Note: This and the next three articles are about writer Erle Stanley Gardner and the 20 Perry Mason novels published in Gardner’s last decade, the Sixties. What follows is, admittedly, an exercise in half-informed speculation. The evidence is real enough: publication dates, production schedules, the roar of celebrity machinery. But the causal chains we draw from them inevitably require more than a little imaginative soldering. In 2026 we hardcore readers and fans cannot peer into Erle Stanley Gardner’s skull circa 1959 or calculate the precise degree to which dictation, deadlines, or That Old Mortality influenced his work. At best, we can observe patterns and venture possibilities based on our own observations of people – like ourselves – who have left middle-age in the rear-view mirror but kept working full-time. Readers are thus invited to treat the following argument as an exploratory sketch rather than a verdict - an attempt to illuminate, not to criticize.
The Fiction Factory That Ate Its Maker
The whole business about Erle Stanley Gardner “declining” once he took to dictation has always felt like one of those cultural red herrings cooked up by romantics who imitate Neil Gaiman and his fountain pen or neuroscientists who argue different parts of the brain are harnessed to handle talking and typing. Dictation isn’t the villain. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Powers used voice recognition software to write The Echo Maker. Gardner himself had been whispering sweet mysteries into a Dictaphone since the early 1940s, and nobody was clutching pearls over TCOT Careless Kitten, TCOT Buried Clock, or TCOT Crooked Candle. Those were tight, bright, and swinging - no harm done by the machine.
No, the real kicker arrived with success - the kind that folds you into a velvet chokehold. By the late Fifties Gardner wasn’t just a writer; he was an institution, an entertainment enterprise. He was approving scripts for a hit television show, juggling Perry Mason novels like burning torches, moonlighting as A.A. Fair for Cool & Lam, and captaining his very own “fiction factory,” his own phrase that suggests equal parts success story and sweatshop. Add awards dinners, speaking engagements, fan luncheons, and whatever civic flattery and requests from charities a man of his fame had to endure - you begin to glimpse the mad circus. One wonders how many hours he spent asleep, or if he simply stood in a corner each night, eyes open, recharging like a noir‑tinted writing device.
In that crucible of busy celebrity in the US, dictation becomes a magnifying glass. Whatever tendencies a writer has - speed, shortcuts, vagueness, flatness - start glowing like uranium. And Gardner, no spring chicken by the 1960s, had the universal experience of our species – ageing and health scares - working against him. Things loosened. Repetition crept in. A little wobble in the joints of the plot. The kind of wobble that comes for us all, if we hang around long enough.
But the real trap wasn’t plot mechanics or style or Perry’s hunches; it was mythic. By the late Fifties Gardner was too big to fail - or to change. His readers, longtime and newcomers too, wanted Perry Mason delivered in the same reliable packaging, hot and fast, like a McLam-burger and McCool shake. His publishers certainly weren’t yearning for experimentation. Innovation becomes an indulgent sport when your livelihood – and that of others - depend on repeating the magic trick, not reinventing it. Ask Jerry Garcia’s bandmates who sweated when they saw Jerry enjoying non-Grateful Dead projects too much.
Some writers manage Houdini‑level escapes - your Rex
Stouts of the world, pulling late‑style miracles out of fedoras. Like Louis
Armstrong, Gardner chose another path: the path of the consummate professional
who knows the audience wants the tune played just so. And so he played it. Over
and over. Until the groove, inevitably, wore thin.
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