Erle Stanley Gardner (1889-1970)was a California attorney who started writing pulp fiction in the 1920s so that he could leave his law career. The general public knows him best as the creator of Perry Mason courtroom dramas but under the name of A. A. Fair he wrote a series about a pair of private investigators named Donald Lam and Bertha Cool. He also wrote mysteries with Terry Clane and Grampa Wiggins, short stories, and some nonfiction mainly about travel; he loved southern California and Mexico and camped in the desert as often as he could manage. Gardner won the Grand Master Award from Mystery Writers of America in 1962.
In a rare exhibition of putting your money where your mouth is, beginning in the late 1940s Gardner convened a panel of experts toreview closed criminal cases to determine if in fact the convicted individual was guilty. His descriptions of these examinations ran in Argosy for 10 years. The Court of Last Resort (William Sloane Associates, 1952) is a collection of some of those articles. It won an Edgar and was the source for an NBC TV series that ran from October 1957 to April 1958.
Another creation of Gardner’s fertile imagination was Doug Selby, young district attorney of a rural county outside Los Angeles. In nine books published between 1937 and 1949, Selby copes with crime petty and significant, small-town politicians, conniving businessmen, and the inexorable incursion of the larger world into the heretofore isolated confines of Madison County.
In the seventh book of the series, The D. A. Breaks a Seal (William Morrow, 1946), Selby has left Madison City to serve in the Army on the European front. He has a few days of furlough before reporting to his new assignment in San Francisco and returns to Madison City to find a contested will is absorbing the attention of the community. The idea of an estate worth about $1 million (now about $18.5 million) is jaw-dropping to the hard-working farmers and tradespeople of the region.
A stranger arrives via early train as the trial gathers steam and dies in his hotel room after ordering a second breakfast. No one knew him or what brought him to Madison City. After the cause of death was determined to be poison, identifying the dead man and learning why he was in Madison City became imperative.
Selby’s replacement in the D.A. office rushes to force an arrest of the waiter who delivered the tainted meal but the sheriff was convinced the waiter was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Selby steps in to assist the sheriff and his friend who is defending the underdog in the matter of the will. He used fast thinking reminiscent of Perry Mason to initiate some courtroom legerdemain to help the sheriff and to sort out who really did have the legal right to inherit.
The everyday details of life set the story firmly in the first part of the 1940s, rationing of gasoline and rubber, for instance, a bus or a train were the only easy options for long-distance travel then. The limited sugar allocated to each hotel resident. The breakfast the dead man was found to have eaten: bacon, eggs, toast, oatmeal, and stewed prunes was astonishing. No one eats that much in the morning now. The limited access to generally public information, available now for years, and the idea that anyone would be traveling without multiple forms of identification. In the background multiple references to the progress of the war suggest the European front is drawing to a close, placing the story in the first half of 1945.
This title has been reprinted often, Goodreads lists 58 editions and Bookfinder shows dozens of copies for sale. Even better, the series has been released in ebook.