Synopses & Reviews
When the beautiful girlfriend of a notorious gangster vanishes, it's up to P.I. Donald Cool to get to the bottom of her disappearance and of a mining scam, an illegal casino operation, a double homicide, and an opportunity for an enterprising private eye to make a small fortune...if he can just stay alive long enough to cash in!
Review
"Absolute gangbusters!" Library Journal
Review
"An ingenious story." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Among his many other virtues, Erle Stanley Gardner is surely the finest constructor of hyper-intricate puzzles in evidence..." Anthony Boucher, The New York Times Book Review
Review
"One of the best in the series....You can only love a book where everyone gets exactly what they deserve in triplicate." Karen Ellington, The Mystery Read
Synopsis
Erle Stanley Gardner is the creator of Perry Mason and one of the most popular American authors of all time, with over 100 million books sold.
Top of the Heap a thrilling hardboiled detective story from Gardner's legendary "Cool & Lam" series is appearing in print for the first time in more than 30 years.
Synopsis
The legendary, long-out-of-print Cool & Lam mystery series by the creator of Perry Mason returns, as private detective Donald Lam unravels his own client's alibi for the night a gangster's girlfriend vanished. Reissue.
About the Author
One of the best-selling authors of all time, Erle Stanley Gardner's greatest creations include crusading attorney Perry Mason (star of more than eighty novels, not to mention the long-running TV series and TV movies) and the hardboiled detective team of Bertha Cool and Donald Lam, who appeared in more than two dozen adventures of their own. An attorney himself, Gardner also founded the Court of Last Resort, a group that investigated criminal cases they believed had ended in an erroneous conviction. The group's real-world detective work resulted in a number of convictions being reversed and prevented the execution of at least one man who was later proved innocent.
Series Description
From World War II through the 1960s, paperback crime novels were one of the fastest-selling categories in book publishing. Millions of readers snapped up hundreds of millions of books by well-known authors like Erle Stanley Gardner and Mickey Spillane, as well as by promising young writers like Lawrence Block, Elmore Leonard, and Ed McBain. Today, Block, Leonard, and McBain still make the bestseller lists with each new hardcover but the pulp novels that first captured the public's imagination weren't hardcovers. They were paperbacks you could fit in your back pocket, with jaw-dropping cover paintings and bare-knuckled prose that grabbed you by the collar with the first sentence and held you until the last page. No one's published books like that in years.
Until now.
Hard Case Crime is dedicated to reviving the vigor and excitement, the suspense and thrills the sheer entertainment of the golden age of paperback crime novels, both by bringing back into print the best work of the pulp era and by introducing readers to new work by some of today's most powerful writers and artists. Determined detectives and dangerous women...fortune hunters and vengeance seekers...ingenious criminals and men on the run for their lives...Hard Case Crime novels offer everything you want from a great story, all in handsome and affordable mass-market editions.