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Doug Selby #2
The D.A. Holds a Candle
Douglas Selby, the ambitious young District Attorney of the territory around Madison City, had up before him a young man guilty of embezzling a comparatively small sum of money which he had spent gambling. Selby could have locked him up - and perhaps ruined his life. But he wanted to find the how and the why of this otherwise law-abiding young man's gambling.
Selby's investigations led him to a hit-and-run motorcycle accident, to blackmail, and to the doorstep of DeWitt Stapleton, the local big-wig, who ran things in that part of the country by and for himself.
Selby's investigations led him to a hit-and-run motorcycle accident, to blackmail, and to the doorstep of DeWitt Stapleton, the local big-wig, who ran things in that part of the country by and for himself.
190 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1938
17 people are currently reading
116 people want to read
About the author
Erle Stanley Gardner
1,430 books831 followersErle Stanley Gardner was an American lawyer and author of detective stories who also published under the pseudonyms A.A. Fair, Kyle Corning, Charles M. Green, Carleton Kendrake, Charles J. Kenny, Les Tillray, and Robert Parr.
Innovative and restless in his nature, he was bored by the routine of legal practice, the only part of which he enjoyed was trial work and the development of trial strategy. In his spare time, he began to write for pulp magazines, which also fostered the early careers of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. He created many different series characters for the pulps, including the ingenious Lester Leith, a "gentleman thief" in the tradition of Raffles, and Ken Corning, a crusading lawyer who was the archetype of his most successful creation, the fictional lawyer and crime-solver Perry Mason, about whom he wrote more than eighty novels. With the success of Perry Mason, he gradually reduced his contributions to the pulp magazines, eventually withdrawing from the medium entirely, except for non-fiction articles on travel, Western history, and forensic science.
See more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erle_Sta...
Innovative and restless in his nature, he was bored by the routine of legal practice, the only part of which he enjoyed was trial work and the development of trial strategy. In his spare time, he began to write for pulp magazines, which also fostered the early careers of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. He created many different series characters for the pulps, including the ingenious Lester Leith, a "gentleman thief" in the tradition of Raffles, and Ken Corning, a crusading lawyer who was the archetype of his most successful creation, the fictional lawyer and crime-solver Perry Mason, about whom he wrote more than eighty novels. With the success of Perry Mason, he gradually reduced his contributions to the pulp magazines, eventually withdrawing from the medium entirely, except for non-fiction articles on travel, Western history, and forensic science.
See more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erle_Sta...
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
January 25, 2020
Major characters:
Emil Watkins, ill-fated hitchhiker
Ross Blaine, young man who forged one check and likes to gamble
George Stapleton, Ross' well-to-do friend
Inez Stapleton, his sister
Robert Gleason, cabin boy #1
Tom Cuttings,cabin boy #2
--- Needham, retired broker
Carlo Handley, professional gambler
Audrey Prestone, cabin girl #1
Monette Lambert, cabin girl #2
Oscar Triggs, owner of the Palm Thatch roadhouse
Madge Trent, the hostess at the Palm Thatch
Doug Selby, D.A.
Sheriff Rex Baldwin
Chief of Police Otto Larkin
Sylvia Martin, crime reporter for The Clarion
Locale: Madison City, California
Synopsis: The book opens with D. A. Doug Selby and Sheriff Rex Brandon giving a young man, Ross Blaine, a friendly talking-to regarding a bad check he passed. Then Selby and Brandon head to The Palm Thatch roadhouse to warn the owner, Oscar Triggs, to cut out the backroom gambling there. On the way they stop and check on a hitchhiker, Emil Watkins. That night Selby is called to look at an unattended death at the Keystone Auto Camp. The deceased turns out to be Watkins, the cause apparently is carbon monoxide poisoning from a defective heater. Two girls in an adjacent cabin, Audrey Preston and Monette Lambert, tell them their dates - Robert Gleason and Tom Cuttings - who rented that cabin - are at the Palm Thatch.
