By Steve Englehart – My choice would have to be Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason books—or at least the first 80 of them. (Gard­ner wrote 84, but he was slowing down at the end.) They don’t aspire to be great literature, but they do aspire to be—and succeed at being—highly entertaining. If I tell you there’s at least one murder, and often more, in each book, the parents among you may wonder if comics really do rot brains, but murders to Gardner were just off-screen pegs on which to hang Mason’s feats of deduction: There’s no overt violence. I devoured these books as a kid, surely starting at around age…