Part of Series
Chinatown... To baffle the lie-detector clamped on his arm, Terry Clane used the technique of intense concentration that he had learnt in the Orient. But the sight of a little Chinese figure - an old man riding backwards on a mule - sent the lie-detector needle leaping: for he had given it once to Cynthia, his former fiancée and a close friend of a man convicted of murder who had escaped. 'Either there is something which I have not accurately diagnosed,' said the police examiner, 'or else... you murdered Horace Farnsworth.' That was just the start of a long and spine-chilling game of hide-and-seek played through San Francisco's Chinatown.
Author
Erle Stanley Gardner was an American lawyer and author of detective stories who also published under the pseudonyms A.A. Fair, Kyle Corning, Charles M. Green, Carleton Kendrake, Charles J. Kenny, Les Tillray, and Robert Parr. Innovative and restless in his nature, he was bored by the routine of legal practice, the only part of which he enjoyed was trial work and the development of trial strategy. In his spare time, he began to write for pulp magazines, which also fostered the early careers of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. He created many different series characters for the pulps, including the ingenious Lester Leith, a "gentleman thief" in the tradition of Raffles, and Ken Corning, a crusading lawyer who was the archetype of his most successful creation, the fictional lawyer and crime-solver Perry Mason, about whom he wrote more than eighty novels. With the success of Perry Mason, he gradually reduced his contributions to the pulp magazines, eventually withdrawing from the medium entirely, except for non-fiction articles on travel, Western history, and forensic science. See more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erle\_Sta...
