Gramp Wiggens Books in Order

Gramps Wiggins is an elderly amateur detective whose visits create trouble for District Attorney Frank Duryea. Erle Stanley Gardner gives him a wandering life, a house trailer, and little interest in behaving as other people expect. Frank is married to Gramps's granddaughter, so his unwanted help comes with a family connection that cannot be dismissed as easily as an interfering stranger. The mysteries turn that uneasy arrangement into a partnership between official authority and practical experience.

Gramps notices things that more orderly investigators can overlook.

The Case of the Turning Tide opens with two deaths aboard a yacht and a question that has major financial consequences. Addison Stearne and C. Arthur Right are dead, but determining whether both were murdered is only part of the problem. The order in which they died also matters to a fortune. Nita Moline says she found the bodies and then fainted on deck, yet uncertainty about her arrival complicates her account. Frank has to sort out the evidence while Gramps, visiting with his trailer, keeps getting in the way.

The yacht setting makes physical circumstances important. Movements around the boat, the accounts of witnesses, and the action of the tide all belong to the puzzle. Gramps approaches these details through the knowledge he has gathered outside an office. His apparent lack of polish can disguise an ability to ask useful questions. That difference in method gives the book its central friction: Frank must manage an official investigation, while his wife's grandfather feels free to follow his own line of thought without respecting the same boundaries.

The Case of the Smoking Chimney takes the mystery inland. A businessman using an assumed name has been buying property around a small town. When he is found dead in an isolated mountain cabin, several people have reasons to fall under suspicion. Gramps again investigates alongside, and sometimes against, the official inquiry. His experience of camping and living outdoors becomes relevant to the physical clues. A seemingly ordinary detail involving an oil lamp helps give the story its distinctive focus on what the scene can reveal.

Begin with The Case of the Turning Tide, then read The Case of the Smoking Chimney. These are compact traditional mysteries built around conflicting explanations, financial interests, and a resourceful outsider. The family arrangement adds humor without removing the seriousness of the deaths. Readers who enjoy watching investigators challenge appearances will find the appeal in Gramps's independence and in Frank's difficulty deciding how much help to accept. The continuing thread is their working relationship, while each novel supplies its own crime and group of suspects.