Part of Series
"FIND ANYTHING ON THAT HOBO'S BODY?" District Attorney Doug Selby fired the question at Perkins. The coroner answered, "A billfold with one of those in-case-of-accident cards. He has a brother in Phoenix. Funny thing about that. The man was a hobo but his brother seems to be some pumpkins." The mystery of the hobo's battered corpse is deepened by a telegram from a man who wasn't there. Then a bookkeeper vanishes and a dead man's fingerprints must be where they aren't and can't be where they are. A routine case had grown into a suspense thriller, and Doug Selby found himself up to his neck in clues that look like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
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...
