|
Volume 24, Number 1 (2000) reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum SAMURAI AT LAW: THE WORLD OF ERLE STANLEY GARDNER FRANCIS M. NEVINS* Gardner was born on July 17, 1889 in the small town of Malden, Massachusetts to a mother whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower and a civil-engineer father descended from a long line of sea captains. This boy whose earliest years coincided with the golden age of social Darwinism was a born combatant, with a boundless zest for competition and an unstoppable drive to succeed. In 1899, while in fourth grade, he wrote a school essay on the Greek myth of Atalanta and the theme that whoever doesn’t win the race dies. Later that year his family moved west, settling in 1902 in a prosperous California mining town. Wander though he did throughout his life, Gardner called the Golden State his home from that day forward. He spent his early teens traveling with his father through remote stretches of California, Oregon and the Klondike, developing a zest for outdoor living that was to become a hallmark of his fiction. In school he was a maverick and a troublemaker, earning pocket money by boxing in unlicensed matches, and his interest in the law seems to have grown out of hunting for loopholes in the California statutes that made prizefighting illegal. After completing high school in 1909 he was admitted to Valparaiso University in Indiana but was soon expelled for slugging a professor. He went back to California, apprenticed himself to one established attorney after another and, in 1911, passed the state bar. Over the next twenty years he discovered that litigation was a form of combat at which he could excel, and he earned a reputation as one of the state’s most flamboyant trial lawyers. Many of his clients came from the Chinese community of Oxnard and the first book-length study of Gardner, now more than half a century old, reconstructs a number of the forensic scams he perpetrated on their behalf. During one of the city’s periodic anti-lottery crusades, Gardner was representing twenty Chinese accused of selling lottery tickets. While all the defendants were out on bail and just before the first batch was to be brought in for trial, Gardner made some secret arrangements with the leader of the local Asian community. The next day a plainclothesman “picked up a Chinese who was booked as Ah Lee. . . . At the station the Chinese prisoner gave a friendly greeting to a deputy sheriff.” When the deputy learned that the prisoner had been booked as Ah Lee, he told the detective: “That’s not Ah Lee.” Detective: “That certainly is Ah Lee. . . . I bought a ticket from him a week ago, and I just arrested him at Ah Lee’s laundry.” Deputy: “I’ve known Ah Lee for ten years. He does my Sunday shirts. This is Wong Duck, the butcher.” Detective: “But I tell you he was running the laundry. . . . He was bossing the others around. What would a butcher be doing running a laundry?” Deputy: “Who knows why a Chinaman does anything?” Next the detective identified another defendant from whom he had purchased a lottery ticket as Ho Ling, the grocer. Deputy: “He’s Ong Hai Foo, the druggist . . . the biggest dealer in dried-lizard medicine in Southern California.” Detective: “But I tell you he was running Ho Ling’s grocery when we arrested him. . . . He was waiting on customers. Why would a druggist be selling vegetables?” The answer of course is that Gardner had had dozens of Asian merchants exchange identities so that each would be booked under another’s name. After it became clear that the key prosecution witness had wrongly identified several defendants, all twenty cases were quietly dismissed.1 This is simply one specimen from the bag of tricks and courtroom fireworks which, when he began writing novels, Gardner handed over to his alter ego Perry Mason. Since the practice of law could not contain his energies, Gardner launched a number of sales businesses as a sideline. But he was a born wanderer, to whom the four walls of a law office or courtroom were like the walls of a prison cell, and the only way he could think of to make decent money and still enjoy a free-ranging lifestyle was to establish himself as a professional writer. But he quickly discovered that writing fiction wasn’t the same as writing briefs. “It was like trying to sign my name with my left hand,” he said many years later. “I knew what I wanted to do but for the life of me I couldn’t do it.” (DBH 73). He collected a drawerful of rejection slips but his Can Do spirit never flagged and as soon as one magazine had bounced a story he’d mail it out to another. In the spring of 1921, as he put it, “Glory be, I clicked!” (DBH 74). His first sales were a pair of humorous skits for which the pulp magazine Breezy Stories paid him ten or fifteen dollars apiece. For the next two years he sold hardly a word. “I wrote the worst stories that ever hit New York,” he said near the end of his life. “I have the word of an editor for that, and he hadn’t seen my