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Erle Stanley Gardner (1889-1970) - also wrote as A.A. Fair, Carleton Kendrake, Charles J. Kenny | |
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Prolific American author,
whose
best-known works center on the lawyer-detective Perry Mason, his
helpmates
the loyal and beautiful secretary Della Street, the private detective
Paul
Drake, and the opponent, District Attorney Hamilton Burger. Erle
Stanley Gardner
worked as a professional attorney for twenty-two years. He was an
ardent sportsman, an enthusiastic wildlife photographer, and a constant
traveler, who spoke fluent Chinese. "Exactly," Mason said. "Now then, you have one defense and only one defense. Either tell me the absolute truth and let me take it from there, or stay with this improbable story. If you do that, I'm going to have to adopt the position that some shrewd, diabolically clever individual is deliberately framing you for murder. And the way events have been taking place, he's very apt to have you convicted." (from The Case of the Horrified Heirs by Erle Stanley Gardner, J. Curley & Assocites, 1977, p. 223) Erle Stanley Gardner was born in Malden, Massachusetts. His father, who was a mining engineer, took the family west to Portland, Oregon. Three years later his father found employment as a mining engineer in Klondike. Finally the family settled in the small mining town of Oroville. During these years Gardner also picked up knowledge of mining, which was reflected later in his novels. In 1909 he graduated from Palo Alto High School, in the San Francisco Bay Are. In his youth Gardner led a wild life. He was kicked out of Valparaiso University in Indiana after some weeks – he was involved in a fistfigh. Later he boxed and arranged unlicenced wrestling matches. While working as a typist in an law office in California, he "read law" without formal instructions and was admitted to the bar in 1911. At the age of twenty-one, Gardner opened his own law office in Merced, California. The business was bad. From 1911 to 1918 Gardner worked as a lawyer in Oxnard, California, for I.W. Stewart, a corporate attorney. During this period he defended Chinese clients, and became known as "t'ai chong tze" (the big lawyer). In 1921 Gardner married Natalie Frances Talbert; they had one child. From Oxnard he moved to Ventura, where he had a law firm with Frank Orr. From 1918 to 1921 he was a salesman for Consolidated Sales Company, but returned then to Ventura, where he continued as a lawyer until 1933. In the courtroom Gardner radiated self-confidence like later Perry Mason, with whom he also shared appetite for thick steaks. In the early 1920s he began writing western and mystery stories for the pulp magazines. Gardner was of the most successful writers before he ever published a novel. To earn additional income Gardner turned to pulp writing, using the pen name Charles M. Green. He remarked that audiences were "the ultimate consumers" and his purpose was to serve those consumers. In the mid-1920s he contributed regularly Black Mask magazine and became one of its most popular contributors. Some of the stories from this period were published in 1990 in Dead Men's Letters. Among his crowd of series characters were Lester Leith, the "Gentleman Rogue", Sidney Zoom, "Master of Disguise", and Soo Hoo Duck, "King of Chinatown." Oriental heroes or villains more often were at time popular, and Gardner wrote a story which was set China. Sax Rohmer (d. 1959) had his own super-criminal, Dr. Fu-Manchu, Earl Derr Biggers (1884-1933) created the detective Charlie Chan. At the time of the Depression Gardner wrote westerns for a penny a word, selling to such publications as Western Roud-Up, West Weekly, and Western Tales. By 144 Gardner had produced 144 short stories and 301 novellettes. In
