The Case of the Borrowed Brunette: A Perry Mason Mystery

A classified ad finds Perry Mason’s client drawn into a murder plot, and only the sleuthing attorney can save her.

When Perry Mason stumbles upon a classified ad for a brown haired woman with very specific physical attributes, he takes note of the seemingly suspicious circumstances surrounding the job posting. Then the woman hired for the job gets in touch, describing the strange requests of her new employer―who pays her and her chaperone to stay inside an apartment and answer to another woman’s name―and Mason knows there’s a more knotted plot at play. But by the time he works out the first mystery, a second, with murder, is just getting started, and that’s only the first twist that awaits him as he endeavors to prove the innocence of “the borrowed brunette.”

Together with his crime solving team of Paul Drake and Della Street, Mason winds his way through one of the most puzzling cases of his career, involving separated ex-lovers, a tangled series of impersonations, and scores of private detectives. In order to clear his client of the charges, though, he’ll risk getting a few himself, before, in a final courtroom scene, breaking the case apart to the judge’s satisfaction.

Reissued for the first time in thirty years, The Case of the Borrowed Brunette is one of the most beloved whodunnits featuring the iconic Perry Mason character, inspiration for multiple hit television series bearing his name.

Gardner has a way of moving the story forward that Is almost a lost art: great stretches of dialogue alternate with lively chunks of exposition, and the two work together perfectly, without sacrificing momentum.”
―Booklist

Erle Stanley Gardner (1889–1970) was the best-selling American author of the twentieth century, mainly due to the enormous success of his Perry Mason series, which numbered more than 80 novels and inspired a half-dozen motion pictures, radio programs, and a long-running television series that starred Raymond Burr. Having begun his career as a pulp writer, Gardner brought a hard-boiled style and sensibility to the early Mason books, but gradually developed into a more classic detective story novelist, showing enough clues to allow the astute reader to solve the mystery. For more than a quarter of a century he wrote more than a million words a year under his own name and numerous pseudonyms, the most famous being A.A. Fair.

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