worst stories because the worst ones I wrote under a pen name.” (DBH 77). Finally thanks to sheer persistence he sold one of those pseudonymous tales (“The Shrieking Skeleton,” under the name Charles M. Green, Black Mask, December 1923), and from then on he appeared with mind-boggling frequency in the so-called pulps that made up most Americans’ entertainment in the days before radio and TV. Black Mask, Top-Notch, Argosy, West, Clues, Air Adventure, Detective Fiction Weekly, Three Star, Prize Detective, Detective Action Stories, Gangland Stories, Western Trails, Gang World, Dime Detective—the entire list of magazines in which he published would fill most of a page. How did he keep up this pace without coming apart? “For a period of several years,” he said, “I pounded out stories on the typewriter at the rate of a novelette every third day, and at the same time practiced law, much of it trying cases in front of juries, which I can testify is a very exhausting occupation.” (DBH 83). After a full day at the office or in court and an evening at home dictating legal memoranda and correspondence, Gardner would sit down at the typewriter around 10:00 P.M. and start work on a story. I would work until one, one-thirty, or two o’clock in the morning when I would be so dog-tired that whenever I would stop to rest I would fall asleep in the chair and have nightmares, dreaming for the most part about the characters in the story, waking up a few seconds later all confused as to what had been in the story and what had been in my dream. At that time I would go to bed. I would sleep about three hours a night, waking up around five or five-thirty in the morning. Then I would take a shower, shave, pull up my typewriter and write until it came time to go to the office. It’s a wonder that I didn’t kill myself with overwork. If I finished one story at twelve-thirty at night, I couldn’t go to bed without starting another. (DBH 83).Night after night he would pound away at those typewriter keys until his fingers bled. Eventually he switched to a primitive dictating machine and set himself a fiction quota of 100,000 words a month. The genre pulps in which Gardner appeared were flimsily bound and stapled and printed on dirt-cheap paper which the years have turned dirt-brown, but copies today are hard to come by and often command astronomical prices. Even if you had the time and fortune to assemble a complete library of the pulps that featured Gardner stories, whenever you opened the pages of an issue to enjoy his contribution you’d run the risk that the magazine might fall apart in your hands. And frankly, many of those early tales don’t hold up all that well fifty-five to seventy-five years later. They were uniformly written in a fiendish hurry and some of them wind up with plot complications not only unexplained but beyond explicability. Yet even the weaker stories are often filled with the kind of raw vivid inventiveness and taut immediacy that have long since vanished from fiction, and the outstanding ones are as readable today as they were when Hoover and FDR sat in the White House. As his friend Freeman Lewis wrote shortly after Gardner’s death: “He was a born story-teller. In over forty years as a publisher, I never met a writer so generously endowed with that quality. In an evening’s conversation (perhaps monologue would be a better word) he would produce more ideas and plots for books than most writers come by in a lifetime.” (DBH 309). Writing as much and at such white-hot speed as he did, it’s small wonder that he often lost track of various elements in his plots. In his defense he argued that “[e]very mystery story ever written has some loose threads” (DBH 163) and claimed that the breakneck pace of his novels and stories made it all but impossible for readers to catch the plot flubs. “After all, on a trotting horse who is going to see the difference? The main thing is to keep the horse trotting and the pace fast and furious.” (DBH 302). The number of series characters Gardner created for the pulps defies belief. In the Western genre alone he wrote ten stories for Black Mask (1924-32) about Bob Larkin, an adventurous juggler who uses a billiard cue instead of a gun; eight tales for the same magazine (1925-35) featuring Black Barr, a gunfighter who considers himself an instrument of God’s justice; three stories apiece about The Old Walrus (1926-27) and Buck Riley (1927-28) and two apiece about Fish Mouth McGinnis (1926-31) and Sheriff Billy Bales (1928). The 21 Whispering Sands tales he wrote for Argosy (1930-34) are perhaps his finest work in this genre, with their rich descriptions reflecting his lifelong love of the desert.2 He also wrote a surprising amount of science-fiction without any series characters.3 The majority of his pulp stories, however, were contemporary crime thrillers, most of them with protagonists somewhat reminiscent of the “good badman” characters of the sort that were portrayed again and again by silent Western film star William S. Hart. Among