How did Donald Lam get all the dames? He was just a brainy little guy, but he had the damnedest way with women...

The blondes melted like wax. 'You're the first guy who's given me a break,' said one. "Kiss me.' Lam kissed her. 'To hell with that stuff,' she said. 'Really kiss me.'

She was only the first - but even the busiest ladies' man has to take time out for murder, especially when he's been too chummy with a corpse and the cops are out for blood...his blood.

About the Author

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.



SHE PLAYED THE ODDS -- AND LOST!

When the beautiful girlfriend of a notorious gangster vanishes, the last man to be seen with her needs an alibi -- and fast. Enter Donald Lam of the Cool & Lam detective agency. Donald tracks down the two women with whom his client claims to have spent the night and the client declares the case closed.

But it's not. Something about his client's story doesn't add up, and Donald can't resist the temptation to keep digging. Before he knows it, he's dug up connections to a mining scam, an illegal casino, and a double homicide -- plus an opportunity for an enterprising private eye to make a small fortune, if he can just stay alive long enough to cash in on it!