Bats Fly at Dusk
A cool girl hunt is what the blind man wanted. He was searching for a pretty young woman, soft spoken and slender, whom he'd never seen but knew had vanished, and he was willing to pay Bertha Cool anything to find her.
The whole thing seemed impossible and sounded suspicious, but the man's money was right - even if his motives weren't - and given the choice Bertha always followed the dollar sign.
Only this time, the dollar sign pointed to murder and fingered Bertha Cool as a red hot suspect.
Erle Stanley Gardner (1889-1970)
Born in Malden, Massachusetts, Erle Stanley Gardner left school in 1909 and attended Valparaiso University School of Law in Indiana for just one month before he was suspended for focusing more on his hobby of boxing that his academic studies. Soon after, he settled in California, where he taught himself the law and passed the state bar exam in 1911. The practise of law never held much interest for him, however, apart from as it pertained to trial strategy, and in his spare time he began to write for the pulp magazines that gave Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler their start. Not long after the publication of his first novel, The Case of the Velvet Claws, featuring Perry Mason, he gave up his legal practice to write full time. He had one daughter, Grace, with his first wife, Natalie, from whom he later separated. In 1968 Gardner married his long-term secretary, Agnes Jean Bethell, whom he professed to be the real 'Della Street', Perry Mason's sole (although unacknowledged) love interest. He was one of the most successful authors of all time and at the time of his death, in Temecula, California in 1970, is said to have had 135 million copies of his books in print in America alone.