One of the best-selling authors of all time, Erle Stanley Gardner’s greatest creations include crusading attorney Perry Mason (star of more than eighty novels, a long-running TV series and TV movies) and the hardboiled detective team of Bertha Cool and Donald Lam, who appeared in more than two dozen adventures of their own.

An attorney himself, Gardner also founded the Court of Last Resort, a group that investigated criminal cases they believed had ended in wrong convictions.