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A dazzling new Perry Mason mystery in which a black eye, a bewildered cabby, a pile of junk and a body beautiful add up to one of the most intricate puzzles of Mason’s career.

It started with a body. The body was alive, female, seductive, and Mrs. Sybil Harlan was convinced that it was taking her husband right out from under her eyes.

Mason is in rare form as he tackles one of the most obscure and tantalizing courtroom problems he has ever faced.

Here’s a PERRY MASON story, with a murder hinging on as ingenious a trick as has appeared in a mystery in a long time, and containing some of the most exiting courtroom scenes Erle Stanley Gardner has even written.

It’s about:

Alden E. Leeds, millionaire and black sheep of the family, about to the torn limb from limb by a pack of gold-greedy relatives; Phyllis, old man Leeds’s niece and business manager; Ned Barkler, once his partner in Klondike days; L. C. Conway, who sold dice almost anyone could roll; blonde, hard Marcia Whittaker, who seemed to have said that all she wanted was a cozy little home; and, of course, wily Perry Mason, Della Street, his secretary, and lanky Paul Drake, the detective.

Readers will find here the usual swift pace and ingenuity, the unexpected twists and surprises that have made Erle Stanley Gardner the most popular detective-store writer in America.

It started as the case of the disappearing driver. Stephane Olger was hitchhiking to Los Angeles when the accident happened. When it was over she was found unconscious behind the wheel — alone. There was a manslaughter charge against her...

An exceedingly profane green parrot, with wicked glittering eyes and a genius for saying the wrong thing...

A pretty (if rather prim) young librarian with a curious interest in dangerous weapons...

An eccentric multi-millionaire, with a penchant for books, trailers and birds...

An apparently un-traceable murder, committed with a double-barreled derringer, obsolete in design but deadly in efficiency... These, and some other bizarre details, which we won’t reveal, plunge Perry Mason and Della Street up to their necks in one of the most exciting mysteries that Erie Stanley Gardner has ever written!

Take two luscious redheads... add green-eyed blonde, mysterious burglary, and a bewildered fiancée... stir in a good measure of that unscrupulous attorney Alphonse Baker Carr... and no wonder...

“You’ve got to break an egg to make an omelet,” said Doug Selby, D.A. of Madison County, and he only hoped it would be one that old A. B. C. couldn’t digest.

Plenty was on the fire, and Selby knew the only way to solve the case and save his reputation was to act faster than he ever had before... That was when he went to call on A. B. C.

Sylvia Martin and Sheriff Rex Brandon do yeoman service as Doug smashes through to bring his most perplexing case to a triumphant conclusion.

Don’t look now — but there’s a mystery behind those funs. And there’s a horse behind that mystery... Take it from PERRY MASON and DELLA STREET, you’re about to witness the finest display of legal fireworks of the year — with Perry an accomplice in murder.

It all starts quietly enough — with two cars side-swiping each other in the middle of the desert. And in the trunk of one of them, an indent jalopy, Perry Mason finds a fan-dancer’s wardrobe. (Item: 2 fans; Item: 1 pair of dancing shoes).

The fans lead to one of the most beautiful clients Perry Mason has ever had... and to a body. A body on the end of a Japanese sword...

They also lead to a beautiful mental teaser for you, with Gardner dropping his clues as fast as you can pick them — or his book — up. Here it is, a real legal twister!

The new Perry Mason murder mystery has

...terrible pace...

...stirring court-room drams...

...a duck that can’t swims...

John L. Witherspoon was accustomed to having — and paying — his way. There was a definite reason why he didn’t approve his daughter Lois’ love affair, and he hired Perry Mason to break it up. If Mason would investigate an 18-year-old murder, Witherspoon was sure the results would change his daughter’s mind.

Perry took the job because several things about the old case intrigued him. And because he had a hunch that the answer to it might save Lois’ happiness.

Mason, Delia Street and Paul Drake went to El Templo, Witherspoon’s great California ranch; they went into action at once, and soon they smoked out a string of crooked plots, brought several shadowy figures into too strong a light, and ran plump into with Mason caught in the middle.

A shot

A splash...

A shout...

and Perry Mason finds himself treading the deepest water of his career. This time, he nearly goes wider...

Things were tense aboard Parker Benton’s yacht. About the only thing the group had in common was the bad weather and a highly controversial business proposition. When that subject came up, tempers came out — and in no time at all the spine-chilling cry “Man O-ver-boar-r-d” cut through the fog...

Perry Mason has been batting around the Orient, taking a well-earned vacation. (Yes, Della Street is along.) We pick up on his way to the roar of the city, the jangle of telephones, the blast of automobile horns, to clients who lie to him and yet expect him to stand behind them. And Perry can hardly wait to get back!

He doesn’t have to wait to get home, however, for excitement to start. Just out of Honolulu, a fellow passenger comes to him with a very strange story.

Mason has already noticed the party of three: the middle-aged man with the  gray eyes, the slender, graceful woman, and the daughter who looks so much like a famous movie actress. Now beside the ship’s rail, he listens to the queer tale a woman tells in a voice of nervous hysteria. Until two months before she was known as Mrs. Moar. But overnight her husband — and so we have: .

Gold is the pay dirt in all these rip-roaring western stories, more of Erle Stanley Gardner’s series with their unique desert setting. Again the master storyteller features his rugged western hero, the philosophical prospector Bob Zane.

In the title story Zane is true to form when he gets a spoiled rich kid to behave like a man and beat out claim jumpers in the desert. Men learn fast out there, or die, and Zane moves faster than any of them, rescuing a pretty hostage from Yaqui Indians, outwitting murderous gangsters in the Painted Desert, avoiding death from poisonous alkali springs, and hunting lost gold in Death Valley. Around camp at night, the sand whispers on the wind and the philosopher in Zane may start talking — but he always keeps his hand on his gun.

The stories move at the headlong pace for which all Gardner adventures are famous, and Zane himself is an exceptional character who often reveals ideas that are clearly Gardner’s own about life, justice, and the debatable values of civilization.

Says Zane: “The reason men don’t know the law of life is because they’re afraid to look Eternity in the face. Out in the desert they have to look at Eternity. It’s on all sides of them; they can’t turn their eyes away. That’s the spell of the desert.”

The day she told her husband he could go his own way, were it blonde or brunette, she became a happy woman. Freed from the duty of preserving a contour that would keep Mr. Cool home nights, she gave up dieting, and serenely watched her figure expand to balloon-like proportions.

Inside, she was hard as nails, shrewd and unscrupulous, stingy, avaricious. She handled cases no decent agency would touch. She hired Donald Lam for two reasons he hod brains, and she knew he needed a job so badly that she could get him for practically nothing. She watched his expense account like a vulture and did her best to deduct legitimate expenses from his already meager salary.

But deep inside that mountain of flesh must have been a heart, for in spite of these instincts she developed an affectionate, almost solicitous, loyalty for Donald.

You’ll like Bertha Cool. She is lusty and gusty and has personality.

Every runt gets pushed around Donald Lam was no exception. The difference between him and most runts was that the harder you pushed the faster Donald came back. He discovered early in life that his hands weren’t much use to him in a fight, so he used his head. And there was nothing soft about Donald’s head. He used his mind and trained it mercilessly. Sometimes it got him into trouble because he was just a little too far ahead of the other fellow.

Nor was Donald too ethical. He’d learned that if nature had made you pint size, it was easier to trip a man up than knock him down. Some people called Donald “poison.”

There was only one thing about him that worried Bertha Cool. She thought he was too susceptible to women. Maybe he was. There was no doubt that women made fools of themselves over Donald. Bertha didn’t understand why but she didn’t mind. Donald’s girlfriends were pretty useful.

First came Perry Mason... then Douglas Selby the “D.A.”... TERRY CLANE, a new sleuth from America.

Jacob Mandra had a million-dollar apartment on the fringe of Chinatown — and a reputation.

Early one morning they found him dead. And a few hours later Terry Clane found himself in the District Attorney’s office — by request. Then the District Attorney began asking strange questions that Terry Clane didn’t care to answer, and when Terry finally sailed out of the D.A.’s office he realized that he and some of his friends were involved in the Mandra murder — up to their necks. But he was a brilliant young lawyer, had lived in the Far East, and knew how to apply Oriental wisdom to Occidental problems. Steeped in Chinese lore, he took life fatalistically and as a grand adventure.

Terry Clane is one of the most exciting and successful characters Mr. Gardner has created. Using extraordinary methods to solve an extraordinary murder, he beats the D. A. to the punch in a mystery that is filled with surprise, cunning, and excitement.

Mr. Gardner’s Chinatown background, incidentally, is authentic, and his plot is, as usual, as fast-moving and as tightly woven as any you will find in the galaxy of detective fiction.

Unfettered, unfiltered, unorthodox Bertha Cool and Donald Lam have four of the least likely and most popular private eyes in the business — and they’ve never been in sharper focus!

It’s always exciting when Erle Stanley Gardner assumes his favorite pseudonym of A. A. Fair and lets her rip! This new mystery novel is exhibit A proving beyond the shadow of a doubt that Bertha Cool and Donald Lam are among the most ingenious and inventive characters in mystery fiction.

Here is all the old sweet-and-sour, plus the catchiest plot ever dissected by the intrepid twosome. Bertha is at her toughest and funniest, and Donald is at top form knowing and debonair.

Beware the Curves

The receptionist told Perry Mason there were two men waiting in the outer office; one of them looked like a prosperous banker, the other a tramp. One wanted to see him about some corporation law, and the other had a damage claim. So Mason said, “I’ll see the tramp. Tell the banker I can’t be bothered with corporation law.”

But it turned out it was the tramp who wanted to sec him about corporation law. And that, in turn, merged into the story of one of the famous Lost Mines of the desert region of Southern California; of a sinewy little desert prospector and his partner, who had struck it rich, “housed-up” and, losing his health, had forsaken the big red-tiled mansion in the fashionable district of San Roberto to spread his sleeping bag out in the cactus garden at the far corner of the grounds. And finally there was the mysterious drowsy mosquito — was it a harbinger of death?

These characters, together with the lure of a fabulously rich gold deposit, discovered more than half a century ago, then lost, and lying untouched year after year, waiting only for chance and the ingenuity of Perry Mason to bring it back into the limelight, make for a fast moving, baffling Perry Mason yarn.

Perry Mason is presented with a strange bag of tricks in THE CASE OF THE MISCHIEVOUS DOLL.

Dorrie Ambler was a beauty. She also proved to be one of the most startling clients in Mason’s career — she insisted that he carefully inspect her appendectomy scar.

Perry thought this sort of thing was much more in Paul Drake’s line — and indeed, Paul was delighted to oblige...

But later, when Dorrie proceeded to make history — and the headlines — at the International Airport, both Mason and Drake realized that any future scars would he theirs battle stars, inflicted by Lt. Tragg and Hamilton Berger...

The client had an extraordinary air of assurance about her — one could almost say a queenly air.

There was no doubt that she was in some sort of jam, which had started years before when she had won a beauty contest. The question was, why was she trying to hide what had happened since — and who was trying to expose it?

Perry Mason was intrigued, and soon found himself unraveling a past that led straight to a trial for murder.

Erle Stanley Gardner is the world’s best-selling mystery writer for reasons this fast-paced story makes abundantly clear.

This sparkling mystery novel reveals a sensational new discovery in the field of scientific criminal investigation...

It all began with an auction. If Perry Mason hadn’t made a casual, five-dollar bid he wouldn’t have bought the personal effects of Helen Cadmus, missing secretary presumed a suicide...

If the personal effects hadn’t turned out to be diaries and a photograph album, Benjamin Addicks wouldn’t have come into the picture...

If Benjamin Addicks hadn’t been an eccentric millionaire, he wouldn’t have been conducting psychological experiments on gorillas...

And that brings us to the most spine-chilling scene ever encountered in a Gardner mystery: Perry Mason creeping through a silent house, stalked by A MURDEROUS, GRINNING GORILLA!

A new Gardner character — Bill Eldon! These two CLUE stories — each with a crime so calculated, so cold-blooded, that it came near being perfect — will establish human, kindly Sheriff Eldon as a dangerous rival for Perry Mason and Doug Selby.

Rockville’s good-hearted, aging Sheriff was slowing up — or so some thought — and the crowd in the courthouse was out to get him. Rank inefficiency, they said, the way he boasts about studying people’s reactions more than material evidence. But Bill Eldon, patient under fire, proved the value of his method...

The first clue...

THE CLUE OF THE RUNAWAY BLONDE

Sam Beckett found her body, lying face down in a plowed field, not far from the mansion where Marvin Higbee had lived and died, leaving his cunningly gathered wealth to a pack of quarrelsome relatives. She was beautiful — and a stranger. And there were no tracks in the soft earth around her, neither her own nor her murderer’s... A crime to cudgel with, this. But Sheriff Bill Eldon, moving slowly, relentlessly, found the answer — an answer that had the town reeling. Serialized as “Clues Don’t Count” in 1945.

The second clue...

THE CLUE OF THE HUNGRY HORSE

When they found the body, the head caved in by the hoof of a restive mare, they identified it as Lorraine Calhoun. An accident, Calhoun said — and the district attorney agreed — a regrettable accident, nothing more. But Bill Eldon thought it was murder... And calmly untangling the skeins of human deception, he found a murderer masked by a sanctimonious face.

Here are two fast-moving mysteries in one package. Here are shrewdly contrived plots, suspense, and a vital new investigator. Truly, Gardner at his customary best.

Erle Stanley Gardner — creator of Perry Mason — was the bestselling author of detective fiction of all time. Many of his best early short novels originally appeared in the famous magazine alongside Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

Gardner’s most enduring hero was Ed Jenkins, also known as “the Phantom Crook.” So enduring was he that when the author considered discontinuing the exploits of this intrepid man, his fans overwhelmingly succeeded in ensuring his longevity.

Working beyond the law, pursued by police criminals, Jenkins’ undesired notoriety made him a prize target for blackmail, coercion and imprisonment. But those who tried to force his hand never knew the man he could be when his back was to the wall, fighting.

This first ever collection of Ed Jenkins short novels represents the most thrilling adventures of Erle Stanley Gardner’s contribution to the hard-boiled detective genre.

Surrounded by the bandit horde of smooth Ayala and the lustful “Wolf,” the unarmed Americans were helpless — save for Dan Harder’s bare hands.

When we foundwe called SEVEN! When we met the “D.A.” — we shouted ELEVEN! They’re both naturals — and though Perry Mason doestake part in this novel, it marks the appearance of Erle Stanley Gardner’s second famous mystery-story character — the fighting young D.A. of Madison City!

The little clergyman had died — peacefully — in bed in the Madison Hotel. An overdose of sleeping powder! “Now listen, Doug, this is just a natural death, see?” the hotel proprietor said anxiously.

But Douglas Selby, District Attorney, just elected on a reform ticket, suspected it was more than that, and sent for the clergyman’s wife. She said the dead man was not her husband — then Selby knew definitely something was wrong.

So Doug found himself faced not only with a wily murderer, but with virulence from a hostile press and reluctant witnesses as well. Who was the little clergyman — was he murdered — by The fighting D.A. at last finds out, through methods entirely different from Perry Mason’s. But the Gardner technique, the pace and the excitement that have endeared Mason to thousands, are present every minute in this story of Douglas Selby.

Perry Mason, world-famous lawyer and sleuth, keeps a lady in mink under wraps in...

Perry Mason and Della Street were in the middle of a rare steak when the mink coat appeared in the hands of a puzzled restaurant proprietor.

The coat belonged, he said, to a waitress who had just taken it on the him... and he didn’t mean food. Now what to do with the coat?

Perry Mason examined the mink he decided there was more than a moth-eaten patch to meet the eye — particularly when the cops arrived...

Goldfish — a golddigger — and a valuable secret formula net Perry Mason the most baffling case of his career — and he nearly gets caught on his own hook...

Humorless Harrington Faulkner was fit to be tied. That golddigger was making preposterous demands — but if he didn’t pay, his goldfish would die. And they were special goldfish — he’d developed the strain himself — Veil Tail Moor Telescopes, they were, the ‘fish of death’...

Perry Mason thought he was a crank with a taller fish story than usual.

And then the fish disappeared and a body was found on the bathroom floor — beside a shattered goldfish bowl...

From then on Della Street and Perry Mason are in the case up to their necks, along with:

SALLY MADISON: a beautiful girl with model proportions, definitely not as good as gold...

TOM GRIDLEY: a chemist and an idealist — the inventor of formulas and trouble for Sally...

JANE FAULKNER: the second Mrs. Faulkner, who turns out to be not as dumb as she looks...

ELMER CARSON: cagey co-owner of Faulkner’s business with a proprietary interest in other things...

GENEVIEVE FAULKNER: the first Mrs. Faulkner and the reason Harrington Faulkner was afraid of divorces...

WILFRED DIXON: her business counsellor who knew how to bluff but didn’t like to be called...

JAMES STAUNTON: a gentleman who underwrites more than insurance...