Part of Series
Her husband was stealing her money, while accusing her of a plot to poison him—or so claims the frightened young Mrs. Myrna Davenport. She wants Perry Mason to find the incriminating note her husband left for the authorities accusing her of murder—especially now that Davenport is dying. Perry finds the envelope, but it's filled with blank paper. Then Davenport does die, or so everyone thinks until his alleged corpse climbs out a window and drives away—straight into a prepared open grave in another county. With Davenport finally dead, Perry could become a possible accessory to murder. And though the victim died twice, Perry gets only one clear shot at saving his client—and himself.
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...