Selby and Brandon suspect there is more to the death than appears. They go to the Palm Thatch to find a game in progress, with Ross Blaine, George Stapleton, and others. The hostess, Madge Trent, has disappeared, and the focus turns to the search for her. Selby teams up with reporter Sylvia Martin to find Trent.
Review: Right away we are in familiar Erle Stanley Gardner territory: a roadhouse with gambling in the back room, a slinky blonde hostess, some fast cars, and a dead body in a cabin at a motor court. D.A. Selby and Rex Brandon throw their weight around without the niceties such as search warrants. This is a good page-turner, and like many Gardners, best to devour in one or two sittings before you start losing track of who's who. The episode of the L.A. police on a gambling raid is quite enjoyable, with a specialized team who have done it before making quick work of the gambling joint. A sledgehammer is put to good use.
Selby's secretary from the first book, appears briefly (unnamed) once in this book. However, Inez Stapleton now chums around with Selby, and the book ends on a confrontational note, with her entering law school and vowing to meet Selby again, this time as a defense attorney; foreshadowing a later title in the series. Selby remains cozy with Sylvia Martin.
(The candle of the title turns out to be just a metaphorical candle).
Emil Watkins, ill-fated hitchhiker
Ross Blaine, young man who forged one check and likes to gamble
George Stapleton, Ross' well-to-do friend
Inez Stapleton, his sister
Robert Gleason, cabin boy #1
Tom Cuttings,cabin boy #2
--- Needham, retired broker
Carlo Handley, professional gambler
Audrey Prestone, cabin girl #1
Monette Lambert, cabin girl #2
Oscar Triggs, owner of the Palm Thatch roadhouse
Madge Trent, the hostess at the Palm Thatch
Doug Selby, D.A.
Sheriff Rex Baldwin
Chief of Police Otto Larkin
Sylvia Martin, crime reporter for The Clarion
Locale: Madison City, California
Synopsis: The book opens with D. A. Doug Selby and Sheriff Rex Brandon giving a young man, Ross Blaine, a friendly talking-to regarding a bad check he passed. Then Selby and Brandon head to The Palm Thatch roadhouse to warn the owner, Oscar Triggs, to cut out the backroom gambling there. On the way they stop and check on a hitchhiker, Emil Watkins. That night Selby is called to look at an unattended death at the Keystone Auto Camp. The deceased turns out to be Watkins, the cause apparently is carbon monoxide poisoning from a defective heater. Two girls in an adjacent cabin, Audrey Preston and Monette Lambert, tell them their dates - Robert Gleason and Tom Cuttings - who rented that cabin - are at the Palm Thatch.
Selby and Brandon suspect there is more to the death than appears. They go to the Palm Thatch to find a game in progress, with Ross Blaine, George Stapleton, and others. The hostess, Madge Trent, has disappeared, and the focus turns to the search for her. Selby teams up with reporter Sylvia Martin to find Trent.
Review: Right away we are in familiar Erle Stanley Gardner territory: a roadhouse with gambling in the back room, a slinky blonde hostess, some fast cars, and a dead body in a cabin at a motor court. D.A. Selby and Rex Brandon throw their weight around without the niceties such as search warrants. This is a good page-turner, and like many Gardners, best to devour in one or two sittings before you start losing track of who's who. The episode of the L.A. police on a gambling raid is quite enjoyable, with a specialized team who have done it before making quick work of the gambling joint. A sledgehammer is put to good use.
Selby's secretary from the first book, appears briefly (unnamed) once in this book. However, Inez Stapleton now chums around with Selby, and the book ends on a confrontational note, with her entering law school and vowing to meet Selby again, this time as a defense attorney; foreshadowing a later title in the series. Selby remains cozy with Sylvia Martin.
(The candle of the title turns out to be just a metaphorical candle).
