By James Aitchison

He is the role model for aspiring young authors: a writer who set himself a target of 1,200,000 words a year, typed with two fingers!

Erle Stanley Gardner was the best-selling American author in the 1960s.  He notched up sales of 325,000,000 books.

He created Perry Mason, the famous fictional American defence lawyer who took on seemingly impossible murder cases, often revealing the true killer in court with his sharp interrogation skills.

The character starred in 82 novels and four short stories.  He was portrayed by Raymond Burr in the classic TV series which ran from 1957 to 1966, while Matthew Rhys starred as a young Perry Mason in the HBO series from 2020 to 2023.

Gardner, himself a lawyer who passed the California State Bar examination in 1911, wrote 140 books, many under such pseudonyms as A. A. Fair, Carl Franklin Ruth, Carleton Kendrake, Charles M. Green, Charles J. Kenny, Edward Leaming, Grant Holiday, Kyle Corning, Les Tillray, Robert Parr and Stephen Caldwell.

Gardner ranks as the 30^th most bestselling author of all time.  Putting his achievement in perspective, ahead of him are stellar names such as Agatha Christie, Georges Simenon, J. K. Rowling and Jeffrey Archer, while following are the likes of Edgar Wallace, Robert Ludlum, Roald Dahl and J. R. R. Tolkien.

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In 1921 he was a partner in the law firm Sheridan, Orr, Drapeau & Gardner in Ventura, California.  It was there he began writing to the pulp magazines of the time.  Gardner enjoyed litigation and developing trial strategies.  Not surprisingly, he began writing stories about a fictional criminal defence lawyer named Perry Mason.

The Mason character was inspired by Earl Rogers, a famous trial attorney of the day.  Rogers pioneered the use of charts, visuals and diagrams in the courtroom, long before it became common practice.  He appeared in 77 murder trials, losing only three.

The first Perry Mason novel — The Case of the Velvet Claws — appeared in 1933.  By 1937, Gardner had moved to a ranch at Temecula, California, where he stayed for the rest of his life.  His output for the pulp magazines declined as his book sales grew.  Ultimately he would write 140 books, not all Perry Mason titles.  Soon he was dictating books to a team of secretaries.

The Perry Mason books often had alliterative titles such as The Case of the Dangerous Dowager,

The Case of the Black-Eyed Blonde, The Case of the Moth-Eaten Mink, The Case of the Lucky Legs and The Case of the Caretaker’s Cat.  Even the last episode in the TV series was titled The Case of the Final Fade-Out.

Perry Mason was aided by his secretary Della Street and private eye Paul Drake.  His usual, unlucky adversary was the district attorney Hamilton Burger.

The original TV series starred Raymond Burr as Mason.  It was one of the first one-hour television series filmed in Hollywood, and became one of the five most popular shows in America.  Burr earned two Emmy Awards for Outstanding Leading Actor in a Drama Series. 

Gardner’s other series, the Bertha Cool-Donald Lam mysteries, was written under his pseudonym A. A. Fair.  The fictional private detective firm featured in 30 novels.

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Gardner died in 1970 and his ashes were scattered over the Baja California peninsula.  His novels are now available as e-books on Amazon.

Interestingly, Erle Stanley Gardner has left us another legacy: his first name.  “Erle” contains an unusual series of common letters, starting and ending with “e”, the most common letter of the English alphabet.  Reportedly, as at January 2012, his name “Erle” has the highest ratio of mentions in the New York Times crossword puzzle of anyone in the newspaper since 1993.