1931 Gardner and his wife made a six-month tour in China.
The experience in the restless land inspired Gardner to create a new
hero, Major Copely Brane, "an adventurer in international politics." In
the first story Brane gets involved in a scheme to prevent publication
of a forged treaty between the legendary Chinese nationalist general
Chiang Kai-shek and the Japanese. On his trip Gardner bought a sleeve
gun as a souvenier. In 1932 Gardner
began to dictate his stories on vax sylinders, turning them over to his
secretary for transcriptions. Gardner dictated a
huge number of his books. Raymond Chandler
said that "years of yapping into a Dictaphone machine have destroyed
the quality of his voice, which now has all the delicate chiaroscuro of
a French taxi horn." (The
World of Raymond Chandler: In His Own Words, edited by Barry
Day, 2015, p. 30) In 1932 Gardner sold the William Morrow & Co. publishing
house his idea of a new
series of mystery novels: "I want to make my hero a fighter, not by
having him be ruthless with women and underlings, but by having him
wade into the opposition and battle his way through to victory,”
Gardner explained. (Cornucopia of Crime: Memories and Summations by Francis M. Nevins, Ramble House, 2010, p. 34) Murder is not perpetrated in a vacuum. It is a product of greed, avarice, hate, revenge, or perhaps fear. As a splashing stone sends ripples to the farthest edges of the pond, murder affects the lives of many people. (The Case of the Horrified Heirs, p. 1) Gardner's first Perry Mason stories were The Case Of The Velvet Claws (1933) and The Case of the Sulky Girl (1933) – the latter H. R. F. Keating included among the 100 best crime and mystery books ever published. "Erle Stanley Gardner may be said to have one important contribution to the shifting history of crime fiction. With his immensely successful creation of Perry Mason, lawyer first and detective afterwards, he put a final nail into the coffin of the brilliant amateur sleuth in American crime writing." (Crime & Mystery: The 100 Best Books, by H. R. F. Kearting, 1987, p. 47). Keating
noted that Gardner was no stylist, but he made one
demand: that
the reader should outguess Perry Mason. Usually in the beginning of the
story a client enters Mason's office: "The girl walked past the
secretary who held the door open, and surveyed the law office with eyes
that showed just a trace of panic." (from The Case of the Sulky Girl, Triangle Books, 1933, p. 1) But,
of course, the major character, Mason, attracts the readers' attention
in the early stories, when he is "a paid gladiator," as he once defined
himself. "Perry Mason gave the impression of
bigness; not the bigness of fat, but the bigness of strength. He was
broad-shouldered and rugged-faced, and his eyes were steady and
patient. Frequently those eyes changed expression, but the face never
changed its expression of rugged patience. He was a fighter; a fighter
who could, perhaps, patiently bide his time for delivering a knock-out
blow, but who would, when the time came, remorselessly deliver that
blow with the force of a mental battering ram." (Ibid., p. 2) Readers
were enthusiastic. Gardner gave up law and wrote eighty more Masons,
although during the revision of The
Case of the Lame Canary
(1937) he thought that "Perry Mason has run through ten or twelve
books, which is damn near enough." (Erle Stanley Gardner: The Case of the Real Perry Mason by Dorothy B. Hughes, William Morrow and Company, 1978, p. 130) From the late 1930s to the late
1950s Saturday
Evening Post serialized
most of the Masons before book
publication. Gardner created other characters, too, and Mason, his
alter ego, turned from tough guy into responsible criminal defense
attorney. Della Street, Mason's secretary, is in
love with him. No visual description of her is given in the books, but
she is not a blonde. ('Erle Stanley Gardner:
The Fiction Factory,' in The
Typewriter Century: A Cultural History of Writing Practices by
Martyn Lyons, University of Toronto Press, 2021, p. 60) To maintain his huge literary production, Gardner hired a staff of secretaries, who typed his dictation. He proudly accepted the description of himself: "the Fiction Factory." Gardner was also called "the Henry Ford of detective fiction." During his lifetime, Gardner's sales were some 100 million copies. An oddball pair of private investigators, the big and crude Bertha Cool and the tiny lawyer Donald Lam, were born in 1938 – Gardner published the books under the pseudonym of A. A. Fair. At
