At the time of his death in 1970, Erle Stanley Gardener was the best-selling American author of the 20th century, largely on the strength of his Perry Mason stories. Much as we may associate Mason with TV adaptations—most recently, on HBO—the books were the foundation of it all. The three novels featured here were published in the 1940s, when this irresistible series hit its stride.

When Perry Mason sees a classified ad for a brown-haired woman with very specific physical attributes, his intuition tells him something is amiss. Then the woman hired for the job tells him that she is paid to stay inside an apartment with a chaperone and answer to another person's name. Before he can untangle this mystery, Mason will be confronted with a murder to solve, and both cases will be compounded by imposters and scores of private detectives.