抄録 | In a previous paper, the author studied eighty-two “Perry Mason” detective stories by Erle Stanley Gardner. In his day, Gardner was well-known as a detective story writer who once sold 26,000 books a day at the peak of his career. In those days, all of his “Perry Mason” books were as famous and popular as those by Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr, and Ellery Queen. Now those “Perry Mason” books have disappeared from bookstores and have been forgotten, while the books by Christie, Carr, and Queen are still on the shelves. That paper discussed the reasons for the disappearance of books about Perry Mason. In this paper, the distinctive features of forewords by Gardner, Christie, Carr and Queen are compared and contrasted. The forewords by the latter three writers are classified into two types. However, Gardner’s forewords are distinctively different and categorized into a third type. In this paper, which is the first of two parts, the forewords by Christie, Carr and Queen are discussed. In the second paper, the forewords by Gardner will be discussed. |