'The bestselling author of the century ... a master storyteller' New York Times
Ellen Robb came into Perry Mason's office with a gun in her purse. She had been framed, she said, by her gambler employer because she had refused to help fleece a customer.
The customer had dropped nearly $10,000 in the gambling establishment and then done his best to pick up Ellen. His wife, none too pleased with either shenanigan, ended up dead as a herring.
Della said Ellen was too beautiful to be trusted; Perry thought he could find out by switching guns on her - thus starting a series of explosions that nearly blast him out of court ...
Born in Malden, Massachusetts, Erle Stanley Gardner (1889-1970) left school in 1909 and attended Valparaiso University School of Law in Indiana for just one month before he was suspended for focusing more on his hobby of boxing than his academic studies. Soon after, he settled in California, where he taught himself the law and passed the state bar exam in 1911. The practise of law never held much interest for him, however, apart from as it pertained to trial strategy, and in his spare time he began to write for the pulp magazines that gave Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler their start. Not long after the publication of his first novel, The Case of the Velvet Claws, featuring Perry Mason, he gave up his legal practice to write full time. He had one daughter, Grace, with his first wife, Natalie, from whom he later separated. In 1968 Gardner married his long-term secretary, Agnes Jean Bethell, whom he professed to be the real 'Della Street', Perry Mason's sole (although unacknowledged) love interest. He was one of the most successful authors of all time and at the time of his death, in Temecula, California in 1970, is said to have had 135 million copies of his books in print in America alone.