his birth, and used it to blackmail the Duke into employing him as his secretary. He resented Saltire's position from his birth, and destabilized the Duke's marriage, to the point that he and his wife separated, the wife moving to France. Saltire was gutted, and the Duke became concerned that James would do him harm, so he sent him to Dr. Thorneycroft Huxtable's nearby, well-regarded Priory School, to keep him safe.
James would not leave it at that, so he hatched a plot with Reuben Hayes, a tenant and former coachman of the Duke, fired due to some impropriety and a criminal background, who was now running the Fighting Cock Inn, two miles from the Duke's estate. He would kidnap Saltire, and use that to force the Duke to break the entail on his estate (here is where that comes in), so the latter could will it to him.
The kidnapping went through more-or-less as planned, except that Heidegger, the German Master, who had witnessed Saltire leaving and rushed to pursue him, was murdered by Hayes.
As far as Dr. Huxtable was concerned, Lord Saltire had disappeared days after being put in his care, and the German Master had disappeared the same night. Highly embarrassed, he went to London to put Holmes on the case. Holmes and Watson come up, and after a few misdirections and false leads, Holmes finds the German Master's body, tracks down where Hayes had put Saltire - at the Inn - and even sees that the Duke had become aware of Saltire's location and has talked to him.
Holmes makes sure that Hayes is caught for Heidegger's murder, but, after confronting the Duke and getting the full story, agrees to otherwise not discuss any more details of the kidnapping, and James's role in it, accepting a full and hearty reward for his trouble.
Now, what would we need to do to make this a Perry Mason story? First of all, we're missing a client falsely accused of a murder. We already have a murder - Heidegger's - and we have a real murderer - Hayes. We also have a client, Dr. Huxtable. So we would have to add some reason to think that he'd be responsible for the murder. We'd either have to flesh out the inter-faculty relationships in the Priory School, adding some conflict that could lead to this murder, or add circumstantial evidence that connects Dr. Huxtable with the kidnapping. Maybe Dr. Huxtable also saw Saltire leaving, saw Heidegger bicycling after him, followed himself, then ran into Heidegger's body?
The Duke is a very good character here - he has an interest to dissemble, and misinformation from him could get in the way of exonerating Dr. Huxtable.
Speaking of the Duke, if we want this to be a Perry Mason story, we need to move the setting in space and time. The Duke could be Mr. Holdernesse, an old money-wealthy and influential Californian politician, and Mackleton could be replaced with some town in the state where there is a prep school for such, run by a Dr. Huxtable. The entail could be a trust set up between now Mr. and Mrs. Holdernesse before their separation. Maybe the trust was set up exactly due to her annoyance with James. She might have gone back East, to some fancy Long Island family estate, instead of France. The Fighting Cock Inn would be replaced by the Fighting Rooster Motel, or something like that.
Now that we've transported the setting, what about Mason's involvement? That would depend. Dr. Huxtable might consult with Mason while only concerned about a lawsuit from Mr. Holdernesse, and at first Mason would only be tasking Paul Drake's agency in finding out a bit more, not knowing there has been a murder. Alternatively, Dr. Huxtable could initially bring Drake in to help investigate under the table - but Drake doesn't have the cachet that Mason has, it wouldn't be quite a good fit, unless they knew each other previously, which would let him be brought in as a friend who is more likely to be discreet, then bringing Mason in when thing go south.
Once these decisions are made, there are enough passions, secrets, and hidden interests here to make for a decent novel or episode.
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