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About the author
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.
Summary
Pauline began to give me double-talk and let her housecoat slip open. Finally she dimpled at me and said, 'Donald, I'm sorry I put on the act I did. But, well, you're a man and I like men'.
That's when Bertha got out of her chair and went up to Pauline. 'You're a tart and you like money. In about fifteen minutes you're going to be talking to the cops. So start telling the truth.' And with that Bertha threw her half across the room.
'Come on, dearie,' Bertha said, 'get rough. I just love to have the party get rough.'
Foreword
'The bestselling author of the century ... a master storyteller' New York Times
