"Lawyer Perry Mason is never so zealous to ferret out the truth as when he comes to the aid of some poor blighter who has no money to pay him. In the case of the hesitant hostess, an innocent man is framed first for a hold-up and then for murder. It takes all Mason's courtroom mastery as well as his skill in handling night-club blondes and other tricky types to arrive at the solution of an unusually baffling puzzle." --

Mason is hired to identify a woman based on an appendix scar, as she fears being a look-alike to an heiress may be a setup for her arrest. Mason later defends the heiress on murder charges.

An exploration of the enduring popularity of the television series Perry Mason and its universal reputation as the most formulaic program in the history of broadcast television. Perry Mason was one of the most successful television programs from the 1950s and remains one of the most influential crime melodramas from any period. The show's influence goes far beyond its nine-year tenure (1957–66), the millions of dollars it generated for its creators and for CBS, and the definitive identification it provided its star, Raymond Burr. Perry Mason has become a true piece of Americana, evolving through a formulaic approach that law professors continue to use today as a teaching tool. In his examination of Perry Mason, author Thomas Leitch looks at why this series has appealed to so many for so long and what the continued appeal tells us about Americans' attitudes toward lawyers and the law, then and now. Beginning with its roots in earlier detective fiction, stories of fictional attorneys, and the work of Erle Stanley Gardner (the show's creator), Leitch lays out the circumstances under which Perry Mason was conceived and marketed as a distinct franchise. The evolution of Perry Mason is charted here in an inclusive manner, discussing the show's broadcast history (ending with the series of two-hour telemovies that aired nearly twenty years after the original series ended) alongside its generic nature and place within popular culture, the show's ideological dynamic, and issues of authorship in the context of television. This concise study is an excellent tool for television and media scholars as well as fans of the Perry Mason series.

Novels bring us into fictional worlds where we encounter the lives, struggles, and dreams of characters who speak to the underlying pulse of society and social change. In this book, post–World War II America comes alive again as literary critic Robert McParland tilts the rearview mirror to see the characters that captured the imaginations of millions of readers in the most popular and influential novels of the 1950s. This literary era introduced us to Holden Caulfield, Augie March, Lolita, and other antiheroes. Together with popular culture heroes such as Perry Mason and James Bond, they entertained thousands of readers while revealing the underlying currents of ambition, desire, and concern that were central to the American Dream. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’sRoom explored racial issues and matters of identity that reverberate still today. The works of Jack Kerouac, the Beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, and the clever and creative William S. Burroughs and his Naked Lunch challenged conventional perspectives. The People We Meet in Stories will appeal to readers discovering these works for the first time and to those whose tattered paperbacks reveal a long relationship with these key works in American literary history.

Criminal lawyer and all-time #1 mystery author Erle Stanley Gardner wrote close to 150 novels that have sold 300 million copies worldwide. His most popular books starred the incomparable attorney-sleuth Perry Mason. And the first time the world heard the name Perry Mason was in 1933 with the publication of the novel that has become an enduring classic... The Case of the Velvet Claws Thanks to a bungled robbery at a fancy hotel, the already-married Eva Griffin has been caught in the company of a prominent congressman. To protect the politico, Eva's ready to pay the editor of a sleazy tabloid his hush money. But Perry Mason has other plans. He tracks down the phantom fat cat who secretly runs the blackmailing tabloid -- only to discover a shocking scoop. By the time Mason's comely client finally comes clean, her husband has taken a bullet in the heart. Now Perry Mason has two choices: represent the cunning widow in her wrangle for the dead man's money -- or take the rap for murder.