Spill the Jackpot

by Erle Stanley Gardner

Overview

The diminutive detective and his bulldog of a boss head to Las Vegas to find a runaway bride in this hard-boiled mystery by the creator of Perry Mason.
 
Donald Lam and Bertha Cool make for a couple of unlikely detectives. Donald is a charming ex-lawyer in his thirties who may lack brawn but makes up for it in brains. Bertha, meanwhile, is a fifty-something-year-old widow who won’t take lip from anyone. She certainly won’t let a bout of illness keep her down. After a stay at the sanitarium, she and Donald are off to Las Vegas for their latest case. Who needs rest?
 
Mr. Whitewell needs Donald and Bertha to find his son’s fiancée and learn why she abruptly left town. Donald quickly gets to work with just a mysterious letter as his only lead. Soon he uncovers a scheme to swindle casinos, along with a brutal murder. Now he must determine what’s going on before someone ensures he’s the next member of the agency to have a long hospital stay—or worse.
 
“The best American writer, of course, is Erle Stanley Gardner.” —Evelyn Waugh
 
“Gardner has a way of moving the story forward that is almost a lost art: great stretches of dialogue alternate with lively chunks of exposition, and the two work together perfectly, without sacrificing momentum.” —Booklist

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781504074254
Publisher:	MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Publication date:	05/17/2022
Series:	The Bertha Cool and Donald Lam Mysteries
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	258
Sales rank:	378,737
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Erle Stanley Gardner (1889–1970) was the top selling American author of the twentieth century, primarily due to the enormous success of his Perry Mason Mysteries, which numbered more than eighty and inspired a half-dozen motion pictures and radio programs, as well as a long-running television series starring Raymond Burr. Having begun his career as a pulp writer, Gardner brought a hard-boiled style and sensibility to his early Mason books, but he gradually developed into a more classic detective novelist, providing clues to allow astute readers to solve his many mysteries. For over a quarter of a century, he wrote more than a million words a year under his own name as well as numerous pseudonyms, the most famous being A. A. Fair. 
 
Erle Stanley Gardner (1889–1970) was an author and lawyer who wrote nearly 150 detective and mystery novels that sold more than one million copies each, making him easily the best-selling American writer of his time. He ranks as one of the most prolific specialists of crime fiction due to his popular alter ego, lawyer-detective Perry Mason. A self-taught lawyer, Gardner was admitted to the California bar in 1911 and began defending poor Chinese and Mexicans as well as other clients. Eventually his writing career, which began with the pulps, pushed his law career aside. As proven in his Edgar Award–winning The Court of Last Resort, Gardner never gave up on the cases of wrongly accused individuals or unjustly convicted defendants.