Perry Mason
Erle Stanley Gardner wrote dozens of novels around defense attorney Perry Mason, and the formula is almost ritualistic: an innocent client, a damning circumstantial case, and a courtroom finale where Mason wrings a confession out of someone other than his client. The pleasure is in the procedure, not in doubt about the outcome.
Gardner, a practicing lawyer himself, packed the books with real evidentiary maneuvering, which keeps them sharper than their pulpy alliterative titles suggest. Loyal secretary Della Street and investigator Paul Drake do the legwork that sets up each cross-examination.
The series stretched across three decades of publishing, with the later 1991 television movie The Case of the Maligned Mobster extending the character well past Gardner's lifetime. Read in sequence, the books are a master class in how a rigid template can stay reliably entertaining.
The Perry Mason franchise spans 14 books, 1 films in the CrossBinge catalog.
Films
Books
- The case of the sleepwalker's niece (1936)
- The case of the dangerous dowager (1937)
- The case of the borrowed brunette (1946)
- The case of the vagabond virgin (1948)
- The Case of the Dubious Bridegroom (1949)
- The case of the negligent nymph (1950)
- The Case of the Nervous Accomplice (1955)
- The case of the gilded lily (1956)
- The case of the beautiful beggar (1960)
- The Case of the Reluctant Model (1962)
- The case of the mischievous doll (1963)
- The case of the daring divorcee (1964)
- The case of the troubled trustee (1965)
- The case of the careless cupid (1968)