The Case of the Bestselling Author

Nonetheless, for many years Erle Stanley Gardner was commonly listed as the bestselling fiction writer of all time (though the perennial Agatha Christie has now surpassed him), his books having sold well over 300 million copies. Nearly all the Mason novels are still in print, and reruns of the 1957-1966 CBS television program “Perry Mason” appear four times daily on the Hallmark Channel. Surely this deserves some serious consideration, if only for sociological reasons. And, in fact, once one starts to examine them, Erle Stanley Gardner and Perry Mason prove to merit a look, all on their own.

The Mason books differ greatly from the television series, even though Gardner personally supervised the show. When the first installments appeared in the early 1930s, mysteries were either hard-boiled (emulating Dashiell Hammett and the other “Black Mask” pulp writers) or relatively urbane (like the puzzle tales of Ellery Queen and Agatha Christie). Gardner somehow managed to write both at the same time. Like a Hammett private eye, Perry Mason is tough and relentless, actively investigating the crimes and willing to use his fists when necessary. In the second novel, “The Case of the Sulky Girl,” Gardner describes the lawyer as giving “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.”

Mason’s biggest weapon, however, is his mind, and he differs from his hard-boiled contemporaries in using logic to solve the crimes (although the cases are so intricate that it is usually all but impossible to determine whether Mason’s arguments actually make sense). After Mason presents his elaborate solution in “The Case of the Counterfeit Eye,” District Attorney Hamilton Burger asks how he knew what had happened, and Mason says, “Simply by deductive reasoning.” The Mason books further follow the puzzle form in forgoing the cynicism that pervaded the hard-boiled school of mystery story, where money inevitably corrupts and women are nearly always duplicitous.

Incorporating elements from both types of popular crime fiction, the Mason stories follow a strict but highly flexible formula unique to Gardner. First we encounter some strange and puzzling events that will lead to murder, either shown through third-person narration or told in first person as a character (often the one who will eventually be accused of the crime) relates the incidents to Mason in his Los Angeles office. So, for example, in “The Case of the Counterfeit Eye” (one of the very best entries in the series), a man hires Mason to find out who stole one of his custom-made bloodshot glass eyes.

TYPICALLY, this part of the story will introduce an attractive young female in distress. In “The Case of the Vagabond Virgin,” a rich businessman hires Mason to bail out a pretty, ingenuous young woman who has been charged with soliciting for prostitution. During these introductory chapters, Mason is highly skeptical, and he never assumes a witness is telling the truth. This proves a wise course, because the motivations and relationships in these sections are extremely complex and most of the characters are hiding various transgressions that prevent them from telling the truth.

The bizarre introductory events lead quickly to murder. Mason, confidential secretary Della Street, and hired detective Paul Drake (often with many operatives) hasten across the city and surrounding area (sometimes as far away as Bakersfield or San Francisco) to discover clues, alter evidence, talk with witnesses, and lay false trails for the D.A. and the police. In the early books in particular, it is in these sections, rather than the courtroom scenes, that Mason pulls off his most audacious stunts. In “The Case of the Vagabond Virgin,” for example, Mason traps a blackmailer by paying him off with a forged check, which results in the blackmailer’s arrest. In “The Case of the Haunted Husband,” the lawyer lures an important but reluctant witness to Los Angeles by offering her a job as receptionist in Paul Drake’s office. To keep the police from getting to one of his witnesses in “The Case of the Counterfeit Eye,” Mason hires a woman to rent an apartment in Reno so that the authorities will think that she is the missing witness.

In these chapters, Gardner frequently puts Mason and his assistants in direct, physical danger. In “The Case of the Haunted Husband,” for example, when a blackmailer’s henchman tries to suffocate Della, Perry breaks down the door. The killer aims a .38 at him, but Della leaps forward and wrests the gun from his grasp. The killer then swings a chair at Mason, but the lawyer outboxes him: “Mason knocked the man’s left aside and sent his fist crashing into the other’s nose,” Gardner writes. “He felt the cartilage flatten out under the impact of his fist. . . . The tall man tried to say something, but the words only bubbled through the red smear that had been his nose and lips.”

Mason and his helpers often operate on the edge of provable obstruction of justice, and he is frequently threatened with arrest. The typical outcome is a courtroom scene, either a preliminary hearing or a trial, in which Mason uses his wiles and legal skill to prove his client innocent, usually before the case can go to a jury for deliberation. Justice is inevitably done in the Mason books, but it is always a close-run thing.

Gardner was a fiendishly inventive plotter, with a genuine ability to suggest multiple possibilities from a small number of facts: Some of the most startling passages are those in which Mason rattles off a series of different ways to interpret a situation. Still, although the novels deviated from the conventions of their time, they seldom strayed far from the initial pattern Gardner established for them. The Mason tales eventually became highly formulaic in their settings, characterizations, paucity of descriptive passages, reliance on dialogue, plodding writing style, and overall narrative form.

