The Case of the Substitute Face – Buch antiquarisch kaufen

067182709X

(ISBN-13: 9780671827090)

leichte Gebrauchsspuren

237

USA

24. Auflage

Taschenbuch

Englisch

The Case of the Substitute Face

Perry Mason was on vacation. When fellow holidaymaker Mrs Newberry approached him because the picture of her daughter she was carrying had been replaced with another, he thought it was a trivial complaint. But when Mr. Newberry disappeared overboard, leaving behind a huge insurance policy, Mrs. Newberry returned to Mason as a capital murder suspect.

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About the author:

Erle Stanley Gardner (1889-1970) was an American writer and attorney who also wrote crime and justice novels under the pseudonyms A. A. Fair, Kyle Corning, Charles M. Green, Carleton Kendrake, Charles J. Kenny, Les Tillray, and Robert Parr published. Among other things, he wrote a series of 82 novels and 3 short stories about the criminal defense attorney Perry Mason.

Gardner practiced law in Oxnard, California, beginning in 1911 and quickly gained a reputation as a criminal defense attorney for immigrants from Mexico and China. From 1918 to 1921 he worked as a traveling salesman, after which he settled in Ventura as a lawyer. At the same time, he began writing detective short stories, which he sold to pulp magazines.

In 1933 the first novel about the lawyer Perry Mason was published. With this series character Gardner became well-known and wealthy. He dictated several thousand words every day and employed six secretaries. Since 1930, Agnes Jean Bethell (1902-2002) was one of these secretaries, who is considered a model for the Perry Mason secretary Della Street. In 1968, two years before his death, Gardner married her.

Two other series had a failed lawyer (Donald Lam) and a district attorney (Doug Selby) as main characters.

From 1948 he ran the Court of Last Resort, a relief organization that sought to reopen dubious criminal cases. In The Court of Last Resort (1952) he presents some cases from the practice of the aid organization.

Gardner has received several awards, including:
- 1953 Edgar Award - Best Fact Crime category by Mystery Writers of America for crime report The Court of Last Resort
- 1962 Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America for his special achievements in the crime genre and his consistently high quality as a writer

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Quotes from Erle Stanley Gardner:

“I like what I like and not what I'm supposed to like because of mass rating. And I very much dislike the things I don't like.” ― Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case Of The Careless Cupid

“It's a damn good story. If you have any comments, write them on the back of a check.” ― Erle Stanley Gardner

“Now listen, Lam," he said, "you’re a nice egg but you’ve got yourself poured into the wrong pan.” ― Erle Stanley Gardner, Top of the Heap

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Reviews from readers:

"In an ending, there is a beginning....

Background: The stylistic heritage of the Perry Mason mysteries is the American pulp magazines of the 1920s. In the early Mason mysteries, Perry - a good-looking, broad-shouldered, two-fisted, man of action - is constantly stiff-arming sultry beauties on his way to an explosive encounter that precipitates the book's climactic action sequence. In the opening chapters of these stories, Gardner subjects the reader to assertive passages that Mason is a crusader for justice, a man so action-oriented he is constitutionally incapable of sitting in his office and waiting for a case to come to him or to develop on its own once it has - he has to be out on the street, in the midst of the action, making things happen, always on the offensive, never standing pat or accepting being put on the defensive. These narrative passages - naïve, embarrassingly crude "character" development - pop up throughout the early books, stopping the narrative dead in its tracks, and putting on full display a non-writer's worst characteristic: telling the reader a character's traits instead of showing them through action, dialogue, and use of other of the writer's tools.

Rating "Ground Rules": These flaws, and others so staggeringly obvious that enumerating them is akin to using cannons to take out a flea, occur throughout the Gardner books, and can easily be used (with justification) to trash his work. But for this reader they are a "given", part of the literary terrain, and are not relevant to my assessment of the Gardner books. In other words, my assessments of the Perry Mason mysteries turn a blind eye to Erle Stanley Gardner's wooden, style-less writing, inept descriptive passages, unrealistic dialogue, and weak characterizations. As I've just noted, as examples of literary style all of Gardner's books, including the Perry Mason series, are all pretty bad. Nonetheless, the Mason stories are a lot of fun, offering intriguing puzzles, nifty legal gymnastics, courtroom pyrotechnics, and lots of action and close calls for Perry and crew. Basically, you have to turn off the literary sensibilities and enjoy the "guilty" pleasure of a fun read of bad writing. So, my 1-5 star ratings (A, B, C, D, and F) are relative to other books in the Gardner canon, not to other mysteries, and certainly not to literature or general fiction.

"The Case of the Substitute Face": A This solid Perry Mason mystery is an entertaining read with plenty of twists and turns and mysterious events - more sheer detection than any half-a-dozen mysteries by less inventive writers, of which, it might be noted, there were plenty populating the book racks in 1938 when this story was first published. But as good as this particular case is, the book itself is ultimately more memorable for the insights it provides into the relationship between Perry Mason and his superhumanly faithful secretary, Della Street.

Perry and Della are returning to Los Angeles by cruise ship from a Hawaiian vacation, when Perry is approached by a woman who would like to engage his help in determining whether her closed-mouth husband is a lottery winner, as he claims, or an embezzler on the run. Before Mason can get an investigation off the ground, her husband disappears during some rough weather, leaving behind witnesses who swear that his wife shot him and then tossed the body over the railing. On his way to solving this tricky case, Perry manages to pull off a couple of bluffs and double-bluffs to get information from evasive witnesses, and then stages some courtroom drama that turns the tables on the prosecution and the murderer.

In the course of bringing a murderer to justice, however, Perry proposes marriage to Della - who turns him down. Her reasons for rejecting the man she obviously loves will have readers with feminist leanings reaching for their picket signs and, in all honesty, there is simply no defending the bald chauvinism of Gardner's attitude. But the attitude strikes me as not truly felt; it seems more like an expedient solution to a problem that was developing in successive books in the Perry Mason series - namely, the burgeoning relationship between Perry and Della. At this point in the series the relationship seemed to be acquiring a life of its own, and consequently demanding more attention and time than Gardner wanted to devote to it. He knew his strengths well enough to realize that it was in his best interests to push the relationship to the far background and focus on the story, the mystery, and the legal twists that constitute the Perry Mason stories at their best. In this book, as in its immediate predecessors, he is groping not to establish a relationship between them, but to define it in such a way that it no longer needs to be written about. A relationship that is no longer dynamic, no longer subject to change or development, so that he can concentrate his writing on the mystery, the law, the action, and the story.

In this book, with the rejected marriage proposal, he achieves that objective." - Duane Schermerhorn
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Condition: very good. Pages slightly darkened due to age.

Comparable new price: €19.95 (incl. shipping).
Your savings on a new purchase: -15% or -3.00 € (incl. shipping).

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