Part of Series
Compared to a juicy murder trial, a case of feuding neighbors isn't exactly Perry Mason's cup of tea. But Arthur Cartright insists that Mason is the only one who can muzzle the howling police dog that's driving Cartright crazy. Perry doesn't realize just how crazy until he meets his client's neighbor, Clinton Foley. Foley says emphatically that Cartright is barking up the wrong tree with his canine complaint—and swears that the man is dangerously insane to boot. Mason's not the type to cop out on a client—but when Cartright draws up a will that leaves everything to this neighbor's wife, even Perry had to wonder if the man had slipped from anger to madness. That's why he pays a personal visit or two to Clinton Foley's house, where he eventually finds one missing wife, one dead dog, and one corpse!
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...
