Erle Stanley Gardner

Tomorrow is the birthday of Erle Stanley Gardner, author of the Perry Mason novels.  Born in 1889, Gardner studied law on his own after high school and passed the bar in California in 1911. He worked off and on as an attorney until 1933 when his first Mason book The Case of the Velvet Claws was published. The rest, as they say, is history.

His writing career began in 1923 when he had his first story published in a pulp fiction magazine. He wrote stories for many of these magazines, setting for himself a goal of 1,200,000 words per year. These were written in his spare time, mind you. He then began to write different series of books involving mystery and the law, using seven pseudonyms. The eighty Perry Mason novels were published under his own name.

Radio gave Perry Mason a voice, that of John Larkin. When producers wanted to bring Mason to television as a soap opera, Gardner refused, so they thinly disguised him and gave him the name Mike Karr, played by John Larkin, on the soap The Edge of Night. When Perry Mason came to television in 1957, he was portrayed by Raymond Burr. (John Larkin appeared several times on the show as unrelated characters.) The show was successful, running for nine seasons, with Gardner appearing as a judge in the final episode.

We have a number of the Perry Mason books (maybe 25 or so, nothing near 80). Are they great literature? No, but they are fun and entertaining. Just how does he win every time and how does D.A. Hamilton Burger keep his job, losing to Perry every time? As for the tv show, we have all nine seasons. It’s my favorite tv show and I watch one every weekday with my morning coffee (watching another one Friday nights when we can stay up later). 

By 1937 Gardner moved to a ranch in Temecula California, living and writing there until his death in 1970 (just five days after the death of William Hopper who played detective Paul Drake for the entire run of the tv show). Proving how popular Perry Mason was, CBS produced 30 movies from 1985 to 1995. Raymond Burr had died in 1993, so the last two years were done with lawyers other than Mason. Barbara Hale who played Della Street in the original series was also in these films with her real-life son William Katt playing Paul Drake, Jr. in the first nine movies. Is that enough coincidence?

Gardner founded The Court of Last Resort in the 1940s. Quoting Wikipedia, The Court was “an organization that was dedicated to helping people who were imprisoned unfairly or couldn’t get a fair trial.” Over the years he spent thousands of hours, along with friends in the legal and forensic fields, researching and helping people get the legal help they needed to rectify injustices. He wrote a book about this in 1952, which was then made into a tv series of the same name. How does one person have the time and talent to write so many books and help so many people? I don’t know, but I wish we could bottle it.