the longest running and best known of his series characters in this vein are Ed Jenkins, the Phantom Crook (72 stories for Black Mask, 1925-43)4 ; Speed Dash, the Human Fly (20 stories for Top-Notch, 1925-30); Lester Leith (66 stories, 1929-43), an aristocratic thief and amateur sleuth whose butler is really an undercover cop assigned to nail him; Sidney Zoom (17 stories for Detective Fiction Weekly, 1930-34), an aloof and godlike sleuth who, like his creator, “aided misfortune, but detested weakness” and whose only friend is a police dog; Dan Seller, the Patent Leather Kid (14 stories, 1930-34); Señor Arnaz de Lobo (23 stories, 1930-34), a sort of Zorro figure without the cape and mask; and Paul Pry (27 stories, 1930-39), another gentleman thief and amateur detective, sidekicked by a one-armed hulk with the improbable name of Mugs Magoo. Then there’s a small army of the shorter-lived series characters including Major Copely Brane (8 stores for Argosy, 1931-34), Rex Kane (3 tales for Detective Action Stories, 1931-32), Steve Raney (7 stories for Clues, 1932-33), El Paisano (5 stories for Argosy, 1933-35), Stan Wider, The Man in the Silver Mask (3 tales for Detective Fiction Weekly, 1935), Barney Killigen (4 stories for Clues, 1938-39), Ed Migrane, The Headache (3 tales for Detective Fiction Weekly, 1939-40), and several more to boot. Random samplings in these series suggest that legal elements sometimes appear in them but not to an overwhelming extent. What almost all Gardner protagonists have in common is that they’re scam artists. Take, for example, Paul Pry, the impossibly debonair young adventurer who debuted in the October 1930 issue of Gang World and, after appearing in all but four of the magazine’s 25 issues, continued his career in the pages of Dime Detective.5 Pry makes his living hijacking stolen goods from the underworld and then collecting huge rewards from the rightful owners. In each of his early exploits he concocts an elaborate scam to frustrate the latest crime coup of gangster master-mind Big Front Gilvray; and if you can ignore Gardner’s graceless and verbose style and just enjoy the clever plotting, these episodes can be almost as much fun as a brace of Roadrunner cartoons, with “A Double Deal in Diamonds” (Gang World, February 1931) having special appeal thanks to vivid action scenes on board an inter-urban tramcar. After awhile the duels with Gilvray vanish and each later story in the series is a self-standing unit. In “Dressed to Kill” (Dime Detective, 1 September 1933), Pry and his sidekick Mugs Magoo are having supper at a nightclub when Mugs, who has a photographic memory for faces and an encyclopedic knowledge of the underworld, pieces together information he happens to have about several fellow diners and tells Pry they’re about to witness the surreptitious delivery of a letter from a certain imprisoned gem thief to his lawyer. Sniffing stolen jewels in the air, Pry deftly snatches the letter before it can be delivered and takes it back to his table, only to find sitting there a lovely lady who allows him to seduce her in record time, then tells him she’s being blackmailed and asks him to accompany her to a masquerade ball and steal back for her some compromising letters. It’s hardly a surprise when we learn that the indiscreet letters and the stolen jewels are connected, but it’s still fun to watch Pry walk into the lion’s mouth, tweak the noses of the ungodly and emerge with all the boodle in sight. “The Finishing Touch” (Dime Detective, August 1938) also opens with Paul and Mugs enjoying dinner at a night spot. Two jewel-cases containing identical gems happen providentially to be in Pry’s pocket. Mugs spots a certain lovely lady in the club and tells Paul she’s an ex-convict whose underworld bosses are forcing her to work the badger game on amorous males. The scheme Pry devises on the spot is never explained to his partner or us but calls for him to allow the woman to work the badger game on him and steal one of the twin jewels while at the same time Mugs flashes the other stone around the nightclub’s bar. When the scheme goes haywire, Pry instantly concocts another, this time trying to convince the thieves that he has a Geiger counter that can locate stolen jewels. In the twenty-seventh and last tale in the series, “It’s the McCoy” (Dime Detective, January 1939), Paul and Mugs are relaxing at a baseball game when Magoo intercepts code signals between a jewel thief and a master fence. Pry instantly cracks the code, audaciously breaks into the signaled conversation and waits for the crooks’ reaction, which is not long in coming. A young woman steps in front of his car as he’s leaving the ballfield parking lot. Her “doctor” tells Pry that she has an incurable disease that will kill her in a few weeks and asks him to take her out every night and make her last hours happy. (How many defendants in auto negligence suits must wish they had hit so forgiving a victim!) Paul then sends Mugs to the city’s best hotel