Thrilling stories starring America’s smartest—and most unscrupulous—lawyer During the gold rush, Richard Warren and Samuel Walcott set out from New York to strike it rich. When fortune does not find them, Samuel saves himself from the gutter by marrying a saloonkeeper’s daughter. Jealous of his friend’s beautiful wife, Richard kills Samuel and flees the desert with the woman and a trove of stolen gold dust. He assumes his dead friend’s identity and makes a name for himself in New York—until the woman he killed for turns out to be a blackmailer. Desperate, Richard turns to the mysterious lawyer Randolph Mason. A crooked genius, Mason doesn’t mind having a killer for a client, and will do whatever he can to help Richard escape justice. In this brilliantly original story collection, Mason follows the letter of the law while gleefully betraying its spirit. This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.

Randolph Mason is a brusque New York lawyer who is highly skilled at turning legal loopholes and technicalities to his clients' advantage. He is depicted as an utterly amoral character who advises criminals how to commit wrongdoings without breaking the letter of the law. The best-known of these stories is "The Corpus Delicti", in which Mason's client murders a blackmailing lover and dissolves her dismembered corpse in acid. Despite circumstantial evidence, Mason secures his client's acquittal on the grounds that nobody has been found and there are no eyewitnesses to the woman's death, as required by New York law at the time. Post deflected criticism of such sensational stories by affirming that he was publicly exposing weaknesses in the law that needed to be rectified. Melville Davisson Post (1869-1930) was an American author, born in West Virginia. Table of Contents: The Strange Schemes of Randolph Mason The Corpus Delicti Two Plungers of Manhattan Woodford's Partner The Error of William Van Broom The Men of the Jimmy The Sheriff of Gullmore The Animus Furandi The Man of Last Resort (The Clients of Randolph Mason) The Governor's Machine Mrs. Van Barton Once in Jeopardy The Grazier The Rule Against Carper