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Erle Stanley Gardner

kevinburtonsmith

Pseudonyms include A.A. Fair, Grant Holiday, Carleton Kendrake, Charles J. Kenney, Charles M. Green,  Kyle Corning, Les Tillray and Robert Parr
(1889-1970)

Although critics sneered and many felt that he was not a very good writer (Rex Stout, for example, once claimed that the Perry Mason books weren’t even novels), by the time of his death ERLE STANLEY GARDNER was the bestselling American mystery writers of all time. And he was amazingly, staggeringly prolific (check out his seemingly endless bibliography below). In his heyday, a ten-year-span from roughly 1926 to 1936, he produced and sold an average of one million words of fiction a year, certainly earning his billing as “King of the Woodpulps.”

He was best known, of course, for creating the world’s most famous fictional lawyer, Perry Mason. If that were all he ever did, he’d still rank a bio on this site, given that Mason, in his earliest books, was little more than a unliciensed private eye who just happened to practise law in between shootouts, fisticuffs and other hard-boiled shenanigans. But Gardner did more, much more…

Astoundingly, he was not just a writer, but also a practicing lawyer, a humanitarian and an adventurer. He was born in Massachusetts, but his father’s job as a mining engineer took the family all over–sometimes as far as the Klondike. A bit of a roughneck as a lad, he was constantly getting into brawls. He once boasted he was kicked out of Indiana’s Valparaiso university for “slugging a professor.” He also participated in (and allegedly organized) several illegal boxing matches.

Somewhere around this time, young Erle eventually decided that a little knowledge of the law might come in handy, so he landed a gig as a typist at an Oxnard, California law firm. He stuck around, picking up what legal knowledge he could, and three years later, in 1911, without ever attending university or law school, he passed the state bar exam and began practicing the law himself.

The fledgling lawyer soon found himself gaining a rep among the Chinese and Mexican communities, with whom he developed some long-standing friendships. (To his credit, characters from these communities who appeared in his fiction were not the usual stereotypical villains so popular at the time, but actually appeared as real people, or at least as real as any of Gardner’s characters ever were. Let’s just say in-depth characterization wasn’t his strong suit.)

Always on the eye to increase his income, Gardner abandoned the law for a short stint, working as a tire salesman, but soon realized he missed the law and returned, this time signing on with a Ventura, Californuia firm. About this time, he also began to write, forcing himself to churn out four thousand words a night. It took two years, but he made his first sale to the pulps. It wouldn’t be the last. He pounded out astonishing number of short stories, novelettes and serialized novels — almost 600 of them, mostly crime and detective stories, but also westerns, air adventures and even occasional non-fiction pieces. And given that, at his pulp peak somewhere around 1932, he was having four, five or six  stories published a month — many of them featured on the covers — he pretty much owned the crime and detective pulp racket.

In fact, before he’d even written a single novel, Gardner was one of America’s most successful writers. He was truly the king of the pulps, writing millions and millions of words, cranking out a steady barrage of characters in everything from Black Mask to Argosy. Most of his stories dealt with one side or the other of the law (and often, both). A contemporary of Carroll John Daly and Dashiell Hammett, Gardner had the longest run of any author in Black Mask, and wrote more stories for the magazine (more than a few under pseudonyms) than any other author. In fact, he probably created more characters, particularly continuing characters, for the magazine than any one else. Asked once why he wrote, Gardner confessed that “I write to make money, and I write to give the reader sheer fun.” He succeeded on both counts. He favoured action and dialogue over characterization or overly-complicated plots, and tended to stress “speed, situation and suspense.” It was just what the pulps wanted.

And although his greatest creation never appeared in its pages, in the early 1930s Black Mask published a string of six short stories starring crusading defense lawyer Ken Corning who fought against injustice in a corrupt city. In many ways, Corning served as a rough template for Mason.

