[SensualPoet]

I'm tempted to ask, Who Murdered Perry Mason? This iconic figure, still very much alive in the hearts and minds of readers and viewers in the English-speaking world, has almost disappeared from print.

Erle Stanley Gardner wrote over 70 full length Perry Mason novels from the early 1930s through to his death in 1970; and a few more stories turned up posthumously. Still in the 1930s, Perry Mason made it to Hollywood with at least five motion pictures. The character appeared in the self-titled long-running daily 15 min radio serial. In 1957, Raymond Burr created the TV version and played Mason for nine years turning out close to 300 hour long episodes. Another variation appeared on TV for a season in the 1970s. Then the series was reborn as a series of TV movies, with Burr back in the saddle, for more than a dozen installments until his death. The TV series has remained popular in re-runs on cable and is being reissued on DVD.

Throughout this 80 year history, Gardner's Perry Mason novels have been issued in hardcover by William Morrow and endlessly reissued in paperback. Until now, it seems. Fawcett and Ballentine appear to be the last to have issued the stories in paper -- and nothing since the 1990s. In fact, I could only find one novel still in print in paperback: The Case of the One-Eyed Witness at Amazon. And this out of a list of 99 editions of Perry Mason almost everyone of them rated at 4 or 5 stars.

Can you imagine Sherlock Holmes being out of print?

I wonder what the heck the issue is -- but the prime suspects have got to be the rights holders -- the publisher(s) -- who have no idea what the value of a back-list is. I can imagine re-issuing all the books over a four or five year period, with smart new covers, and perhaps even some fresh prefaces / tributes from other mystery / court room authors, and in e-book format would produce a tidy sum.

Or, we can wait ten years, and all of it -- all the 100s of Gardner works under ESG and his various pseudonyms -- fall into public domain and the publishers won't see a plugged nickle.