Résultats de "Erle Stanley Gardner" dans Toutes les catégories

The extraordinary Perry Mason never handles straightforward divorce cases, but this one is an especially strange bird. Rita Swaine is dating her sister's ex-boyfriend. Her sister, Rosalind, is married to shady insurance adjuster Walter Prescott, who's got dollar signs in his eyes and ice water in his veins. When Rita's beau gallantly steps in to warn Rosalind about her heinous husband's designs, Prescott hatches a plan to prey on them all...by suing for big profit.

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 and is now being blackmailed. Perry Mason can't decide who is hiding what. Then comes murder - and one of Perry Mason's toughest trials.

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. He knows there has been trouble in Bassett's life. His wife wants out, his stepson hates him, an embezzler can't pay him back - and there's the man with a glass eye who hired Perry Mason even before his glass eye went missing and was found in the hands of the deceased.

Years ago Alden Leeds found a rich vein of gold in the Klondike. Now his greedy relatives fear he's planning to throw his fortune away on a gold-digging spouse, Emily Milicant. So to prevent the two from joining in holy matrimony, they commit their affluent kin to a sanitarium on a trumped-up charge. Then Leeds escapes, only to end up in the company of Emily's blackmailing brother, John, a manufacturer of fixed dice, rolling bones that always come up seven.

A waitress in a favorite restaurant of Mason's runs out in the middle of the lunch rush, leaving behind her pricey mink coat. But this is only the first question in a cop-killer case that traps Mason's client with both an impossible story and the murder weapon. With Perry as a prime suspect with a blazing gunpowder trail that leads straight to the heart of the police department....

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 - and he wants the feline off the premises by hook, crook...or poison. When Perry Mason takes the case, he quickly finds there's much more at stake than an old man's cat - a million dollars or more to be exact....

Take a no-holds-barred proxy war for a rich Texas oil company, with Jerry Conway, its young president, fighting for survival. Add a beautiful woman in a mudpack and not much else who gives up a freshly fired .38 to Conway before she shows him the door. Top it off with the body of another young woman with a bullet in her chest fired by the same gun, and you have the recipe for the perfect murder - and the perfect frame-up.

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, a man murdered on someone else's yacht. As the surprising scenario unravels, it takes a sharp mind like Mason's, the savvy of his secretary Della Street, and the legwork of investigator Paul Drake to pull all the clues out of the water before the case sinks like a deadweight.

In order to help her seriously ill boyfriend, gorgeous Sally Madison sets out to separate wealthy Harrington Faulkner from some of his money by offering him a cure for his ailing exotic fish, but her plan goes awry when the fish mysteriously vanish and Faulkner turns up dead.

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...that she had already murdered once and would not hesitate to strike again. Mason's own curiosity made him take the case, and before long he was wanted for questioning by several different officers of the law. Question: was Myra Davenport a quiet little person, who enjoyed nothing better than pottering about in her garden? Or was she a poisoner, a minx, a modern Lucrezia Borgia?

The voice on the phone was young and silky. The woman it belonged to touched something soft in Perry Mason's cool, legalistic mind. The offer she made was too intriguing to pass up. But what began as a request for a simple courtroom visit turned into an intrigue of baffling complexity...as well as one of the most cleverly rigged frame-ups of Perry's career.

He announced himself as Mr. Cash. His calling card was ten crisp hundred-dollar bills! "My wife has disappeared," he told Perry Mason. "She's in trouble of some sort. I want to find her." Mr. Cash's wife was indeed in trouble of a most serious sort. First, her jewelry disappeared. Then she disappeared. Perry Mason had to find her before the police could arrest her - for murder.

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.

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. Shortly after quitting her job and moving to Hollywood, she is picked up by a well-dressed man while hitchhiking. The man loses control of the car and they end up in a horrible accident. Both Stephane and the driver escape unscathed but the strange man flees the scene leaving Stephane to face a charge of manslaughter.

Criminal lawyer and all-time number-one mystery author Erle Stanley Gardner wrote close to 150 novels that have sold 300 million copies worldwide. His most popular books starred the incomparable attorney-sleuth Perry Mason. In The Case of the Curious Bride, a woman claiming not to be a bride consults Mason about her "friend", whose husband, long thought to have died in a plane crash, turns up alive.

Virginia Baxter is the only witness still living who can vouch for the authenticity of Lauretta Trent's will. Lauretta Trent, a wealthy widow is also living. But for how long? Someone has been peppering the spicy food Lauretta loves with arsenic. Could it be the same someone who tried framing Virginia Baxter for drug smuggling?

Engaged to a dynamic young go-getter on his way up the corporate ladder, secretary Mildred Crest was riding high. Until her prince charming embezzled company funds and skipped town, leaving Mildred with nothing but a ring on her finger and egg on her face. Now all she wants is to start life over again and when a fateful drive leads to the death of a lone hitchhiker, Mildred gets that chance.

Perry Mason had no hesitation in defending Albert Brogan, a broke ex-salesman against a charge of robbery. He's counting on the testimony of the nightclub hostess Martha Lavina to clear him. She had most of the requirements for a good professional hostess, and one was an innocent face. That, plus various other attractions, made her a formidable challenge as she faced Perry Mason on the witness stand.

A talented but overprotective young man has his hands full as trustee of the inheritance of a beautiful blonde but very naive young woman. But his love and her money don't mix. Why would he embezzle a quarter of a million dollars from his client "for her own good?" Perry Mason may be able to prove, in fact, that his client is no embezzler...but what happens when murder rears its head?

Helen Cadmus was dead - but how had it happened? Suicide, most people said. She jumped off that millionaire's yacht in a fit of despair, her body was never found, and the case was closed. The story was too neat to suit Perry Mason. It didn't add up. Somebody was concealing the truth about Helen's death, and how was going to uncover it even if it killed him.