the beginning of his career Gardner had typed 66,000 words
a week for the pulp market. He saw that the essence of good writing was
in craftsmanship. Gardner's first stories were not very good. "I didn't
know how to plot [and] I had no natural aptitude as a writer." (The American Detective: An Illustrated History by Jeff Siegel, Taylor Publishing Company, 1993, p. 105) To turn out
the huge amount of stories he wanted to produce in his assembly line,
Gardner created a formula for characters, their motivations,
and plot structuring. Mason's clients are innocent, and he constantly
urges them to tell the truth: it is in their own best interest. All
cases move toward the revelation of the real culprit. Mason's client is
freed. The stories are dialogue-driven. "Througout, Gardner deploys a
style so withdrawn and neutral, so dependent on speech, that he makes
Hammett look florid." (Perplexing
Plots: Popular Storytelling and the Poetics of Murder by David
Bordwell, 2023, Columbia Univerity Press, p. 292) In 1935 Gardner's marriage to Natalie ended; there was no divorce and Gardner send her money for the remainder of her life. After her death Gardner married in 1968 his private secretary Agnes Jean Bethell, who had worked for him from the 1930s. From 1940s Gardner dedicated many of his books to penologists
and specialists in forensic medicine. The Case of the Horrified
Heirs (1964) was dedicated to the barrister and doctor of science
and medicine, John Glaister, who after thoroughgoing research
identified two bodies, which had been mutilated by removal of eyes,
ears, nose, lips and skin – all teeth had been extracted. John Glaister
also was the author of Medical Jurisprudence and Toxicology,
one of the most comprehensive and authoritative books in the field. In the foreword of The Case Of The Amorous Aunt (1963) he
wrote that "the arch-enemy of the murderer is the autopsy. . . . In
cold-blooded crimes committed by an intellectual and scheming murderer
who has greed or revenge as his goal, the medical examiner, following
clues which would never be apparent to a less thoroughly trained
individual, can establish the truth." (Ibid., New York: Pocket Books, 1965, p. v) Writing, to Gardner, remained an exacting business. Fat from the popular notion that he casually whipped out his novels, improvising each scene out of thin air at his Dictaphone, he actually spent many hours on each of them. Before beginning dictation, he worked out all of his plots in longhand with painstaking care in variety of notebooks over a period of days or weeks, He would never start to dictate until every plot problem had been solved, every character fully delineated – and with the final courtroom fireworks laid out in detail. (William F. Nolan in Mystery and Suspense Writers, Volume 1, edited by Robin W. Winks, Scribner's Sons, 1998, p. 417) Gardner was one of the founding members of the Court of Last Resort (The Case Review Committee), an association who reopened cases wherein a person might have been falsely convicted. In 1952 he won the Fact Crime Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for the book about the foundation. When the longrunning Perry Mason television series started in 1957, Gardner worked without credit as script supervisor and set up Paisano Prodections to maintain control of the series. Starring Raymond Burr in the title role, this program contributed to the average television viewers comprehension of the legal procedures and professional ethics. Eventually the National Association of County and Prosecuting Attorneys complained that the series and its ilk were prejudicing real-life American jurors against prosecutors. (Perry Mason by Thomas M. Leitch, 2005, p. 53). Gardner died on March 11, 1970, in his home at Rancho del Paisano. By the time of his death, he had produced over eighty Perry Mason mysteries. His cremated ashes were scattered over his beloved Baja Peninsula. Gardner had found the place in the late 1930s and as an outdoor person, he loved nature and animals. The Case Of The Postponed Murder (1973) was Gardner's last Mason story. After the death of the author, Thomas Chastain has continued the series, starting