Erle Stanley Gardner

Lawyer

  • Born: July 17, 1889
  • Birthplace: Malden, Massachusetts
  • Died: March 11, 1970
  • Place of death: Temecula, California

American novelist

Gardner, a prolific writer of detective fiction, created Perry Mason, one of the most well known and popular fictional lawyers in print and on television.

Areas of achievement Literature, television, film, law

Early Life

Erle Stanley Gardner was the second child of Charles Walter Gardner and Grace Adelma Gardner. The eldest child, Walter, was two years older. A third child, Kenneth, was born in 1901. His father, a civil engineer, moved the family west to find work in his field, first to Portland, Oregon, and then to Oroville, California. Erle was about ten when they moved, and though he loved to travel, he remained a loyal Californian.

Gardner an energetic nonconformist tended to clash with Walter, an academic achiever in high school and college. Gardner’s academic career was much rockier; his own accounts of high school days included clashes with authority figures in the Oroville Union High School. A series of incidents led to his dismissal from school, which pushed him to find work with the deputy district attorney of Butte County. His understanding father then boarded him with an outstanding high school principal, Joseph C. Templeton of Palo Alto High School. Determining that Gardner suffered from excessive energy, Templeton set up a grueling schedule that required Gardner to read for two or three hours before breakfast and type legal papers in a law office after school until 9:30 p.m. This discipline enabled Gardner to graduate from high school on June 18, 1909.

Gardner’s legal education was self-directed: He studied law as he worked in lawyers’ offices, passed the qualifying examination, and was admitted to the bar when he was twenty-one years old. After an unsuccessful attempt to start his own office, he moved to Ventura County to handle the small cases of a prominent corporate lawyer. Because of one case involving Chinese gamblers wherein Gardner helped them by exploiting some of the racist attitudes of the times, he became a hero in the Chinese community and an annoyance to the district attorney. Although he continued to practice law in Ventura County for twenty years, he said later that he disliked the routine practice of office law but very much enjoyed trials, especially in front of juries.

On April 9, 1912, Gardner married Natalie Frances Beatrice Talbert, then a secretary in a law office, and in 1913 their only child, Natalie Grace, was born. Two years later, he was invited into a partnership with a prominent young attorney, Frank Orr. After taking a short and hectic detour into sales for three years, Gardner settled into the law practice and, in 1921, started writing fiction.

Life’s Work

Writing did not come easily to this genial lawyer who could skillfully talk his way around a courtroom. At first, Gardner’s years of battling in court only provided him with the emotional toughness he needed to keep sending off jokes, skits, stories, and novellas while the rejection slips kept piling up. In 1923, some caustic comments from a reader about a story he had submitted to The Black Mask magazine were accidentally included in the rejection slip. Gardner took the comments to heart and revised for three nights, typing with two fingers until the skin on the fingers cracked. He sold the revision for $160 as Charles M. Green, his pen name at the time. Thereafter he sold a steady stream of writing to The Black Mask and other pulps.

The idea for a book-length mystery was first brought up by Gardner in 1929. Gardner’s methodical approach and experience breaking into the pulps was repeated: He studied the market, took notes, analyzed, and learned. By 1932 he had produced a seventy-thousand-word manuscript featuring Ed Stark, a hard-boiled lawyer and detective figure, and his secretary. He then wrote a second manuscript that featured a different lawyer figure, Sam Keene. The manuscripts made the rounds of publishers until the president of William Morrow and Company, a relatively young firm, expressed interest and useful criticism.

Gardner had the idea, the word count, and the plot line, but he had to make the transition from the rough, violent world of the pulp magazines that had sustained him as a writer to the world of mystery and romance expected in drugstore novels. Because it was a standard practice in pulp fiction to give characters names that personified their most remarkable characteristics, Gardner changed “Stark” to “Stone” and then settled on “Mason,” which had the advantage of referring to a person instead of inert matter yet had the connotations of granite-hard strength. So many laborious, minute revisions followed that Gardner wrote to his agent that revising a book was the hardest job he had ever tackled. Finally, after rejecting many other possibilities, the title was chosen from a line of dialogue uttered by Della Street, the secretary: The Case of the Velvet Claws. It was published in 1933 and set the pattern for the hugely successful Perry Mason franchise that followed.

Gardner, though capable of long hours and hard work, found several ways to turn his struggle with the art of writing into the “fiction factory,” as he jokingly called it. As a practical matter, Gardner’s method of writing progressed from laboriously handwriting with a pencil on legal foolscap to thinking and typing directly on the typewriter, and then to dictating his stories; each stage increased his output. He worked out a system to produce a novel in three days: He would plot out a story and then dictate details of the development into a machine, working so fast that it took several devoted secretaries to keep up with the typing. Secrets of the World’s Best-Selling Writer (1980), by Francis L. Fugate and Roberta B. Fugate, provides a remarkably detailed look at the process by which Gardner analyzed the components of a well-written story closely enough to put them on a single index card. So methodical did he become in his analysis that he was able to construct lists of plots, protagonists, victims, character components, and types of romantic conflicts. Finally, he also used his background in sales to understand what the public wanted in its leisure reading and proceeded to give it to them.

