Copyright & Information
The Adventures of Paul Pry
© 1990 Erle Stanley Gardner; Renewed 1983 Jean Bethel Gardner
© 2012 House of Stratus; Typography and Coding
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The right of Erle Stanley Gardner to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.
This edition published in 2012 by House of Stratus, an imprint of
Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,
Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.
Typeset by House of Stratus.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.
| EAN | ISBN | Edition | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1842320815 | 9781842320815 | |||
| 0755140265 | 9780755140268 | Kindle | ||
| 0755140451 | 9780755140459 | Epub | ||
| 0755155335 | 9780755155330 | Epdf |
This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.
Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.
About the Author
Erle Stanley Gardner (1889-1970) is the master of American mystery fiction.
A civil rights lawyer, his mysteries contain intricate, ever-twisting plots. Challenging and full of surprises, these are whodunits in the best tradition.
He wrote 146 books, 85 of which feature Perry Mason. The fictional attorney became the basis of a number of television series (reputedly 271 episodes), and achieved an enviable record for winning his cases.
Erle Stanley Gardner has an amazing sales record: at the height of his popularity in the mid-1960s he was selling an average of 26,000 copies of his novels a day, making him one of the world’s best selling author’s, easily outstripping at the time Agatha Christie and Barbara Cartland combined
Born in Massachusetts, Gardner went on to attend Law School in Indiana, but this only lasted for around a month, being suspended because of various distractions to his studies, especially boxing. He moved to California and became a self-taught attorney before opening his own law office, but bored with this ended up working in sales for five years. Returning to the law in 1921, he created another law firm, but again was not really enthusiastic, other than when acting as a trial lawyer.
Writing was his great passion and eventually he gave up the law completely to pursue a full time writing career. In this he was prodigious, setting himself a target of 66,000 words per week. His output under various pseudonyms, as well as his own, went wider than Perry Mason and also extended to non-fiction. He became an expert on the early Mexican exploitation of California.
In later life, law did play a significant part in his life once again. With friends, he set up what they termed ‘The Court of Last Resort’, aimed at investigating and attempting to reverse what they perceived as miscarriages of justice because of poor legal representation, or evidential problems.
Gardner himself once wrote:
‘I want to make my hero a fighter, not by having him be ruthless to women and underlings, but by creating a character who, with infinite patience jockeys his enemies into a position where he can deliver one good knockout punch.’