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.