August 29, 2021
Well, for the first time I've read an Erle Stanley Gardner of which I can say I really loved it. Even though Doug Selby only starred in nine novels compared to Perry Mason's 80-something, you can tell that Gardner cared about the Selby mysteries just as much as the Masons, with plots that are deliciously complex, a whole fictional city with its own newspapers, locations, and kingpins, and of course a great hero - District Attorney Douglas Selby. It was very cool to see Gardner write about a prosecutor rather than a defense attorney this time around. The plot revolves Selby, sheriff Rex Brandon, and reporter Sylvia Martin investigating the case of a hitch-hiker who is found asphyxiated to death by a gas heater in a motel room - his death seems to be accidental but he had a gun and a note saying he has killed a man but is justified in doing it. The question is, who was he going to kill, and why? The case involves professional gamblers (back when that kind of gambling was very illegal,) shady motel owners, and the Stapletons, Madison City's most powerful family. The plotting is tight, full of action, and suspenseful, and the solution surprising but fair. I think a lot of Gardner's strength lies in creating a perfect balance between the hardboiled action of the likes of Hammett and Chandler, and a fair-play mystery which is well-clued, perfectly guessable, but still surprising. His experience of being a lawyer having to use strong evidence, and a previously hardboiled-centered writing career before he began the Mason books. I can say that so far this is both the best Gardner book I've read so far and my favorite. Much recommended!!
April 29, 2026
Erle Stanley Gardner is best known as the creator of defense attorney Perry Mason, featured in some 82 novels plus a popular television series starring Raymond Burr. Unbeknownst to many of Gardner’s fans, he also put out a nine-volume series about District Attorney Douglas Selby: The D.A. Calls It Murder (1937); The D.A. Holds a Candle (1938); The D.A. Draws a Circle (1939); The D.A. Goes to Trial (1940); The D. A. Cooks a Goose (1942); The D.A. Calls a Turn (1944); The D.A. Breaks a Seal (1946); The D.A. Takes a Chance (1948); and The D.A. Breaks An Egg (1949).
Selby is not a magician the way Mason tends to be and, at least the second book in the series, unlike the Perry Mason series, is bereft of courtroom scenes, which had come to occupy sometimes a third or half of a Perry Mason book. Also, contrary to how district attorneys conduct themselves at least nowadays, Selby has no fear of injecting himself right into a case and being an investigator just as much as the sheriff is. Set in fictional Madison City, many people reading this series see it as a stand-in for Ventura, California, where Mason practiced for many years before turning full time to writing on his ranch near Temecula,
The story starts out light with some bad checks and Selby advising troubled young men, but quickly turns sinister when two secretaries staying at a lodge and who had come up to the mountains with two boys who were staying in a separate cabin reported a body in the boys’ cabin. The body is odd, appears to be a hitchhiker Selby and the Sheriff had met earlier, appears to have died from carbon monoxide poisoning, but with a gun in his hand and letters to a mysterious estranged daughter. Near the corpse was a note claiming responsibility for killing a man who deserved to die. Selby doesn’t think the two women are involved, but follows the tracks of the two boys to a local bar (the Palm Thatch) where they had apparently been involved in a poker game with some sharps and a friend who owed the sharps some serious money.
Selby understands that poking around the poker game and the gambling debts owed might lead him to places politically undesirable in that he is due to run for election every few years and the money interests such as Charles Dewitt Stapleton might not see to fit to back him even if he dated Inez Stapleton a bit.
Selby admits that the job has a strange fascination for him with regard to being able to poke into people’s lives.
This is not an action-oriented crime novel and, for most of it, Selby is not even sure a murder was committed, but it is fascinating how he calmly and carefully pokes around until he finds out what actually happened.
