Bigger They Come

The story of how a man can commit a brutal murder, confess, and get away with it!

The killer was guilty without a shred of doubt. The police had him behind bars. The district attorney had plenty of evidence. But - no court in the state could convict him!

The Bigger They Come features that fast-moving, skull-cracking team: Bertha Cool, a two-hundred pound "lady" who uses the language of a longshoreman. And Donald Lam, a pint-sized process server who would have been in the morgue long ago except that he can think faster than the next man ... or woman.

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 than 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.

The story of how a man can commit a brutal murder, confess, and get away with it! The killer was guilty without a shred of doubt. The police had him behind bars. The district attorney had plenty of evidence. But - no court in the state could convict him! The Bigger They Come features that fast-moving, skull-cracking team: Bertha Cool , a two-hundred pound "lady" who uses the language of a longshoreman. And Donald Lam , a pint-sized process server who would have been in the morgue long ago except that he can think faster than the next man ... or woman.

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