What Gardner discovered and perpetuated in Perry Mason the unbeatable lawyer-detective was what he called the “lowest common denominator of story interest.” By the late 1950’s, after the limited success of motion pictures based on his creations, Gardner had organized his own production company so he could have more control over the presentation of his idea of Perry Mason on television. At a two-day conference for employees of Paisano Productions, he was able to explain what he had garnered in thirty years of analyzing and studying mysteries. Good plots had to be built, he told them; they did not just pop into one’s mind. The place to start was with a situation that the public would find appealing. What people wanted was escape and inspiration.

In addition to the prodigious output of Perry Mason material, Gardner wrote forty-six other mysteries and fifteen nonfiction volumes, as well as hundreds of short stories and magazine articles. He wrote so much that he took several pen names, partially because he was embarrassed to have his real name constantly in print and also because he was aware that people often equate productivity with mediocrity. In addition to Perry Mason, he created other recurring characters in novels: A series about a district attorney, Doug Selby, lasted from 1937 to 1949. The Bigger They Come (1939) was the first book in a series featuring Bertha Cool and Donald Lam that ran until 1970.

Gardner’s crowning achievement was, undoubtedly, Perry Mason, who exemplified the successful mix of Gardner’s personal psychological characteristics of nonconformity and stubbornness, his tremendous physical energy, his legal experience in the courtroom, his willingness to defend the socially outcast, his lessons about the craft of pleasing readers, and his instinctive bachelor habits. He had separated from his wife Natalie amicably around 1934; he did not remarry until her death in February, 1968. On August 7, 1968, he married Jean Walters, the model for the fictional Della Street and his loyal secretary from his first years as a writer. Two years later, Gardner died at his ranch in Temecula, California, the home where he had entertained so many friends and acquaintances with his generosity and geniality and millions of strangers with his writing.

Significance

What Gardner created in Perry Mason was an American cultural icon with a substantial material presence: 82 original novels, 3 shorter works, 271 television episodes, 3,221 radio episodes, more than 20 television movies, 6 films, and numerous other spin-offs such as comic books and board games. As a hard worker who did not consider himself to be a born writer, he left a fascinating analysis of what he learned about the craft and routine of writing a popular series. In his fiction factory, with the devoted help of his many secretaries, he seemed to perfect the magical trick of giving the public the familiarity they needed with sufficient novelty and variety to keep them coming back for more.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that in creating the lawyer who believed in the American justice system and always found a way to use it to prove his clients innocent, Gardner may have influenced a generation or two to understand and believe in the eventual effectiveness of the legal process, provided one had a great lawyer. He may even have inspired some of his readers and viewers to aspire to be these great lawyers. Even Raymond Burr, the actor whose career became so identified with that of the crusading lawyer during the years of the Perry Mason television series (1957-1966), explained his philanthropy off the set as an attempt to uphold the public reputation of the most popular fictional lawyer at the time.

Gardner’s literary contribution has to be closely linked to the cultural phenomenon. Unlike some of the other California writers well known for their crime and mystery novels, such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald, Gardner is not primarily admired for his style and narrative ambience. He believed in action, in keeping the story moving and not burdening the plot with descriptions of setting and extraneous details. His prose, especially given the factory production-line method, stays in the service of a suspenseful story.

Gardner knew he was selling a fantasy world where things might temporarily go wrong for an ordinary, working citizen but where the right hero armed with knowledge of the law and moral courage and his team of equally right-minded and loyal detectives and secretaries would battle the dangers of injustice and eventually free the innocent by discovering the guilty. Such an interpretation, ironically, puts Gardner on the reverse and sunnier side of hard-boiled detective fiction: Readers, after all, need a means to escape from an unfathomable, chaotic, and ultimately unjust world. The continuing appeal and memory of Perry Mason, the knight in legal armor, is Gardner’s reward for the substantial, optimistic, and comforting imaginary world he created.

Bibliography

Bounds, J. Dennis. Perry Mason: The Authorship and Reproduction of a Popular Hero. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. Bounds analyzes the influence of various media on the presentation of Perry Mason. An extensive appendix lists the appearances of Mason in fiction, film, radio, television, and other media. Includes a generous bibliography and an index.

Fugate, Francis L., and Roberta B. Fugate. Secrets of the World’s Best-Selling Writer: The Storytelling Techniques of Erle Stanley Gardner. New York: William Morrow, 1980. A detailed report on Gardner’s writing habits. Appendixes include his formula for writing mysteries, briefly describing the range of plots, characters, and titles. Bibliography and index.

Hughes, Dorothy B. Erle Stanley Gardner: The Case of the Real Perry Mason. New York: William Morrow, 1978. A useful source of information about Gardner’s personal life by a friendly acquaintance and affectionate fan of his writing. Includes a bibliography of Gardner’s work compiled by Ruth Moore.

Karnick, S. T. “The Case of the Bestselling Author.” Weekly Standard 8, no. 20 (February 3, 2003): 25. Discussion of some of Gardner’s books with the character Perry Mason.

Van Dover, J. Kenneth. Murder in the Millions: Erle Stanley Gardner, Mickey Spillane, and Ian Fleming. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1984. Examines the work of three highly popular writers for the stereotypes they employed. Suggests the moral, political, and social implications of their genres.

1901-1940: 1920: The Mysterious Affair at Styles Introduces Hercule Poirot.