Count of Nine
You might call Bertha Cool the broad beam of the Cool and Lam Detective Agency. As this story begins, all 200-odd pounds of her are quivering happily at the thought of a fat fee to come.
All Bertha has to do is guard the priceless treasures of wealthy explorer Dean Crockett II, who is about to throw a fabulous party. But somebody's hand is quicker even than Bertha's gimlet eye, and one valuable jade Buddha and a primitive blowgun disappear.
That's when brainy bantam-weight Donald Lam steps in, and the pace sets off fiercely, before reaching a sensational, unexpected climax.
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.