NONE OF THIS EXPLAINS why the books sold so well and Perry Mason became a piece of Americana. A big part of the answer lies in Gardner’s blending of another pair of starkly contrasting and seemingly incompatible approaches to storytelling. Gardner designed the superficial aspects of his stories–the settings, situations, and characters–to be sufficiently familiar to engage the modern reader. But his narrative foundation was not realistic fiction. It was, rather, classic romance literature: knightly tales of quests and noble deeds.

Mason’s quest is for justice, and Gardner’s multimillion-dollar observation was that a lawyer could stand as the new knight, with his clients as beautiful damsels and oppressed peasants who needed protection from wicked and incompetent nobles, invading warlords, pirates, and rogue warriors. Knight-errantry was a conscious decision on Gardner’s part. In their 1980 “Secrets of the World’s Best-Selling Writer,” Francis and Roberta Fugate quote Gardner: “This is the vision of the knight charging to the aid of the damsel in distress. It is the fairy godmother touch of Cinderella, in which justice is brought to the downtrodden. And it also has something of Robin Hood because Mason’s mind is about the same as Robin’s bow and arrow.”

The narratives and imagery of the Mason books make this intention clear. Mason tells an antagonist in “The Case of the Stuttering Bishop,” “I’m not merely a paid gladiator fighting for those who have the funds with which to employ me. I’m a fighter, yes, and I like to feel that I fight for those who aren’t able to fight for themselves, but I don’t offer my services indiscriminately. I fight to aid justice.” In Gardner’s modern romances, wealthy businessmen replace the barons, and government officials (usually corrupt) serve as their satraps. Gangsters replace the independent warlords, while playboys and idle young women are the new courtiers.

The jousting in the Mason books is done with the mind rather than lances, of course. The second paragraph of the first Mason book, “The Case of the Velvet Claws,” describes Mason: “His face in repose was like the face of a chess player who is studying the board. . . . He gave the impression of being a thinker and a fighter, a man who could work with infinite patience to jockey an adversary into just the right position, and then finish him with one terrific punch.” The forum in which the contest takes place is the courtroom, and nearly all the Mason books culminate with an elaborate, complex trial or hearing. The prosecutor–usually District Attorney Hamilton Burger–presses forward doggedly, hitting Mason and his client hard, piling up a compelling case. Mason parries with all the tricks at his disposal, and the judge looks on in impartial dignity like a medieval king. In the end, Mason, the selfless, virtuous knight, invariably triumphs.

MASON IS NOT UNIQUE in Gardner’s fiction. When Gardner published his first Mason novel, in 1933, he had already written most of the more than 550 stories and short novels he produced for the popular but low-paying pulp magazines of the time. Among Gardner’s many pulp knights are Paul Pry (an adventurer who preys on other criminals and takes their loot), the suave, sinister Dan Seller (the “Patent Leather Kid”), master of disguise Sidney Zoom, Señor Lobo (a professional soldier of fortune), freelance espionage agent Major Brane, Speed Dash (a human fly), and crusading attorney Ken Corning (a precursor of Mason).

Although they use whatever means are necessary to achieve their aims, each of these heroes is something of an idealist, a crusader for justice, and usually operates well outside the law. So, of course, is Mason, and so also was Gardner himself, as a crusading lawyer, legal defender of Chinese immigrants, and founder of the real-life “Court of Last Resort” for prisoners wrongly convicted.

One of Gardner’s most popular pulp protagonists was Ed Jenkins, a reformed criminal who is simultaneously pursued by both the police and various gangsters in seventy-four stories and novelettes. Another of Gardner’s knights-errant from the pulps, Lester Leith, is a charming bon vivant who executes highly elaborate schemes to break up criminals’ enterprises and recover stolen money, usually in the form of jewels, rare coins, or the like.

As with all romances, story takes precedence over characterization. Concealment of individuals, objects, and information is always a powerful motif in Gardner’s work. In every Mason story, the lawyer hides a crucial witness or fact from the police, leading them astray and preventing them from assembling an airtight case against his client. Gardner further evokes classic romances by having his protagonists adhere to a clear code of honor: Although Mason flouts the rules and even breaks the law, he does so only in pursuit of justice, never for selfish reasons.

Chivalry toward women is a slightly different matter. Mason is as abrupt and rude toward a female liar as to a male one, and he knowingly sends Della into danger in several instances. He informs her of the hazards, of course, but unlike most romance heroes of the past, Mason is willing to put a lady at risk. Nonetheless, the clients for whom Mason places himself and others in jeopardy are usually women, and young, innocent ones at that–classic damsels in distress.

Finally, Gardner strongly evokes the past in his evident dislike of the social chaos of the modern age. He was fond of camping in the desert, and many of his characters explicitly seek out peace and quiet. In the numerous “Whispering Sands” crime stories he wrote for Argosy, Gardner waxes rhapsodic about the joys of seclusion in the desert, where the soothing quiet of nature is broken only by human depravity. And in the Mason series, the complexity and chaos of modern life are evident in the gnarled plots and the schemes that end in murder.

