In this not-very-clever whodunit, Mark plays Perry Mason. (Does that make Lucas Della Street? More likely Paul Drake, I suppose.)
In an attempt to create ambiguity about who-shot-whom, the writer (Ken Kolb) throws logic out the window. If one believes Mark's testimony that Whiteside was "making like" he was about to draw on Goss, how does one then explain how Whiteside could have been shot in the back? Worse, as Whiteside /was/ actually shot in the back from a window on the second floor of the hotel, the bullet that killed him must have passed through and been the bullet Goss says whizzed past him. But it was fired from a high angle, making such a path essentially impossible.
(Erle Stanley Gardner did this sort of thing much better in "The Case of the Singing Skirt", in which the victim is killed with a gun that could not possibly have been the murder weapon.)
There's one clever turn at the end, in which Lucas pulls a Mason-style trick. I anticipated it, on the assumption it /would not/ be used -- but it was.
The writer apparently didn't do research to learn what photographers charged. A tintype or ambrotype cost about $1 during the Civil War. For Goss to charge Mark 50 cents for a full-plate 8x10 photo is absurd. Also, Eastman didn't start selling dry plates until 1881 (about a year before this episode takes place), so it's likely the photographer would still have been using wet plates, not the dry plates shown. (Oddly, the potassium cyanide Goss tells Lucas to use to fix the image /was/ used with wet plates.)
In an attempt to create ambiguity about who-shot-whom, the writer (Ken Kolb) throws logic out the window. If one believes Mark's testimony that Whiteside was "making like" he was about to draw on Goss, how does one then explain how Whiteside could have been shot in the back? Worse, as Whiteside /was/ actually shot in the back from a window on the second floor of the hotel, the bullet that killed him must have passed through and been the bullet Goss says whizzed past him. But it was fired from a high angle, making such a path essentially impossible.
(Erle Stanley Gardner did this sort of thing much better in "The Case of the Singing Skirt", in which the victim is killed with a gun that could not possibly have been the murder weapon.)
There's one clever turn at the end, in which Lucas pulls a Mason-style trick. I anticipated it, on the assumption it /would not/ be used -- but it was.
The writer apparently didn't do research to learn what photographers charged. A tintype or ambrotype cost about $1 during the Civil War. For Goss to charge Mark 50 cents for a full-plate 8x10 photo is absurd. Also, Eastman didn't start selling dry plates until 1881 (about a year before this episode takes place), so it's likely the photographer would still have been using wet plates, not the dry plates shown. (Oddly, the potassium cyanide Goss tells Lucas to use to fix the image /was/ used with wet plates.)