Erle Stanley Gardner

For more information on Erle Stanley Gardner, visit Britannica.com.

Erle Stanley Gardner (1889-1970) became one of the most successful mystery writers of all time. Most of his reputation stems from Perry Mason and other memorable characters that he created. Gardner's best novels offer abundant evidence of his natural storytelling talent.

Gardner was born in Malden, Massachusetts on July 17, 1889. He spent much of his childhood traveling with his mining-engineer father through the remote regions of California, Oregon, and the Klondike. In his teens he not only boxed for money, but also promoted a number of unlicensed matches. Gardner attended high school in California and graduated from Palo Alto High School 1909. He enrolled at Valparaiso University in Indiana that same year but was soon expelled for striking a professor.

In the practice of law Gardner found the form of combat he seemed born to master. He was admitted to the California bar in 1911 and opened an office in Oxnard, where he practiced law until 1918. As a lawyer he represented the Chinese community and gained a reputation for flamboyant trial tactics. In one case, for instance, he had dozens of Chinese merchants exchange identities so that he could discredit a policeman's identification of a client. Gardner worked as a salesman for the Consolidated Sales Company from 1918 until 1921. He then resumed his legal career in Ventura, California from 1921 until 1933.

Early Writings

In the early 1920s Gardner began to write western and mystery stories for magazines, often under the pseudonyms of A.A. Fair, Carleton Kendrake, and Charles J. Kenny. Eventually he was turning out and selling the equivalent of a short novel every three nights while still practicing law during the business day. With the sale of his first novel in 1933 he gave up the practice of law and devoted himself to full-time writing, or more precisely to dictating. Thanks to the popularity of his series characters - lawyer-detective Perry Mason, his loyal secretary Della Street, his private detective Paul Drake, and the foxy trio of Sergeant Holcomb, Lieutenant Tragg, and District Attorney Hamilton Burger - Gardner became one of the wealthiest mystery writers of all time.

The 82 Mason adventures from The Case of the Velvet Claws (1933) to the posthumously published The Case of the Postponed Murder (1973) contain few of the literary graces. Characterization and description are perfunctory and often reduced to a few lines that are repeated in similar situations book after book. Indeed virtually every word not within quotation marks could be deleted and little would be lost. For what vivifies these novels is the sheer readability, the breakneck pacing, the convoluted plots, the fireworks displays of courtroom tactics (many based on gimmicks Gardner used in his own law practice), and the dialogue, where each line is a jab in a complex form of oral combat.

Perry Mason Novels

The first nine Masons are steeped in the hard-boiled tradition of Black Mask magazine, their taut understated realism leavened with raw wit, sentimentality, and a positive zest for the dog-eat-dog milieu of the free enterprise system during its worst depression. The Mason of these novels is a tiger in the social-Darwinian jungle, totally self-reliant, asking no favors, despising the weaklings who want society to care for them, willing to take any risk for a client no matter how unfairly the client plays the game with him. Asked what he does for a living, he replies: "I fight!" or "I am a paid gladiator." He will bribe policemen for information, loosen a hostile witness's tongue by pretending to frame him for murder, twist the evidence to get a guilty client acquitted and manipulate estate funds to prevent a guilty non-client from obtaining money for his defense. Besides Velvet Claws, perhaps the best early Mason novels are The Case of the Howling Dog and The Case of the Curious Bride (both 1934).

From the late 1930s to the late 1950s the main influence on Gardner was not Black Mask but the Saturday Evening Post, which serialized most of the Masons before book publication. In these novels the tough-guy notes are muted, "love interest" plays a stronger role, and Mason is less willing to play fast and loose with the law. Still the oral combat remains breathlessly exciting, the pace never slackens and the plots are as labyrinthine as before, most of them centering on various sharp-witted and greedy people battling over control of capital. Mason, of course, is Gardner's alter ego throughout the series. In several novels of the second period, however, another author-surrogate arrives on the scene in the person of a philosophical old desert rat or prospector who delights in living alone in the wilderness, discrediting by his example the greed of the urban wealth-and power-hunters. Among the best cases of this period are Lazy Lover; Hesitant Hostess which deals with Mason's breaking down a single prosecution witness; and Lucky Loser and Foot-Loose Doll with their spectacularly complex plots.