Gardner was skilled at creating formidable villains. In the early Mason novels, the lawyer’s police antagonist is Sergeant Holcomb, a brutish policeman who despises the slick Mason and will resort to any means of putting him in jail. In “The Case of the Silent Partner,” Gardner wisely replaces him with Lieutenant Tragg, an intelligent, suave, and sophisticated man whom Mason respects. Although the two men are on opposite sides of any particular case and do their best to manipulate each other, they respect each other and seem to enjoy each other’s company.

Mason’s battles with Los Angeles district attorney Hamilton Burger are another matter. Mason describes him as “a pretty decent chap” in “The Case of the Counterfeit Eye,” the first novel in which Burger appears. At their initial meeting, Burger tells Mason that he respects the latter’s trickery because it is intended not to free guilty persons but “to bring out the truth,” adding, “I have been impressed by your work.” But as Mason’s victories over the broad-shouldered, thick-necked D.A. pile up, Burger comes to hate him and even tries to have him disbarred.

Like all real romances, the Mason tales show little interest in psychological examination and explanations. Gardner’s insistence that people are responsible for their actions provides what the critic J. Kenneth Van Dover called a “stable moral background” for the stories. In “The Case of the Velvet Claws,” for example, the pervasive blackmail in the plot does not imply that all of society is fundamentally corrupt, as it would in a Hammett or Chandler novel. On the contrary, these transgressions reinforce the sense of justice at the center of the story. Mason’s goal is not to ensure that nobody is held responsible for the crimes in question, only that his client is not wrongly convicted.

Mason’s description of his preternaturally loyal secretary, Della, in “The Case of the Velvet Claws” strongly reflects this line of thinking: “Your family was rich. Then they lost their money. You went to work. Lots of women wouldn’t have done that.” This scene takes place during the early years of the Great Depression, when many people could have argued that their sufferings were not their fault. But Gardner will have none of this self-pity. Hence, in “The Case of the Stuttering Bishop,” Mason turns down a big fee to defend a man he knows is guilty, tying together the classical motif of knight-errantry with the American respect for self-reliance. “I know it’s a lot of money,” he tells Della bitterly, “and I’m going to turn it down. That kid’s nothing but the spoiled, pampered child of a millionaire. He’s dished it out all his life and never learned to take it. So when he ran up against the first real setback he’d ever had, he grabbed a gun and started shooting. Now he says he’s sorry, and thinks everything should be smoothed out for him.”

IT IS IN THIS WAY that the Mason novels differ most starkly from the hard-boiled school–in particular, from the works of Raymond Chandler, who also famously described his detective, Phillip Marlowe, as a knight. Gardner came first, of course, and Chandler was an admirer of the Perry Mason series, lauding, in a 1946 letter to Gardner, the latter’s “artistic performance” and “intensity.” Marlowe, however, is not a true modern knight. He and his kind usually have a code, albeit rather flexible and inconsistent, but their adversaries are seldom bound by it. In the Mason series, by contrast, both defender and prosecutor observe the same code of honor. In “The Case of the Demure Defendant,” Mason tells Drake, “I sometimes do things that will expose the weakness of the police theory, . . . but I don’t go around planting evidence in order to compound murders.”

This code of ethics is part of something bigger: Gardner’s view of religious faith. Characters pray, and their prayers are answered. In the Ed Jenkins novelette “In Full of Account,” the narrator-protagonist, in a tight fix, says, “So I prayed a short prayer that I was acting on the right hunch and slipped away in the dark shadows of the yard.” His decision proves correct. Gardner’s tales are also peppered with religious allusions and images, and the Christian theme of self-sacrifice runs throughout his fiction.

Perry Mason himself has a spiritual side, though it usually remains hidden. In Chapter 17 of “The Case of the Haunted Husband”–one of the best single chapters in all of mystery fiction–Mason comforts a woman who is depressed because of her husband’s death. He says, “If only we had the vision to see the whole pattern of life, we’d see death as something benign.” Then, through what he describes as “simply the application of what you might call legal logic to the scheme of existence,” he shows her how nature indicates that the human soul lasts beyond death. The woman says, “I guess I’m getting my faith back.” Characters in quite a few of Gardner’s tales talk explicitly about God and the strength they can draw from him, as in the D.A. Doug Selby novel “The D.A. Calls It Murder” and the Whispering Sands story “The Whip Hand.” The latter, in fact, ends with the words, “‘I guess there’s a God after all,’ she said softly.”

A good plot is a very pleasing thing, but the pervasive recognition that God is watching, that justice will ultimately be done, and that there are good and unselfish people in the world was a rare thing in twentieth-century popular fiction. That is probably the real reason Erle Stanley Gardner became one of the bestselling authors of all time and why, for all their deficiencies, his books are still in print and still worth reading.

S.T. Karnick is editor in chief of American Outlook magazine, published by the Hudson Institute.