Selby is not a magician the way Mason tends to be and, at least the second book in the series, unlike the Perry Mason series, is bereft of courtroom scenes, which had come to occupy sometimes a third or half of a Perry Mason book. Also, contrary to how district attorneys conduct themselves at least nowadays, Selby has no fear of injecting himself right into a case and being an investigator just as much as the sheriff is. Set in fictional Madison City, many people reading this series see it as a stand-in for Ventura, California, where Mason practiced for many years before turning full time to writing on his ranch near Temecula,
The story starts out light with some bad checks and Selby advising troubled young men, but quickly turns sinister when two secretaries staying at a lodge and who had come up to the mountains with two boys who were staying in a separate cabin reported a body in the boys’ cabin. The body is odd, appears to be a hitchhiker Selby and the Sheriff had met earlier, appears to have died from carbon monoxide poisoning, but with a gun in his hand and letters to a mysterious estranged daughter. Near the corpse was a note claiming responsibility for killing a man who deserved to die. Selby doesn’t think the two women are involved, but follows the tracks of the two boys to a local bar (the Palm Thatch) where they had apparently been involved in a poker game with some sharps and a friend who owed the sharps some serious money.
Selby understands that poking around the poker game and the gambling debts owed might lead him to places politically undesirable in that he is due to run for election every few years and the money interests such as Charles Dewitt Stapleton might not see to fit to back him even if he dated Inez Stapleton a bit.
Selby admits that the job has a strange fascination for him with regard to being able to poke into people’s lives.
This is not an action-oriented crime novel and, for most of it, Selby is not even sure a murder was committed, but it is fascinating how he calmly and carefully pokes around until he finds out what actually happened.
July 31, 2024
Doug Selby, Ross Blaine adında bir gence sahtecilik yapmasına rağmen nasihat eder ve işlem yapmaz. Ondan Trisk adında bir adamın kumar oynattığı bilgisini alır. Yola koyulduklarında bir otostopçunun görürler. Emil Watkins olduğunu söyleyen bu adama da bir şey yapmazlar. Mekanı Şerif Rex Brandon ile basınca şehrin en zengin adamı olan Stapleton'un oğlu George da oradadır. Bir süre önce arabasını çok ucuza arkadaşı olan Chettam'a satmıştır. Ablası Inez ile tenis oynayan ve gezen Selby olayı anlamaya çalışır. Needham ve Handley adında iki adam daha vardır. Madge adındaki garson kız panik olur. Sonrasında aynı gece Chettam'ın kaldığı odada otostopçu ölü bulunur. Karbon monoksit zehirlenmesinden ölmüştür. Bir kot da bulunur yanında sanki birini öldürecekmiş gibi. Olayı araştırmaya Slyvia Martin ile beraber başlar. Bir içki şişesi vardır ve bunu Inez'in babasına doğum gününde aldığını öğrenir. Babası oğlunu koruyacaktır. Madge de ortadan kaybolur. Bakımevindeki kızı Nina'ya tavşan ve çakal hikayeleri anlatmaktadır. Otostopçunun kızı Olan Marcie'nin bir kazada öldüğü ortaya çıkar. Çarpan araba George'un arabasına benzer. Yüzleşmeye gidince babası çok sert çıkar. Hiç bir çıkar yol kalmamış gibidir. Bu sefer Needham ve Handley için Los Angeles polisi ile iş birliği yapar. Bir telefon konuşması ile Handley suçu Needham'a atıyor gibi polis konuşunca Needham her şeyi dökülür. George gerçekten kıza çarpmıştır. Ama Handley öldürmüştür araba egsozunu açık bırakarak. Eve tekrar gidip George'un alırlar. Şerif ve Slyvia çok mutludur. Marge bulunacak mıdır? Ona aşık olan Blaine ne yapacaktır? Inez Selby ile konuşacak mıdır? Bundan sonra neler olacaktır? Keyifle okunan bir roman.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 1, 2017
#2 in the Doug Selby series. A fun series. As in the author's Perry Mason series, the police farm out crime solving. Perry Mason, the defense attorney solves his cases and here they are solved by the DA, Doug Selby. A dead hitchhiker, his missing daughter, an illegal card game, a missing hostess, a wastrel youth with a beautiful sister and an arrogant father, and a story about a coyote and a momma rabbit. All come together in time to save Doug's job and prove to Inez' father that he can "hold a candle". An enjoyable mystery in the Southern California of 80 years ago.
