Rogues’ Gallery

Erle Stanley Gardner’s Other Series Characters

Long before he hit it really big with Perry Mason (and moderately big with Bertha Cool and Donald Lam), the endlessly inventive Erle Stanley Gardner created dozens and dozens of colourful and sometimes downright odd characters for the pulps of the twenties and thirties, before turning towards the more lucrative field of novels. Most of them were the good guys, but I think it’s fair to say that few of them were angels. They were con artists, private eyes, lawyers, flim flam men, cowboys, angle players, career diplomats, and corner cutters, more than willing to bend and twist the law to achieve their goals, whether it was to see justice done or simply to relieving some criminal of his ill-gotten goods. Most of them were at least colourful, some were definitely eccentric and a few of them were just plain weird. And in what was surely a recurring motif, many were quiter wealthy; something that must have appealed to Depression-era readers.

These misfits appeared in all kinds of pulps, not just Black Mask and Argosy, but also Clues, All Detective, Dime Detective, Detective Story, Dime Detective, Detective Action Stories, Double Detective, This Week, Detective Fiction Weekly, not to mention West and some other cowboy pulps. Later, some of them popped up in such slicks such as The Country Gentleman, Cosmopolitan and The Saturday Evening Post. A lot of them have been rounded up in assorted collections and anthologies, but many have — even years later — never been reprinted.

So, if you’re ever prowling around a yard sale or a flea market and spy an old, tattered pulp with a Garner story in it going for pocket change, pick it up. Chances are you won’t be disappointed.

Respectfully compiled by Kevin Burton Smith.