The Ides of Perry Mason 47

On the 15^th of every month, we deal with a topic related to Our Favorite Lawyer.

Erle Stanley Gardner: The Case of the Real Perry Mason - Dorothy B. Hughes

The 1978 biography, written eight years after the subject’s death, paints a convincing portrait of Gardner as fighter and competitor.  Such was his compulsion to succeed, early on he doubted his ability as a writer. So he listened carefully to the advice of editors and other writers. He worked for 10 years – the Twenties basically – writing as many as 650 stories for pulp magazines. This book has a shockingly lengthy bibliography of westerns featuring heroes like the Patent Leather Kid and mystery stories starring private detectives the alluring-alliteration-loving Gardner[1] named Lester Leith and Paul Pry.

In his long years of toiling on his craft, he came to accept as axiomatic that in the crime tale characterization and description got in the way of what readers wanted: action. Gardner thought there were two kind of readers so in his fiction he wanted to give the lowbrows the action they craved and to appeal to the highbrows with short informative digressions, brisk pacing, plot twists and courtroom fireworks.

Gardner’s publisher Morrow commissioned Hughes, a mystery writer in her own right, to write this biography. She was also a mystery critic for the Albuquerque Tribune so her journalistic style is very readable and easy to follow as she covers Gardner’s youth, lawyering, and career in writing, publishing and broadcasting. She had access to his correspondence so this book verges on the autobiographical, so extensive are the quotations from his letters.

Sometimes the letters are tantalizing but we are left unsatisfied. For example: “…the last Donald Lam that I did, I put away the feeling that it was too lousy to revise and sent it to my publisher.” Nowhere does Hughes include a gloss as which specific Cool & Lam novel Gardner so disliked. Thus, the difference between journalists and scholars. Like I always say when I watch the TV news, “It never occurs to reporters to tell you what you really want to know.”

Unfortunately, Hughes does not often put on her critic’s hat. She was a fine writer of mysteries, with The Expendable Man and the tour de force In a Lonely Place reprinted by New York Review of Books. I was looking forward to her examination of aspects of Gardner’s writing that wove his magic, that ineffable magnetism that makes it impossible to bail out of a Mason mystery once past the half-way point. And what critical stances are expressed – e.g., that the last seasons of Mason the TV series avoided getting stale – are open to vociferous debate.

The older I get, the more I’m convinced the Seventies were a stranger time than we can really come to grips now, especially those of us who were young adults at the time. Perhaps because 1978 was too much in the midst of change, Hughes is unable to take stock of the place of the Gardner Fiction Factory (his words) in the history of the whodunit. Though in the late 1960s Gardner did indeed stay current – he was crazy about technology like computers and CB radio and scientific advances in forensics - Hughes gives little sense of how whodunnits were changing in the 1960s and 1970s to become longer, darker, more regional, and more ripped from the headlines.

Time passes. Though the TV series is easy to find nowadays, Gardner’s novels have been infrequently reprinted in the last 20 years because the books have become quaint.  Readers in 2023 don’t grok cuspidors, carbon paper, hat closets, folding boats, jump seats in taxi cabs, and poor access to telephones, much less CRestline-6-9342. Old-fashioned jobs like elevator operator or car hop provoke uneasy smiles and incomprehension. Ditto for outdated expressions: hang crepe, taxi dancer, to be in a brown study.

“There is no test of literary merit except survival, said George Orwell, “which is itself an index to majority opinion.” Is it possible that a writer who sold 300,000,000 copies of his books in his day would just gradually fade away? Could it be Gardner is on his way to Wilkie Collins status: only read by the most hardcore, readers like us?

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* There must be something about an alliterative name that they are so popular and memorable enough to spring to mind without much coaxing: Marilyn Monroe, Mickey Mantle, Fred Flintstone, Charlie Chan, Bruce Banner, Betty Boop, Peter Pan. Try it yourself: you’ll come up with a half-dozen in less than minute.  . . .  Did you date yourself like I just did?