Case of the Turning Tide

District Attorney Frank Duryea had more than a simple murder case on his hands. Had someone killed both Addison Stearne and C. Arthur Right and then vanished? Or had it been a murder and a suicide? And, in either case, who died first? A vast fortune depended on the answer.

The obvious suspect was Nita Moline, who claimed she discovered the bodies, rushed up on deck and fainted. However, nobody had seen her come aboard. And through the tangled web of evidence, there seemed to be more than one mystery. Fortunately for Frank Duryea, his wife's grandfather - the black sheep of a wild family - came for a visit and got in everybody's way.

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.

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