Part of Series
Douglas Selby, the ambitious young District Attorney of the territory around Madison City, had up before him a young man guilty of embezzling a comparatively small sum of money which he had spent gambling. Selby could have locked him up - and perhaps ruined his life. But he wanted to find the how and the why of this otherwise law-abiding young man's gambling. Selby's investigations led him to a hit-and-run motorcycle accident, to blackmail, and to the doorstep of DeWitt Stapleton, the local big-wig, who ran things in that part of the country by and for 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...
