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

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.

"The Man of Last Resort; Or, The Clients of Randolph Mason" by Melville Davisson Post. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.

The second installment in this groundbreaking series reveals that crime does pay—if you’re a lawyer In New York’s Plaza Hotel, a gambler, a Virginia gentleman, and a failed lawyer named Alfred Randal come together to form a three-man political machine. Rather than contend with Tammany Hall, they set out west to take control of the Arizona statehouse. Soon Randal is governor, the Virginian is auditor, and the gambler is secretary of state. Their reach absolute, their power unquestioned, the trio has only one problem: They have robbed the treasury blind. To keep himself out of prison, Randal returns to New York to beg the help of Randolph Mason, a brilliant lawyer who never hesitates to help bad men escape justice. In these classic stories, America’s most dangerous legal mind assists all manner of liars, crooks, and scoundrels—proving once again that even a master criminal is only as smart as his attorney. This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.

Good Press presents to you this carefully created volume of "The Greatest Works of Melville Davisson Post: 40+ Titles in One Edition". This ebook has been designed and formatted to the highest digital standards and adjusted for readability on all devices. 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 Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries The Doomdorf Mystery The Wrong Hand The Angel of the Lord An Act of God The Treasure Hunter The House of the Dead Man A Twilight Adventure The Age of Miracles The Tenth Commandment The Devil's Tools The Hidden Law The Riddle The Straw Man The Mystery of Chance The Concealed Path The Edge of the Shadow The Adopted Daughter Naboth's Vineyard The Sleuth of St. James Square The Thing on the Hearth The Reward The Lost Lady The Cambered Foot The Man in the Green Hat The Wrong Sign The Fortune Teller The Hole in the Mahogany Panel The End of the Road The Last Adventure American Horses The Spread Rails The Pumpkin Coach The Yellow Flower Satire of the Sea The House by the Loch Novels Dwellers in the Hills The Gilded Chair The Mountain School-Teacher Melville Davisson Post (1869-1930) was an American author, born in West Virginia. Post's best-known character is the mystery solving, justice dispensing West Virginian backwoodsman, Uncle Abner. Post also wrote number of stories about Randolph Mason, a brusque New York lawyer who is highly skilled at turning legal loopholes and technicalities to his clients' advantage. Post's other recurring characters include Sir Henry Marquis of Scotland Yard, the French policeman Monsieur Jonquelle and the Virginia lawyer Colonel Braxton.

This carefully edited collection of murder mysteries has been designed and formatted to the highest digital standards and adjusted for readability on all devices. Melville Davisson Post (1869-1930) was an American author, born in West Virginia. Post's best-known character is the mystery solving, justice dispensing West Virginian backwoodsman, Uncle Abner. Post also wrote number of stories about Randolph Mason, a brusque New York lawyer who is highly skilled at turning legal loopholes and technicalities to his clients' advantage. Post's other recurring characters include Sir Henry Marquis of Scotland Yard, the French policeman Monsieur Jonquelle and the Virginia lawyer Colonel Braxton. 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 Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries The Doomdorf Mystery The Wrong Hand The Angel of the Lord An Act of God The Treasure Hunter The House of the Dead Man A Twilight Adventure The Age of Miracles The Tenth Commandment The Devil's Tools The Hidden Law The Riddle The Straw Man The Mystery of Chance The Concealed Path The Edge of the Shadow The Adopted Daughter Naboth's Vineyard The Sleuth of St. James Square The Thing on the Hearth The Reward The Lost Lady The Cambered Foot The Man in the Green Hat The Wrong Sign The Fortune Teller The Hole in the Mahogany Panel The End of the Road The Last Adventure American Horses The Spread Rails The Pumpkin Coach The Yellow Flower Satire of the Sea The House by the Loch

Edgar Allan Poe essentially invented the detective story in 1841 with Murders in the Rue Morgue. In the years that followed, however, detective fiction in America saw no significant progress as a literary genre. Much to the dismay of moral crusaders like Anthony Comstock, dime novels and other sensationalist publications satisfied the public's hunger for a yarn. Things changed as the century waned, and eventually the detective was reborn as a figure of American literature. In part these changes were due to a combination of social conditions, including the rise and decline of the police as an institution; the parallel development of private detectives; the birth of the crusading newspaper reporter; and the beginnings of forensic science. Influential, too, was the new role model offered by a wildly popular British import named Sherlock Holmes. Focusing on the late 19th century and early 20th, this volume covers the formative years of American detective fiction. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

Who populates the pages of crime and mystery writing? Who are the characters we willingly follow into the mystery genre's uneasy imaginative territory? And who created those characters in the first place? What life experience and expertise informs their work? What are the sources of their themes, regional accents, and even the axes that some grind? Why do some wish to give us a good laugh, while others seem hell-bent on making us shudder? Whodunit? answers these questions and more. Here mystery expert Rosemary Herbert brings together enlightening and entertaining information on hundreds of classic and contemporary characters and authors. Some--such as P.D. James, Ian Rankin, Sherlock Holmes, and Kinsey Millhone--appear in individual entries. Still more keep company in articles about characters we admire, such as the Clerical Sleuth, and in pieces about those we love to hate, including the Femme Fatale and Con Artist. There is even an article on a figure that haunts so many great works of mystery--The Corpse. Drawing on the Edgar Award-nominated volume The Oxford Companion to Crime & Mystery Writing, Herbert adds 101 new entries on the hottest new names in works ranging from puzzling whodunits to chilling crime novels.

An exploration of the enduring popularity of the television series Perry Mason and its universal reputation as the most formulaic program in the history of broadcast television. Perry Mason was one of the most successful television programs from the 1950s and remains one of the most influential crime melodramas from any period. The show's influence goes far beyond its nine-year tenure (1957-66), the millions of dollars it generated for its creators and for CBS, and the definitive identification it provided its star, Raymond Burr. Perry Mason has become a true piece of Americana, evolving through a formulaic approach that law professors continue to use today as a teaching tool. In his examination of Perry Mason, author Thomas Leitch looks at why this series has appealed to so many for so long and what the continued appeal tells us about Americans' attitudes toward lawyers and the law, then and now. Beginning with its roots in earlier detective fiction, stories of fictional attorneys, and the work of Erle Stanley Gardner (the show's creator), Leitch lays out the circumstances under which Perry Mason was conceived and marketed as a distinct franchise. The evolution of Perry Mason is charted here in an inclusive manner, discussing the show's broadcast history (ending with the series of two-hour telemovies that aired nearly twenty years after the original series ended) alongside its generic nature and place within popular culture, the show's ideological dynamic, and issues of authorship in the context of television. This concise study is an excellent tool for television and media scholars as well as fans of the Perry Mason series.

Scott Turow is a novelist, lawyer, and humanist who has fused his two passions, writing and the law, to create challenging novels that raise significant legal issues and test the justice of present laws. In all of his books, Turow reveals the moral ambiguities that afflict both accuser and accused, and challenges his readers to reconsider their preconceived notions of justice. Beginning with One-L, his first published work about the first-year law school experience, Turow continues to capture his readers' imaginations with books such as Presumed Innocent and Burden of Proof.