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

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 goes into high on page one and stays there through the fastest and most intriguing mystery A. A. Fair has ever created.

A beautiful young woman seeks the help of the world-famous lawyer to free her frail, wealthy uncle from the clutches of a conniving half brother. But the police believe she may be a murderer. Could they be right? Or will Perry Mason and his clever assistants, Paul Drake and Della Street be able to prove her innocence?

A dynamic young businesswoman is in danger of losing control of her flower shop, and someone sends poisoned bonbons to a nightclub hostess. Mason must reacquire some stock and defend the businesswoman.

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 Black Mask 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 and 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.

No suspense collection is complete without this anthology. Originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, the stories in this volume represent many of the biggest names in detective and suspense fiction: Ellery Queen, Harold Q. Masur, Celia Fremlin, Jack Ritchie, Patricia Highsmith and Bill Pronzini are only a few of the prize-winning authors in this amazing volume.

a book to remember...In this book you will investigate crime with such Famous Detectives asPerry MasonNero WolfeEllery Queenand read stories of detection and suspense by such Famous Mystery Writers asAgatha ChristieJohn Dickson CarrGeorge Harmon CoxeCharlotte ArmstrongHugh Pentecostand be surprised at tales of mystery and crime by such Famous Literary Figures asW. Somerset MaughamBen Hecht,John Van DrutenA book to remember, a book to read and reread — a book to treasure and keep permanently in your library...

4 novelets and 3 short stories by the creator of PERRY MASON and the best-selling American mystery writer of all time.

Erle Stanley Gardner, the creator of Perry Mason, was one of the leading writers for Black Mask, the legendary hard-boiled crime fiction magazine. Although Perry Mason never appeared in its pages, Black Mask in the early 1930s published a series of six short novels by Erie Stanley Gardner starring a crusading lawyer named Ken Corning who fought against injustice in a corrupt city Representing clients framed by crooked police arid bribed city officials, Ken Corning protected the rights of the underdog while relentlessly pursuing the guilty through a maze of violent subterfuge and sinister intrigue. Now, for the first time, all six Ken Corning short novels are collected in book form in Honest Money.These are good tight mysteries with lots of action — the stuff that made Erie Stanley Gardner justly famous. As a collection, they rank right up there with both Dead Men’s Letters and The Blonde in Lower Six.

First came Perry Mason... then Douglas Selby the “D.A.”... and now 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.

Gold is the pay dirt in all these rip-roaring western stories, more of Erle Stanley Gardner’s Whispering Sands 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.”

Otto Penzler rounds up the most cunning, ruthless, criminals in mystery fiction.The best mysteries — whether detective, historical, police procedural, cozy, or comedy-have one thing in common: a memorable culprit. For all the heroes in earnest pursuit, there are malefactors on the loose, determined to outfox their efforts and sow trouble in their wake. These are the rogues and villains who haunt our imaginations, but they often have more in common with their heroic counterparts than we might expect (and, as we shall see, some even moonlight as detectives or do-gooders themselves). The seventy-two handpicked stories in this collection introduce us to the miscreants who have schemed and slashed their way through the mystery canon over the past hundred and fifty years, captivating and confounding readers in the process.MEET DELINQUENT PSYCHES OF ALL STRIPES, INCLUDINGgentleman thieves, calculating crooks, fearsome body snatchers, masters of disguise, morally-challenged lawyers, deceitful doctors, heinous hit men. charismatic con men, amoral adventurers, supernatural suspects, deviant detectives, vile villainesses, and cold-blooded killersIN UNFORGETTABLE TALES BYRobert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, Washington Irving, Jack London, L. T. Meade, 0. Henry, Sinclair Lewis, Edgar Wallace, Leslie Charteris, Erle Stanley Gardner, Edward 0. Hoch, David Morrell, Loren D. Estleman, and countless others.

Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of Perry Mason and the world’s bestselling mystery writer, wrote for the leading magazines such as Argosy and Black Mask alongside Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.Following the success of Dead Mens Letters featuring the exploits of Gardner s most enduring pre-Perry Mason hero Ed Jenkins — also known as “The Phantom Crook” — this collection continues with the intrepid man caring less for the letter of the law than for what he doggedly believes to be right. But to achieve his ends, Jenkins is forced to confront police and criminals while avoiding the pitfalls of blackmail, coercion and incarceration. In The Blonde in Lower Six, a full length novel, and three other short novels contained in this volume, Ed Jenkins still remains his own man to those who try to force his hand.The pre-Perry Mason Erle Stanley Gardner was one of the most popular authors of his day and the accounts of Ed Jenkins were among his very best early work. The Ed Jenkins sagas, collected in one volume for the first time, represent the author s most thrilling adventures in the hard-boiled genre.

It was beautiful bait: two lovely thousand-dollar bills and a torn half of a ten-thousand-dollar note. Perry Mason swallowed it, hook, line, and sinker.They had gone to a lot of trouble. They had Mason’s private number, woke him up and persuaded him to meet them at his office in the middle of the night. There he found a man and a girl; a man who knew exactly what he wanted but wouldn’t explain; a girl who wore a man’s overcoat, a mask — and wouldn’t speak. It was the girl who kept the other half of the ten-grand note. When and if they needed Perry Mason he’d get her half. Not until then would he know who his client was. Perry suspected he was being played for a sucker, but he was too interested to swim away.The next morning, he felt the hook. It was murder, a murder obviously linked to his mysterious visitors. And the barb on the hook was that Perry couldn’t discover who his client was or what he was supposed to do. Della Street’s mocking jibes were hard to take.A racing Gardner story full of action, suspense and one of the most original plots Gardner has ever created.

“I count eight,” said Perry Mason, meaning brunettes.They were almost identical brunettes, at that, all standing at consecutive corners on the south side of the street, and they added up to such a beautiful dark mystery that even Perry Mason, famous connoisseur of fine murders that he is, was so fascinated he almost began a new career — behind bars.Mathematically Eva Martell was perfect: her height was five feet four and one-half inches, her weight one hundred and eleven, her waist twenty-four, her bust thirty-two.Because of these dimensions, curiously enough, she attracted dead bodies... She has also attracted one of Gardner’s top voltage plots, the kind that keeps Perry Mason and Della Street sizzling around in bizarre clues, counter clues and extra-legal activities. The kind that keeps Gardner readers up till dawn convinced that at last they are going to out-mastermind him.Gardner knows how to make his characters come to life. He also knows how to kill them off under completely baffling circumstances. He doesn’t believe in tricking his readers; it might be dangerous. So he gives you all the evidence with machine- gun rapidity — and lets you trick yourself. Even the most successful lawyers and criminologists come to a bad end the minute they tangle with a Gardner plot. Which is what makes him so successful.With this thought in mind we leave you, on the brink of one more Perry Mason mystery that anyone can figure out — wrong.

GUN OVERBOARDWhen Matilda Benson solicits the help of Perry Mason, her request seems simple enough: cruise to a gambling ship moored just beyond the twelve-mile limit and buy back the IOUs signed by Miss Benson's niece. But after Mason reaches the floating casino, he discovers problems aplenty--most notably the ship's owner with a bullet hole through his head.Strangely enough, Matilda and her niece are also on board that night . . . when someone tosses a gun over the railing. Does Perry Mason's client have something to hide? With the support of his trusty secretary, Della Street, and the ever-helpful Paul Drake, Mason dives into an ocean of menace.