disguised as a visiting rajah, complete with a fake ruby in his turban and some out-of-work black showgirls as his harem. The argument between Magoo and a bad-tempered belly dancer is one of the funniest scenes Gardner ever wrote. When Pry tells his dying girlfriend that he’s a professional thief with designs on the rajah’s ruby, she breaks out in gales of enthusiasm for the scheme, saying “I don’t think it’s exactly a crime to rob the very rich” and “After all, the world owes you a living.” Once again Pry’s master plan is never explained but it works perfectly and our heroes come out of the climactic bloody battle unscathed and the richer by two suitcases full of jewelry while the poor dying maiden gets stuck with the red glass from Mugs’ turban. At around the same time he created Paul Pry, Gardner also launched an even longer-running series about the light-fingered larcenist Lester Leith, whose forte is solving crimes by analysis of newspaper reports and then hijacking the loot before he exposes the criminal to the stupid police.6 Lead-witted Sergeant Ackley has planted an agent in Leith’s palatial penthouse but Lester has long been aware that his valet is a spy and delights in twisting poor Scuttle into a pretzel each time the game is afoot: sending him out on humiliating wild goose chases, ridiculing his every word, almost but never quite letting the servant know that his cover is blown, manipulating events so that Scuttle and Ackley slam into each other full tilt while he nimbly slips between them with the boodle. Most of Leith’s 66 adventures are hastily assembled and prone to loose plot threads but unfailingly rich in verve and zip and bounce and sheer readability. One of the finest in the series is “The Candy Kid” (Detective Fiction Weekly, 14 March 1931), a walloping bamboozler of a tale in which Leith leads the forces of law and order around by their noses as everyone searches for the rajah’s rubies which an unlucky stickup artist had snatched and then apparently hidden somewhere in a candy factory moments before being Swiss-cheesed by police bullets. Before he’s finished Lester finds uses for fifty dollars worth of chocolate, an electric soldering iron, a string of firecrackers, a police siren, a blowtorch, and a mad scheme to save heat by pretending November is July. The tales at the end of the cycle are just as wild and crazy as the early entries in the series. In “Something Like a Pelican” (Flynn’s Detective Fiction Magazine, January 1943), Leith happens to be on the sidewalk below when a mysterious woman throws a silver fox cape out of a furrier’s window to the accompaniment of screams for the police. Puzzled, he returns to the neighborhood that night just in time to witness the abduction of a secretary in the precision instrument company across the street from the furrier’s. It soon develops that the blueprints for a new invention were stolen from the company’s vault during the fur-tossing diversion and the caper turns into a race for the plans between Leith and the police and a fight between Leith and the company over the innocent secretary’s claim for damages. The plot would have been killed in its tracks by a thorough police search at the get-go but this is a fun story, paced like a rocket, spiced with laconic wit and boasting the added dividends of satire on amateur authors and expert-sounding shotgun lore. In “The Black Feather” (Flynn’s Detective Fiction, July 1943), the police spy Scuttle is replaced as Leith’s valet by Singra Bhat, who pretends to be a Burmese detective but is actually a Japanese spy planning to steal a secret treaty from a sick diplomat in a hotel and pin the blame on Lester. Meanwhile Leith becomes interested in a jewel theft and sets out to hijack the loot with the help of a siren-equipped baby carriage, some smoke bombs, and a wacky scheme to produce 16mm movies for home viewing. With this 66th and last caper the series ended. but thematically connected stories, written (or more likely dictated) and published in Black Mask during the period when he was making the transition from pulp magazines to hardcover novels.7 Protagonist of these tales is Ken Corning, a young man fresh out of law school who, for no particular reason except that it’s a Darwinian challenge, sets up practice in a metropolis which for sheer corruption rivals (and no doubt was strongly influenced by) the poisonvilles in Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest (1929) and The Glass Key (1931). Hardly is the paint dry on Corning’s office door when he begins to run afoul of the politicians in control of the York City government. In each tale he represents a far from admirable person who’s being framed on a criminal charge by some of the local powers that be and in each tale he clears his client not by any lawyerly skills but by getting out into the streets and concocting an imaginative scam that flushes out the truth. Assisting him in these schemes is his secretary Helen Vail, who is the prototype of Della Street as Gardner first