Television Work

Gardner worked without credit as script supervisor for the long-running Perry Mason television series (1957-66), starring Raymond Burr. Within a few years television's restrictive influence had infiltrated the new Mason novels. The lawyer evolved into a ponderous bureaucrat mindful of the law's niceties, just as Burr played him, and the plots became chaotic and the courtroom sequences mediocre, as happened all too often in the television scripts. But by the mid 1960s the libertarian decisions of the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warran had already undermined a basic premise of the Mason novels, namely that defendants menaced by the sneaky tactics of police and prosecutors needed a pyrotechnician like Mason in their corner. Once the Court ruled that such tactics required reversal of convictions gained thereby, Mason had lost his raison d'etre.

Several other detective series sprang from Gardner's dictating machine during his peak years. The 29 novels he wrote under the byline of A. A. Fair about diminutive private eye Donald Lam and his huge irascible partner Bertha Cool are often preferred over the Masons because of their fusion of corkscrew plots with fresh writing, characterizations, and humor, the high spots of the series being The Bigger They Come and Beware the Curves. And in his nine books about small-town district attorney Doug Selby, Gardner reversed the polarities of the Mason series, making the prosecutor his hero and the defense lawyer the oft-confounded trickster. But most of Gardner's reputation stems from Perry Mason, and his best novels in both this and other series offer abundant evidence of his natural storytelling talent, which is likely to retain its appeal as long as people read at all.

Gardner was married in 1912 to Natalie Talbert. The couple had one daughter and separated in 1935. Gardner married his second wife, Agnes Jean Bethell, in 1968. He died on March 11, 1970 in Temecula, California.

Books

Hughes, Dorothy B. Erle Stanley Gardner: The Case of the Real Perry Mason, Morrow, 1978.

Johnston, Alva. The Case of Erle Stanley Gardner, Morrow, 1947.

Van Dover, J. Kenneth. Murder in the Millions: Erle Stanley Gardner, Mickey Spillane, Ian Fleming, Ungar, 1984.

Erle Stanley Gardner
Gardner in 1966
Born	July 17, 1889(1889-07-17)
Died	March 11, 1970 (aged 80) Temecula, California
Education	Palo Alto High School (1909) Valparaiso University School of Law (1 month)
Known for	Perry Mason
Spouse(s)	Natalie Frances Talbert Agnes Jean Bethell

Erle Stanley Gardner (July 17, 1889 Malden, Massachusetts – March 11, 1970 Temecula, California) was an American lawyer and author of detective stories, who also published under the pseudonyms A.A. Fair, Kyle Corning, Charles M. Green, Carleton Kendrake, Charles J. Kenny, Les Tillray and Robert Parr.

Contents 1 Life 2 Death 3 Work 4 Bibliography 5 Terry Clane mysteries 6 Gramps Wiggins mysteries 7 Other fiction 8 Non-fiction 9 Books about Erle Stanley Gardner 10 References 11 External links

Life

Gardner graduated from Palo Alto High School in 1909, and received his only formal legal education at Valparaiso University School of Law in the state of Indiana. He attended law school for approximately 1 month, was suspended from school when his interest in boxing became a distraction, then settled in California where he became a self-taught attorney and passed the state bar exam in 1911. He opened his own law office in Merced, California, then worked for five years for a sales agency. In 1921, he returned to the practice of law, creating the firm of Sheridan, Orr, Drapeau and Gardner in Ventura, California ^[1].

In 1912, he married Natalie Frances Talbert; they had a daughter, Grace. Gardner practiced at the Ventura firm until 1933, when The Case of the Velvet Claws was published. Much of that novel was set at the historic Pierpont Inn, which was just down the road from his law office.

Gardner gave up the practice of law to devote full time to writing. In 1937 he moved to Temecula, California, where he lived for the rest of his life. In 1968 he married his long-time secretary Agnes Jean Bethell (1902-2002), the "real Della Street".

Death

He died on March 11, 1970 in Temecula, California. ^[2]

Work

The Case of the Velvet Claws (1933), 1953 U.S. paperback edition

Innovative and restless in his nature, Gardner was bored by the routine of legal practice, the only part of which he enjoyed was trial work and the development of trial strategy. In his spare time, he began to write for pulp magazines, which also fostered the early careers of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. He created many different series characters for the pulps, including the ingenious Lester Leith, a "gentleman thief" in the tradition of Raffles, and Ken Corning, a crusading lawyer who was the archetype of his most successful creation, the fictional lawyer and crime-solver Perry Mason, about whom he wrote more than eighty novels. With the success of Perry Mason, he gradually reduced his contributions to the pulp magazines, eventually withdrawing from the medium entirely, except for non-fiction articles on travel, Western history, and forensic science.

Gardner also devoted thousands of hours to a project called "The Court of Last Resort", which he undertook with his many friends in the forensic, legal and investigative communities. The project sought to review and, if appropriate, to reverse, miscarriages of justice against possibly innocent criminal defendants who were convicted owing to poor original legal representation or to the inadequate, careless or malicious actions of police and prosecutors and most especially, with regard to the abuse or misinterpretation of medical and other forensic evidence. The resulting 1952 book earned Gardner his only Edgar Award, in the Best Fact Crime category.

The character of Perry Mason was portrayed in various Hollywood films of the 1930s and 40s, and a long-running radio program from 1943 to 1955. "When Erle Stanley Gardner was reluctant to allow CBS to transform Mason into a TV soap opera, (CBS) created The Edge of Night. For that latter enterprise, John Larkin, radio's best identified Mason, was cast as the protagonist-star, initially as a detective, eventually as an attorney, in a thinly veiled copy of Mason."^[3]

Gardner also created characters for the radio programs The Adventures of Christopher London (1950), starring Glenn Ford, and A Life in Your Hands (1949-1952). "As on other Gardner-inspired narratives, someone else actually penned the scripts."^[4]

Eventually Perry Mason became a long-running TV series with Raymond Burr as the title character. Gardner himself made an uncredited appearance as a judge in the final episode of the original series titled "The Case of the Final Fade-Out." ^[5] In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Mason was revived for a series of made-for-TV movies featuring surviving members of the original cast, including Burr.

Under the pen name A. A. Fair he also wrote a series of novels about the private detective firm of Bertha Cool and Donald Lam. He also wrote another noteworthy series of novels about District Attorney Doug Selby and his opponent, the rascally Alphonse Baker Carr. This series is interesting in that it is an inversion of the motif of the Perry Mason novels, with prosecutor Selby being portrayed as the courageous and imaginative crime solver and his perennial antagonist A.B. Carr being a wily shyster whose clients are always "as guilty as hell".

The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center currently archives Gardner's manuscripts. The library has constructed a miniaturized reproduction of his study room.^[6]

Bibliography

• Perry Mason (novels) (see also Perry Mason)^[7]
• Cool and Lam^[7]
• Doug Selby^[7]

Terry Clane mysteries

• Murder up my Sleeve (1937)^[7]
• The Case of the Backward Mule (1946)^[7]

Gramps Wiggins mysteries

• The Case of the Turning Tide (1941)^[7]
• The Case of the Smoking Chimney (1943)^[7]

Other fiction

• This is Murder (1935)^[7]
• The Clue of the Forgotton Murder (1935) (criminologist Sidney Griff)^[7]
• Over the Hump (London, 1945) (A different version of this novella is also included in The Case of the Murderer's Bride under the title "Death Rides a Boxcar")^[7]
• Two Clues (1947) (two novelets about Sheriff Bill Eldon, The Clue of the Runaway Blonde and The Clue of the Hungry Horse)^[7]
• The Case of the Musical Cow (1950)^[7]
• The Case of the Murderer's Bride (1969) (various short stories and novelettes)^[7]

Posthumous Collections

• The Amazing Adventures of Lester Leith (1980) (five Lester Leith stories)^[7]
• Whispering Sands - Stories of Gold Fever and the Western Desert (1981) (nine stories--seven feature Bob Zane)^[7]
• The Human Zero (1981) (seven science fiction stories)^[7]
• Pay Dirt and Other Whispering Sands Stories of Gold Fever and the Western Desert (1983) (nine Bob Zane stories)^[7]
• The Adventures of Paul Pry (nine Paul Pry stories)^[7]
• Dead Men's Letters (1990) (a compilation of six Ed Jenkins novelettes)^[7]
• The Blonde in Lower Six (1990) (a compilation of four Ed Jenkins stories)^[7]
• Honest Money (1991) (the six Ken Corning stories)^[7]
• The Danger Zone and Other Stories (2004) (ten miscellaneous stories)
• The Casebook of Sidney Zoom (2006) (ten Sidney Zoom stories)

Non-fiction

Travel

• The Land of Shorter Shadows (1948)
• Neighborhood Frontiers (1954)
• Hunting the Desert Whale (1960)
• Hovering Over Baja (1961)
• The Hidden Heart of Baja (1962)
• The Desert is Yours (1963)
• The World of Water (1965)
• Hunting Lost Mines by Helicopter (1965)
• Off the Beaten Track in Baja (1967)
• Gypsy Days on the Delta (1967)
• Mexico's Magic Square (1968)
• Drifting Down the Delta (1969)
• Host With the Big Hat (1969)

True Crime

• The Court of Last Resort (1952) (revised and enlarged paperback edition in 1954)
• Cops on Campus and Crime in the Streets (1970)

Books about Erle Stanley Gardner

• Mundell, E. H. Erle Stanley Gardner: A Checklist. Kent State University Press, 1968. ISBN 87338-034-7.
• Senate, Richard L. Erle Stanley Gardner's Ventura: Birthplace of Perry Mason. Ventura, California: Citation Press. ISBN 0-9640065-5-3.
• Fugate, Francis L. & Roberta B. Secrets of the World's Best-Selling Writer: The Story Telling Techniques of Erle Stanley Gardner. New York, William Morrow & Co. 1980. ISBN 0-688-03701-1.
• Hughes, Dorothy B.. Erle Stanley Gardner: The Case of the Real Perry Mason. New York, William Morrow & Co. 1978. ISBN 0-688-03282-6.
• Johnston, Alva. The Case of Erle Stanley Gardner. New York, William Morrow & Co., 1947.

References

1. ^ Current Biography 1944, pp224-226
2. ^ "Erle Stanley Gardner, Author of Perry Mason Stories, Dies". Los Angeles Times. March 12, 1970. "Erle Stanley Gardner, whose Perry Mason mysteries made him the world's best selling author, died Wednesday at his ranch home at Temecula in Riverside County." 
3. ^ Cox, Jim, Radio Crime Fighters, 2002, pp. 199-201, McFarland, Jefferson, NC, ISBN 0786413905
4. ^ Cox, Jim, Radio Crime Fighters, 2002, pp. 10, 157, McFarland, Jefferson, NC, ISBN 0786413905
5. ^ "Perry Mason TV Series". http://www.perrymasontvseries.com/wiki/index.php/EpisodePages/Show271. Retrieved 2008-09-14. 
6. ^ Duffy, Jill; Rachel Howarth. "Law-Related Resources at the Harry Ransom Center". Jamail Center for Legal Research. http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/rare/hrc.html. Retrieved 2008-06-02. 
7. ^ ^{a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u} Hubin, Allen J. (1984). Crime fiction, 1749-1980: a comprehensive bibliography. New York: Garland Pub.. ISBN 0-8240-9219-8. 

External links

• Erle Stanley Gardner
• Erle Stanley Gardner fan site
• Erle Stanley Gardner bibliography
• Erle Stanley Gardner pages with extensive bibliographic and other information, including pulp publications
• Erle Stanley Gardner searching for lost mines in Popular Science magazine
• Episodes of A Life in Your Hands, a radio program created by Gardner, in the public domain
• Episodes of Christopher London, a radio program created by Gardner, in the public domain

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