Doug Selby series - Sheriff Rex Brandon alerts DA Doug Selby to the body of an itinerant carpenter found in a motor court cabin. It seems to be a vase of carbon monoxide poisoning but Selby is not convinced. The two boys registered to the cabin are found in a back room gambling game at the Palm Thatch road house. Also in the game is a professional gambler and big loser George Stapleton, the brother of Doug's sometimes girlfriend Inez.
Doug Selby series - Sheriff Rex Brandon alerts DA Doug Selby to the body of an itinerant carpenter found in a motor court cabin. It seems to be a vase of carbon monoxide poisoning but Selby is not convinced. The two boys registered to the cabin are found in a back room gambling game at the Palm Thatch road house. Also in the game is a professional gambler and big loser George Stapleton, the brother of Doug's sometimes girlfriend Inez.
April 11, 2026
It bothers me when two characters refer to each other by name in conversation even when there's no one else in the room and no reason for the reader to be confused about who's speaking. No one does that in the real world. For example:
“Gee, Doug,” she said, “this is big!"
“Doug,” she said, “how about Inez?”
“Well,” Sylvia asked, “what’s next on the program, Doug?"
"Okay, Sylvia. Here we go.”
“But, Doug, it’s such a gamble.” “I love to gamble,” he told her.
Even if I didn't think that Perry Mason could run circles around Doug (and Della Street around Sylvia) the constant 'Doug!' 'Sylvia!' 'Rex!' (the series' version of Paul Drake, sort of) would prevent me from giving this more than 3 stars. However, it was amiable.
“Gee, Doug,” she said, “this is big!"
“Doug,” she said, “how about Inez?”
“Well,” Sylvia asked, “what’s next on the program, Doug?"
"Okay, Sylvia. Here we go.”
“But, Doug, it’s such a gamble.” “I love to gamble,” he told her.
Even if I didn't think that Perry Mason could run circles around Doug (and Della Street around Sylvia) the constant 'Doug!' 'Sylvia!' 'Rex!' (the series' version of Paul Drake, sort of) would prevent me from giving this more than 3 stars. However, it was amiable.
January 11, 2019
The D.A. In this one isn’t Hamilton Berger, but instead a young man on the move who plays hunches, takes chances, and fights the power just like Perry Mason. This one is OK, but has no courtroom action and no antagonist who can duel effectively with our hero. So basically, we just watch our hero figure out the puzzle and show the power structure something about law and order and bringing feckless rich kids to heel. Not the best ESG, and far from the best in this series.
October 6, 2025
Somehow the suspect was both completely pain the whole time and still surprisingly complex at the same time. Gardner can keep the suspense going through the whole book, yet at the very end keep you wrapped up in the action even when know what's going to happen.
This one had a number of curse words throughout.
This one had a number of curse words throughout.
September 29, 2020
Selby is ridiculed for being a back country lawyer and told that he can not hold a candle to the sharp city lawyers. He proves them wrong as he fights against the biggest employer in the small town of Madison City.
July 4, 2025
This story is well worth reading. This is Mr. Gardner's third series of books. Mr. Selby mirrors Perry Mason but is the district attorney. As to Perry Mason investigates to clear his clients, Mr. Selby investigates to find the person to persecute. Enjoy.
July 19, 2017
Enjoyable book with a suitably twisty plot and somewhat interesting setting and characters. Like most Gardner, it isn't a masterclass in prose and is very heavy on the exposition.
February 21, 2023
I like Gardner's Perry Mason books but I was bored with this (which was a different character) and I would say do not judge all his work from this one.
November 12, 2024
Según pasaba las hojas, más sensación tenía de estar viendo una película en blanco y negro.
March 8, 2016
Comfortable mystery with the same style as his Perry Mason novels.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews