Case of the Blonde Bonanza
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'Why would anyone hire a girl with the figure of a stripteaser and pay her $100 a week to put on weight?' Perry Mason asked Della Street.
'In the course of my secretarial career,' Della said demurely, 'I've seen quite a few approaches, but this is a new one.'
'According to the letter of this contract,' Mason mused, 'if Dianne Alder should marry a millionaire and her husband should die, the party of the first part would be entitled to fifty percent.' Suddenly Mason snapped his fingers.
'You've got it?' Della Street asked.
'I have an explanation. I don't know whether it's the explanation, but it's quite an explanation'.
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 than 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.