Happy Birthday Erle Stanley Gardner

Erle Stanley Gardner, July 17, 1889 – March 11, 1970

Few readers – fewer critics -- would claim the creator of Perry Mason, Erle Stanley Gardner, was a gifted writer or talented stylist. Gardner himself admitted that he had no aptitude for writing and improved simply by writing all the time for practice and taking criticism seriously.

Gardner had the limitations of other popular mystery writers like Agatha Christie. His vocabulary cries for expansion. His two adverbs are “abruptly” and “evidently.” Eyes always “twinkle” and a face is inevitably “like a mask.” His rhythm-free prose sparks zilch aesthetic thrill. Instead of developing the essential ingredients to a classic mystery - characterization and atmosphere – Gardner focuses on the puzzle, piling up clues, red herrings, and incidents in a perplexing fashion. He creates one-dimensional stock characters that have more mannerisms than personality. Perry Mason is forever pushing his thumbs into the armholes of his vest when pacing and thinking.  PI Paul Drake always puts both legs over one arm of an easy chair. As for settings, LA is the main location but the city never genuinely comes alive to influence the plot one way or the other, as place does in Simenon’s Paris, Earl Derr Biggers’ Hawaii or Ross Macdonald’s Southern California.

Gardner has been little reprinted in the last 20 years because the books have become quaint.  Readers in 2019 don’t grok cuspidors, carbon paper, hat closets, folding boats, jump seats in taxi cabs, and poor access to telephones. Old-fashioned idioms, artifacts and jobs provoke smiles and incomprehension. These, from just one of the novels, The Case of the Rolling Bones:

• four bits: a half-dollar, since two bits was a quarter
• pulchritude: beauty , especially feminine comeliness.
• to pull a boner: to blunder.
• Gladstone bag: a small portmanteau suitcase built over a rigid frame which could separate into two equal sections.
• to get down to brass tacks: begin to talk about important things
• glad rags: a fancy or expensive item of clothing
• taxi dancer: a girl or woman employed, as by a dance hall, to dance with patrons who pay a fee for each dance or for a set period of time.
• plunger: a person who bets, gambles, or speculates, especially rashly or recklessly.
• to foozle: to bungle, to do clumsily
• pard: partner
• to be trimmed: be upstaged
• as right as a rivet: sane, reliable, sound
• to hang crepe: be pessimistic, especially if pessimism is not warranted. In the early 20th century, a piece of black material, aka crepe, was placed over the door to indicate a death in the family. A crepe hanger is a person who is pessimistic, even when the situation doesn’t call for it.

The character names are so retro that we seldom meet people with such first names anymore. From The Case of the Daring Decoy: Gifford, Rosalind, Mildred, Evangeline, Norton, and Ruth. We may wonder if, say in The Case of the Sleepwalker’s Niece, Myrna Duchene is said Merna or Meerna. Call me narrow-minded but it’s easier for me to imagine a Phyllis as a formidable aunt than a femme fatale.

Why then do I read Perry Mason and Lam & Cool novels, if Gardner as a writer has so many negatives?

Some people read fantasy with orcs, I read fantastic stories about lawyers in a vanished world. Perry Mason personifies my ideal image of a lawyer as an expert and fighter that will defend clients hard up against The Law and its relentless partners, judges, DA’s and police. Other lawyers may let the chips fall where they may but Mason will drop everything to help people who are missing the breaks in a criminal justice system monstrously unfair to the poor and working class. Mason is also the lone individual fighting the legal impunity of the rich, corruption among the powerful, and mean-minded contempt for constitutional rights among the cops. 

Mason’s gumption and fight make me feel nostalgic. I remember Americans when I was a kid in the 1960s: argumentative, defiant, and ornery instead of today’s ideal of attentive listeners who are tolerant, sensitive, flexible, and resilient, all code words for docile with incompetent supervisors, meek with capricious bosses, and obedient to any pompous blowhard in a uniform.

Where’s my shawl, dammit?

Anyway, I grant that Gardner's plots hinge on murder, blackmail, and other grubby crimes, but violence and sadism rarely impinge. Greed, loathing, and lust, often enough, but nihilistic moral squalor, never. Like P.D. James and Sara Paretsky, Gardner worked in the real world a long time and in his stories used his knowledge not only of law and lawyering but also of how, for instance, the extractive business of mining and oil drilling used to work. His professional background lends the verisimilitude of a world as tough as taxes then, as dead as a doornail now.

Like many pulp writers, Gardner’s strongest point was his plotting, with the non-stop action that climaxed in courtroom fireworks. As with other writers we are embarrassed to admit we like – Kipling, Maugham, Simenon, Ian Fleming - he wrote excellent escape fiction. 

In conclusion, given the plot holes, pretentious diction, and excessive length of his novels, I’m leery of Raymond Chandler getting the last word, but for what’s worth let’s finish with an excerpt from a letter he wrote to Gardner:

That intensity may be a matter of style, situation, character, emotional tone, or idea. ... It may also be a perfection of control over the movement of a story similar to the control a great pitcher has over the ball. That is to me what you have more than anything else and more than anyone else. ... Every page throws the hook for the next. I call this a kind of genius.