But Gardner created a veritable rogues’ gallery of colourful and sometimes downright odd characters for the pulps in the twenties and thirties, before turning towards the more lucrative field of novels, and many of them, perhaps by necessity, shared occasional similarities.

Gardner wrote for all kinds of pulps, not just Black Mask and Argosy, but also Clues, All Detective, Dime Detective, Detective Story, Detective Action Stories, Double Detective, This Week, Detective Fiction Weekly, West and other cowboy pulps). He also wrote for slicks such as The Country Gentleman, Cosmopolitan and The Saturday Evening Post.

The last year that he wrote exclusively for the pulps, 1932, saw Gardner earning around 20,000 bucks, and that’s at a few cents a word! Maybe not a fortune these days, but this was the Depression. To put it in perspective, those are Stephen King-like numbers.

In his pulp days, Gardner was notorious for killing off the final heavies with the last bullet in the hero’s gun, which led to some editors teasing him about how all his good guys seemed to be such bad shots.

Gardner’s alleged explanation? “At three cents a word, every time I say ‘Bang’ in the story I get three cents. If you think I’m going to finish the gun battle while my hero still has fifteen cents worth of unexploded ammunition in his gun, you’re nuts.”

In 1933, Gardner unleashed his first full-length novel, The Case of the Velvet Claws, which introduced hard-boiled, two-fisted attorney Perry Mason. It was a hit right out of the gate, and Gardner soon turned his attention to books, averaging about one book every four months until his death in 1970.

Gardner gradually sanded off Mason’s decidedly rough edges, hoping to make him more palatable to the editors of The Saturday Evening Post, a market he was eager to crack. From the early fifties on, many of the Mason novels were serialized or excerpted in The Post prior to book publication, a fact that no doubt contributed to the subsequent TV series success, although successful movies, radio shows, comic strips and a hit TV show certainly played their part as well. And through it all, Gardner kept sanding down the edges.

Not that Gardner, workaholic that he was, completely abandoned non-Mason projects. Besides the long-running Mason seres, he wrote a series of novels featurng the memorably mismatched private eye team of Bertha Cool and Donald Lam, as well as novels featuring Doug Selby (District Attorney) and Sherriff Bill Eldon. Around this time, to keep up with demand, Garner chucked his typewriter for a bevy of up to six secretaries. He subsequently dictated everything!

Not that Gardner was content with merely being a bestselling author — he continued to practice the law.  multi-talented man, Gardner was a practicing attorney for 22 years.  His fascination with the law and dedication to justice led to him writing The Court of Last Resort, a long-running regular column (and occasional follow-up editorials) for Argosy Magazine, dealing with with potential miscarriages of justice. The column led to any Edgar-winning collection of those columns, and  in turn to a 1957-58 television series on NBC which dramatized many of the cases. The show, co-produced by Gardner’s own Paisano Productions, was pretty much a precursor of today’s The Innocence Project.

Always a passionate outdoorsman and adventurer, Gardner also wrote several non-fiction travel books, including several about Baja, California, an area he frequently visited and explored. When he died in 1970, his ashes were scattered over the area.

But he left behind millions of fans, including president Harry S. Truman, Pope John XXIII and Supreme CourtJustice Sonya Sotomayor, who has frequently cited Perry Mason as one of her earliest influences. It’s rumored that when Albert Einstein died, a Perry Mason novel was by his bedside.

UNDER OATH

SHORT STORIES

 

NON-FICTION COLUMNS & ARTICLES

NOVELS

NOTE: The Perry Mason series was continued, beginning in the eighties, by Thomas Chastain, who also created New York eye J.T. Spanner.

COLLECTIONS

NON-FICTION

FILMS

RADIO

COMIC BOOKS & COMIC STRIPS

TELEVISION

REFERENCE BOOKS

RELATED LINKS

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith. Radio info by Jack French. And thanks to Ed Collins, Monte Herridge and Jim Doherty for some help here.
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