Edgar Award Winner: True stories of miscarriages of justice, legal battles, and landmark reversals, by the creator of Perry Mason. In 1945, Erle Stanley Gardner, noted attorney and author of the popular Perry Mason mysteries, was contacted by an overwhelmed California public defender who believed his doomed client was innocent. William Marvin Lindley had been convicted of the rape and murder of a young girl along the banks of the Yuba River, and was awaiting execution at San Quentin. After reviewing the case, Gardner agreed to help—it seemed the fate of the “Red-Headed Killer” hinged on the testimony of a colorblind witness. Gardner’s intervention sparked the Court of Last Resort. The Innocence Project of its day, this ambitious and ultimately successful undertaking was devoted to investigating, reviewing, and reversing wrongful convictions owing to poor legal representation, prosecutorial abuses, biased police activity, bench corruption, unreliable witnesses, and careless forensic-evidence testimony. The crimes: rape, murder, kidnapping, and manslaughter. The prisoners: underprivileged and vulnerable men wrongly convicted and condemned to life sentences or death row with only one hope—the devotion of Erle Stanley Gardner and the Court of Last Resort. Featuring Gardner’s most damning cases of injustice from across the country, The Court of Last Resort won the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime. Originating as a monthly column in Argosy magazine, it was produced as a dramatized court TV show for NBC.

"This has a double claim to special notice,- the quality of the book, and the identity of the author, the "cipher clerk" who broke with the Soviet Union in 1945 and turned over the documentary evidence contributing to the breaking of Canada's spy ring. Inevitably, one feels that in depicting Novikov, a scholar who molded himself into a "Soviet man", he has tapped his own knowledge of the techniques used to break down a man's resistance, to destroy his moral sense, to corrupt wholly. This figure is set in opposition to the "titan", Mikhail Gorin, a giant literary figure (based, the publishers indicate, on Maxim Gorki), recalled by Stalin to add to the propaganda publishing of the state which he had helped, in earlier years, bring into being. It is a fascinating and horrifying story, with intricate subplots involving insatiable lust for power, petty jockeying for position, ruthless elimination of all who differ from authority, and elimination of any independence even in affairs of the heart. Novikov, really in love with Gorin's daughter, Nina, is instructed to forget it and turn elsewhere; then when his marriage to Lida brings her momentary happiness, that too is negated by her father's arrest as "enemy of the people". The book builds up to an inevitable climax of disaster, as Gorin forcibly recognizes the position into which he has been tricked - and Novikov descends to the depths of infamy. But the final note is one of faint hope, that there is still the spark of faith in man. The story has the sweep and power of Russian classical literature, and despite its length, is a holding and moving reading experience from start to finish. "--Kirkus.

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