The Amazing Adventures of Lester Leith

by Erle Stanley Gardner

-In Round Figures
-Bird in the Hand
-A Thousand to One
-The Exact Opposite
-The Hand is Quicker than the Eye (orig., Lester Leith, Magician)

Genres: Mystery

384 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Erle 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...

Reviews

[Michael Brown · Rating 2 out of 5]

Erle Stanley Gardner is best known for the Perry Mason series of legal/detective adventures where the lawyer outwits his court room opponents by various means. But Gardner wrote hundreds of short stories and novellas for the pulps, regular magazines and the book trade. One of the characters was a crook who stole from crooks named Lester Leith. There are about a hundred stories over the years and we have five here that highlight how Leith outwits the police despite their having an officer as his valet. While the stories are interesting and the plots fun, I did not fully care for the stories. The valet is smart in many ways but fails to realize his employer knows he is a cop. The main officer is a sergeant who is dumb as a post and so self centered on Leith he ignores obvious clues as presented by his informer. And Leith does not read papers, listen to the radio or do any research. He just thinks up fantastic things and has the valet run errands and then foils the police. No need to hunt down any more than this five tales to see how the series played out over the decades.

[Steve Gross · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun stuff

[Glen · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent collection of one of Erle Stanley Gardner's top 5 (IMHO) creations.

Like so many of Gardner's 30's era characters, Leith is a man of leisure, who solves crimes and makes a profit doing so, making a fool out of the police.

In this case, the police have even infiltrated a cop as Leith's butler, who goes around trying to get Leith interested in various crimes the police can't solve.


Very entertaining pulp.

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gardner was an accomplished - and very funny - storyteller. These read a bit like Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster stories, though the stakes are jewels rather than antique cow creamers and it's the wastrel gentleman who has the upper hand over the butler.