Perry Mason refused to believe the proof against his client. The district attorney was too smug. The evidence was too good.

Perry Mason refused to believe the proof against his client. The district attorney was too smug. The evidence was too good.

Almost everyone knows that Stanley Ketchel was one of the great boxing champions of all time, but many have forgotten that he was murdered—and under baffling circumstances. All the evidence pointed to a gambling syndicate yet the case was obscured by a missing diamond stickpin, a lucky bracelet, and a pretty cook. Here Erle Stanley Gardner relates how this strange case was solved by not following the logical clues.

Perry Mason and Della Street are writing love letters this time — to a girl they’ve never seen. In fact they don’t even know her name.

But they’ve seen a letter she wrote to a Lonely Hearts Magazine. According to her, she’s both attractive and an heiress, an heiress who’s tired of people who love her for her money...

According to Perry Mason, she’s lying. And there’s something phony about the Lonely Hearts business — including Mr. Robert Caddo who runs it. But there’s nothing phony about the beautiful corpse that almost puts Perry behind bars for life.

It takes talent to kill two birds with one stone... but it takes genius (Erle Stanley Gardner variety) to make three bull’s-eyes with one arrow.

This Perry Mason mystery is a tantalizing triple-decker.

One threesome comprises three glamorous ladies — all long-legged models with ambitions that range from keeping the home fires burning to putting the home fires out.

Another trio is a far-from-pleasant collection of small metal objects called guns.

Finally, the favorite triumvirate of mystery readers around the world: Perry Mason, Della Street and Paul Drake. This is one of Mason’s most absorbing cases — meaning sensational action all the way, with a fabulous courtroom climax.

A mistake at a murder scene dogs Perry while he tries to represent a woman taken in by a con man.

A new and different Gardner — featuring the State Police and forensic medicine.

It was there that Rob Trenton found himself on a blissful tour with the lovely, if mysterious, Linda Carroll. And it was there that the bumptious Merton Ostrander joined the twosome and, as far as Rob was concerned, made it a crowd.

But it was on a lonely road outside New York City that the real trouble began. For that was when Rob discovered the cache of dope cleverly concealed in Linda’s car — setting the scene for murder...

While Perry Mason is enjoying a moonlit canoe ride, he admires a naked bathing beauty. Little does he know he'll soon be rescuing her and that next day he'll have to clear her of a jewlery-theft charge. But then she's suddenly charged again--this time with murder. It takes all of Perry's wiles, Della's insights, and Paul Drake's deft detecting to solve 'The Case of the Negligent Nymph'.

Perry Mason finds that “art is long but life is fleeting” — especially in the fine art of murder...

The painting was a modern masterpiece. But was it authentic? Three experts staked their reputations on the fact that it was. But Collin M. Durant called it a rank imitation. The witness to his remark gave Perry Mason a signed affidavit, and millionaire Otto Olney, owner of the painting, sued for slander.

Then the witness — a beautiful blonde art student and model — disappeared, leaving Perry Mason headed for the courtroom and a spectacular trial. A trial not, as originally planned, for slander, but one for murder in the first degree...

If Della Street had not been so intrigued, Perry Mason may well have missed one of the most baffling cases of his spectacular career...

Take one wife, strikingly beautiful... one ex-wife, whittled down to make a comeback... a gorgeous secretary trying to play the role of Ugly Duckling... and you have three lovely and shapely ladies who figure prominently in the life — and death — of Morley L. Theilman.

It started with blackmail: the suitcase bulging with $20 bills, the crude, threatening notes, the clever directions for payment — and ended with murder. But why kill the goose who laid the golden egg?

Perry Mason pulls some of the fastest legal footwork of his career — in front of judge and jury — before he finds the answer and cracks the case of the prosecution.

When two men change bedrooms at a house-party, everyone thinks that the sleepwalker with the carving knife killed the wrong man.

FRANK DURYEA, the young D. A., was on the spot. Elections were coming on. The ranchers in Petrie, California, were up in arms over a loophole in the law. A mysterious and seemingly impossible murder was making a confused situation even more embarrassing. And a lot of very nice people were involved, each certain that the others were mixed up in the murder.

ENTER CRAMPS WIGGINS. Duryea and his wife Milred had learned to expect most anything when her grandfather clattered into town in his disreputable-looking car with the home-made trailer. Cramps’ visits had an effect like that of a fresh, salty gale — invigorating and energizing, but promising trouble at least, if not out-and-out destruction.

And this time was no exception. Excitement was Gramps’ life. If there wasn’t any, he made it; and if there was, he helped it along and made it bigger.

Gramps had never let himself become too civilized — and a lucky thing it was for the District Attorney. For when they found the murdered man in the chicken rancher’s shack it was Gramps, with his eye for the girls and his knowledge of comparatively primitive accoutrements such as oil lamps, who found the astounding answer to a confusing puzzle.

Even Paul Drake was convinced... this time, Perry Mason’s client was guilty!

Although Amelia Corning, owner of the Corning mine interests, was confined to a wheel chair, no one had the misconception that she was a gentle, little old lady. Half-blind and crippled, she might be, but lesser characters quailed before her steel-trap mind and razor-sharp tongue — and Susan Fisher was no exception.

How could Susan explain the discrepancies she found in the company accounts, or the shoe box she had wrested from the district manager’s 7-year-old son — a shoe box filled with $100 bills?

She couldn’t. That’s why she went to Perry Mason, and in no time flat the lawyer was walking the worst tight rope of his legal career. As for Miss Corning, she barely missed being wheeled out feet first.

When a man’s past threatens his family’s future there’s only one way to turn — to Perry Mason

Harlow Bissinger Bancroft, head of a vast corporate empire and a happily married man, had a battery of lawyers — not one of any use to him in his present situation.

That’s why he sat facing Perry Mason, his air of authority vanished, a deeply disturbed man.

“There are three ways of dealing with a blackmailer,” Mason told him, “but only one should concern you — tell him to go jump in the lake.”

The blackmailer was found on the lake, all right, but he’d not had a chance to jump in it for he was as dead as the proverbial mackerel.

A bratty heiress wants to keep the news of her marriage a secret from the guardian who controls her purse strings, but when he's murdered, her groom is accused.

Time — As in all Gardner mysteries, now.

Place — A fashionable West Coast resort.

Some of the dramatic and colorful characters involved—

TED SHALE: all he wants is to sell wealthy Addison Stearne some hotel supplies — and he pancakes right into what looks like a double murder on a yacht.

NITA MOLINE: glamorous and seductive blonde. What is she to Stearne? and what is she doing aboard the yacht?

JOAN HARPLER: her Albatross is anchored near the palatial Gypsy Queen. She seems to spend a lot of her time aboard — when she isn’t swimming.

PEARL RIGHT: she is worried. Has her jealousy driven her husband to murder?

WARREN HILBERS: Pearl’s brother. His chief concern is his sister’s well-being and no effort seems too great to save her from her conscience.

ELWELL AND FIELDING: they don’t want Stearne to take up the option on their oil well.

FRANK DURYEA: young D.A. He finds himself sharing the investigation with the whole family—

...including...

hell-raising, foxy old Grandpa Wiggins who comes in like a lamb and goes out like a lion.

A spoiled woman is keen to keep news of her affairs from her powerful husband, even if it costs Perry his freedom when she swears he was on the murder scene.

The fishing season was on — Sheriff Bill Eldon was making his regular swing through the mountains — then death struck suddenly.

Millionaires were that hunter’s only game, and when he’d bagged them he sewed their lips up tight for he knew that even dead men sometimes talk. But Paul Pry, professional opportunist, was a tailor of sorts himself, with a needle as sharp and deadly as the cross-stitch killer’s—an avenging sword cane to darn living flesh!

A space capsule reels into space (in the 1920s!), complete with rocket and weightless passengers. Intelligent ants guard a ledge of solid gold in darkest Africa. A scientific miracle makes people invisible. Fans of Erle Stanley Gardner will be surprised and delighted to discover in these long-unavailable stories that he was one of our earliest science fiction writers — and science fiction readers will regret that he did not write many more.

Published in Argosy magazine in the 1920s and 1930s, these suspenseful tales display Gardner’s grasp of a vast range of unlikely subject matter and the masterful gift for plot and action that made him the best-selling author of all time. Some of the stories are peopled with his classic cops and killers, tough reporters and sleuths of detective fiction, along with the mad professors and strange geniuses of fantastic science. The nature of molecules is the key to a locked-room murder in The Human Zero title story, and A Year in a Day is another crime story. But there is also natural disaster when a shift in the earth’s poles causes a worldwide flood (with a gripping description of the inundation of New York City), and still more eerie events are tied to hypnotism, reincarnation, and exotic ceremonies in a lost temple in India. The author’s imagination and ingenuity seem limitless; the action and entertainment he could pack into a 10,000-word story are remarkable.

The Human Zero: The Science Fiction Stories of Erle Stanley Gardner is a find for all his fans and collectors of his work.