with The Case of Too Many Murders (1989). For further reading: The Case of Erle Stanley Gardner by Alva Johnston (1947); Erle Stanley Gardner: The Case of the Real Perry Mason by Dorothy B. Hughes (1978); Secrets of the World's Best-Selling Writer by Francis L. Fugate and Roberta B. Fugate (1980); 'Gardner, Erle Stanley' by Jack Adrian, in Twentieth-century Crime and Mystery Writers, edited by John M. Reilly (1985); Murder in the Millions by J. Kenneth Van Dover (1984); 'Erle Stanley Gardner: The Case of the Sulky Girl,' in Crime & Mystery: The 100 Best Books by H.R.F. Keating (1987); The Marble Orchard: A Novel Featuring the Black Mask Boys: Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Erle Stanley Gardner by William F. Nolan (1996); Erle Stanley Gardner's Ventura by Richard L. Senate (1996); Perry Mason: The Authorship and Reproduction of a Popular Hero by J. Dennis Bounds (1996); Erle Stanley Gardner's Ventura by Richard L. Senate (2005); 'Perry Mason: The Defense Attorney,' in Mystery Movie Series of 1930s Hollywood by Ron Backer (2012); Secrets of the World's Bestselling Writer: The Storytelling Techniques of Erle Stanley Gardner by Francis L. & Roberta B. Fugate (1980; 2015); 'Erle Stanley Gardner: The Fiction Factory,' in The Typewriter Century: A Cultural History of Writing Practices by Martyn Lyons (2021); Perplexing Plots: Popular Storytelling and the Poetics of Murder by David Bordwell (2023) Films: The Case of the Howling Dog (1934), dir. Alan Crosland, starring Warren William as Perry Mason and Helen Trenholme as Della Street; The Case of the Curious Bride (1935), dir. Michael Curtiz, starring Warren William and Claire Dodd as Della Street; The Case of the Lucky Legs (1935), dir. Archie L. Mayo, starring Warren William and Genevieve Tobin as Della Street; The Case of the Velvet Claws (1936), dir. William Clemens, starring Warren William and Claire Dodd; The Case of the Black Cat (1936), dir. William Mc Gann, starring Ricardo Cortez as Perry Mason and as June Travis as Della Street; The Case of the Stuttering Bishop (1937), dir. William Clemens, starring Donald Woods as Perry Mason and Ann Dvorak as Della Street. - Television series Perry Mason from 1957-66, starring Raymond Burr, Barbara Hale and William Hopper, produced by Gardner's company Paisano Productions. The role of the judge was played by Gardner in the final first run episode, The Case of the Final Fadeout. Among the script writers were also Jonathan Latimer. The New Perry Mason in 1973, starring Monte Markham. - Two-hour TV movies, starring Raymond Burr: Perry Mason Returns (1985), Perry Mason: The Case of the Notorious Nun (1986), Perry Mason: The Case of the Shooting Star (1986); Perry Mason: The Case of the Lost Love (1987); Perry Mason and the Case of the Sinister Spirit (1987); Perry Mason: The Case of the Murdered Madam (1987); Perry Mason: The Case of the Scandalous Scoundel (1987); Perry Mason: The Case of the Avenging Ace (1988); Perry Mason: The Case of the Lady in the Lake (1988); Perry Mason: The Case of the Leathal Lesson (1989); Perry Mason. The Case of the Musical Murder (1989). Radio: CBS soap opera from 1943 to 1955, 15 minutes daily. Gardner in Finland. Erle Stanley Gardner has been very popular writer in Finland. Over forty Mason books have been translated into Finnish, and several works written under the pseudonym A.A. Fair. Among Gardner's well-known readers was the political cartoonist Kari Suomalainen, who did not like much description in books – a feature that was developed to its limits in Perry Mason mysteries. The television series Perry Mason, starring Raymond Burr, draw large audiences in the 1960s. Gardner's influence is seen in the work of Mauri Sariola, especially in his mysteries about the lawyer Matti Viima. Sariola, a drop out law student, translated into Finnish the novel The Case of the Calendar Girl from 1958 under the title Vaaralliset valokuvat. (1959). Suomeksi Perry Mason -tarinoita on julkaistu yli neljäkymmentä. Teoksen Kleptomaanin jäljet (suom. 1944, original title The Case of the Shoplifter's Shoe) käänsi runoilija Viljo Kajava (1909-1998). Pentti Saarikoski suomensi Gardnerin tarinan 'Äkäinen todistaja' kokoelmassa Salapoliisikertomuksia Sherlock Holmesista Perry Masoniin (1962). Selected works:
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