Erle Stanley Gardner

Art student Maxine Lindsay, as the guest of her mentor, art dealer Colin Durant, attends a reception aboard the yacht of millionaire Otto Olney....

Married Eva Griffin has been caught with a prominent congressman, and is ready to pay the editor of a sleazy tabloid hush money to protect the politician....

Young Marjorie Clune's best asset is her greatest misfortune: a pair of exquisite legs. They attract the perfect heel, a self-professed movie promoter named Frank Patton....

Frances Celane has good reason to pout. Thanks to a provision in her late father's will administered by her uncle, she's caught in the middle of a family feud between matrimony and money....

In his will, Peter Laxter guaranteed his faithful caretaker a job and a place to live...for life. But Laxter's grandson Sam says the deal doesn't include the caretaker's cat....

Wealthy businessman Hartley Bassett has killed himself. There's a typewritten suicide note and three guns lying near his body. But for Perry Mason, that's evidence overkill....

Platinum blonde Veronica Dale is arrested on a charge of vagrancy. Yet, she has a hotel reservation in her name. Addison, head of a department store, booked the room for her....

A spanking-new tin can, secretly placed among the rows of Mrs. Florence Gentrie's preserves, contains not a speck of food - but it does carry one very damning clue to a murder....

On his way to finding out, Mason meets Mrs. Milfield, a barely distraught widow, and a slew of suspicious characters all intimately connected to the recently deceased....

In the dead of night, a thick fog lies over the black waters. You are aboard a fancy yacht full of fancy people who loathe one another. Suddenly you hear...A scream! A splash! A shot....

Who killed Philip Rease? Peter Kent was known to be a sleepwalker and a bloodstained knife was found under his pillow. There were people who would like to see Peter Kent out of the way....

"The Case of the Irate Witness," the mystery which is the star of this collection, is the only one that Erle Stanley Gardner ever wrote featuring Perry Mason in short story form....

Perry Mason had no hesitation in defending Albert Brogan, a broke ex-salesman against a charge of robbery....

Poker-faced Nellie Conway, the nurses bed-ridden Elizabeth Bain, brings trouble when she calls on Perry Mason with a glass phial containing four pills which she suspects are poison....

Who was that masked woman? That was the question plaguing Perry Mason. No one loves a good mystery more than Mason - but being asked to represent a client who is concealing her identity....

Aspiring actress Stephane Olger just wants to be in pictures. But she may end up in mug shots instead when she gets herself caught up in a crime....

The two women in Perry Mason's office were a cat-and-mouse combination. And at first glance it seemed that little Mrs. Davenport was the mouse. But her husband said she was trying to kill him....

Though some think they saw a ghost, it was a real, live woman in the (mostly exposed) flesh flitting through Sierra Vista Park....

Perry Mason is dining peacefully at the Golden Goose cafe when he receives a mysterious phone call. The frantic woman on the other end of the line is desperate to retain Mason's services....

The voice on the phone was young and silky. The woman it belonged to touched something soft in Perry Mason's cool, legalistic mind....