drew her: a tough-talking but good-hearted dame who gladly takes risks from which the most loyal secretary in the real world would run screaming. Corning’s ultimate adversary, political boss Carl Dwight, comes onstage only in the first tale and has vanished long before the last. In “Honest Money” (November 1932) the client is speakeasy proprietor Esther Parks, who’s been locked up on a phony charge of attempting to bribe Sergeant Perkins of the local Prohibition squad. A few hours after he’s retained Corning to handle the case, Mrs. Parks’ obese husband is shot down on the street. Corning goes into action and soon discovers that she’s being railroaded because she had inadver-tently discovered too much about corruption in the city water depart-ment. The tale ends with a gun battle and the release of Corning’s client but, in a touch of truly Hammett-like cynicism, nothing happens to the murderers. In “The Top Comes Off” (December 1932) Corning gets involved in what seems a private matter as a mysterious woman hires him to represent George Colton, who’s in jail charged with the murder of his wife’s lover, politically connected realtor Harry Ladue. Corning quickly realizes that the woman is Mrs. Colton, and that she’s on the brink of suicide. This time the murderer turns out to be Sergeant Perkins, the corrupt cop from the first Corning story, who, being relatively low on the political food chain, winds up having to pay for his crime. The client in “Close Call” (January 1933) is Amos Dangerfield, a politically ambitious businessman who has gone into hiding at Corning’s suggestion after being accused of the hit-and-run murder of hostile newspaper publisher Walter Copley. Once again it’s a political frame-up, which Corning explodes by setting a trap that proves the man who claims to have witnessed the killing is actually the assassin for hire who did it. Neither he nor his higher-ups is arrested for the crime. “Making the Breaks” (June 1933) opens with Helen Vail coming to Corning in the middle of the night after having money planted on her that is tied to a murder case her boss is defending. Clearly the powers that be are out to discourage Corning from representing ex-convict and small-time burglar Fred Parkett, who’s been charged with a street killing on evidence he claimed the arresting officer planted on him. With the help of an undercover Federal agent, Corning establishes that the real killers were the men who claimed they witnessed the murder and the police detective. “Devil’s Fire” (July 1933) begins in medias res with Corning at the scene of another street murder, this one apparently the result of a violent argument between underworld bosses Frank Glover, who wound up dead, and George Pyle, who’s charged with the murder. A sniveling small-time crook by the name of Henry Lampson buttonholes Corning on the street, claims he saw the murder and offers to testify in Pyle’s favor if he’s paid off. When Corning refuses to give a bribe, Lampson goes to the police and makes a deal to frame the lawyer for suborning perjured testimony. Eventually Corning sets up a scam involving a rigged target-shooting competition to lure the real killer out of the woodwork. “Blackmail with Lead” (August 1933) brings the series to an end of sorts. Corning is retained by small-time criminal Sam Driver, who’s accused of killing his partner Harry Green, and soon finds that the case is linked to the murder of wealthy George Bixel in a lonely mountain cabin several months before. When a rapacious slattern who knows some of the truth is bought off and sent packing, Corning gets Helen Vail to impersonate the woman and rigs a charade that exposes the facts. The result was Perry Mason, who debuted in The Case of the Velvet Claws (1933) and eventually made his creator one of the wealthiest and most widely read authors in the history of the world. What accounts for the mind-boggling success of the Perry Mason novels? Gardner himself never claimed they were written with any grace. His characterizations and descriptions tend to be perfunctory and are often reduced to a handful of lines that he recycled in book after book. Indeed virtually every word not within quotation marks could be left out of any Perry Mason exploit and little would be lost. For what vivifies these novels is the sheer readability, the breakneck pacing, the involuted plotting, the fireworks displays of courtroom tactics based in large part on Gardner’s own law practice in Oxnard, and the dialogue, that inimitable Gardner dialogue whose every line, whether spoken in or out of court, is a jab in a complex form of oral combat. The first nine Perry Mason books, published between 1933 and 1936, are set in the dog-eat-dog milieu of a free enterprise system in the depths of its worst depression, and Gardner, born scrapper that he was, revels in it. The Perry Mason of these novels is a tiger in the social Darwinian jungle, totally self-reliant, asking no favors, despising the weaklings who want society to care for them, willing to take any risk for a client no matter how unfairly the client plays the game with him. On the first page of The Case of the Velvet Claws we are told of Mason: “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.” (1). A few pages later there is this telling exchange between Mason and the beautiful treacherous woman who has consulted him. Mason: “Nobody ever called on me to organize a corporation, and I’ve never yet probated an estate. I haven’t drawn up over a dozen contracts in my life, and I wouldn’t know how to go about foreclosing a mortgage. People that come to me don’t come to me because they like the looks of my eyes, or the way my office is furnished, or because they’ve known me at a club. They come to me because they need me. They come to me because they want to hire me for what I can do.” Woman: “Just what is it that you do, Mr. Mason?” Mason: “I fight!” (5) Variations on this scene recur throughout Gardner’s early novels, in which Mason again and again says of himself: “I am a paid gladiator.” If Gardner had wanted to show off his erudition he might have had Mason call himself the servant of the bad man Holmes had evoked in “The Path of the Law”;8 if he had wanted to connect back with his Western stories he might have had Mason describe himself as a hired gun; if his affinity had been for Japanese rather than Chinese culture he would probably have him called a samurai. In the last analysis all these formulations have the same meaning. And Della Street in her first incarnation is cut from the same cloth: in the words of Gardner’s publisher Thayer Hobson, “a gal who would poison her mother, eat unslaked lime, and twist a baby’s wrist for the man she cared for.” (DBH 130). Any doubts that these characters clearly reflect their creator are dispelled by a glance at Gardner’s voluminous correspondence. At the outset of his career as a novelist he wrote his publisher: “I want to make my hero a fighter, not by having him be ruthless with women and underlings, but by having him wade into the opposition and battle his way through to victory. . . . More than that, I want to establish a style of swift motion. I want to have characters who start from scratch and sprint the whole darned way to a goal line. . . .” (DBH 102). The letter he wrote his publisher at the end of 1934 is full of similar imagery: “Let’s plant our feet firmly on the ground, double our right fists, measure the distance with a nice left lead, and sock all competitors right between the eyes. Yours for a belligerently successful 1935.” (DBH 124). In The Case of the Velvet Claws Mason outlines his creed to private detective Paul Drake. “I’m a lawyer. I take people who are in trouble, and I try to get them out of trouble. I’m not presenting the people’s side of the case, I’m only presenting the defendant’s side. The District Attorney represents the people, and he makes the strongest kind of a case he can. It’s my duty to make the strongest kind of a case I can on the other side, and then it’s up to the jury to decide. That’s the way we get justice. If the District Attorney would be fair, then I could be fair. But the District Attorney uses everything he can in order to get a conviction. I use everything I can in order to get an acquittal. It’s like two teams playing football. One of them tries to go in one direction just as hard as it can, and the other tries to go in the other direction just as hard as it can. . . . My clients aren’t blameless. Many of them are crooks. Probably a lot of them are guilty. That’s not for me to determine. That’s for the jury to determine.” (259-260). Perry Mason as Gardner first created him does indeed use everything he can, and usually his tools are the little people whose financial desperation in the pit of the Depression forces them to accept almost any risk in return for a little money. In The Case of the Velvet Claws Mason pays twenty dollars to a hotel switchboard operator to tell him what number a certain person called and then with twenty-five bucks bribes a policeman who lost his shirt at poker the previous night to get confidential information from the phone company as to who has that number. Later in the same novel he loosens the tongue of a hostile witness by pretending to frame him for a murder, and at the climax he manipulates estate funds to prevent a murderer who is not his client from obtaining money for his defense. In The Case of the Counterfeit Eye (1935) Mason is searching for a woman to impersonate a prosecution witness. Mason: “Go to an employment agency and find a young woman [of a certain description] who is hungry. . . . Be damn sure she’s hungry.” Della Street: “How hungry?” Mason: “Hungry enough so she won’t argue with cash.” Della: “Will she go to jail?” Mason: “She may, but she won’t stay there, and she’ll be paid for it if she does. . . .” (180). Della brings back a young woman and Mason’s talk with her goes in part as follows. Mason: “Been out of a job long?” Woman: “Yes.” Mason: “Ready to do anything that’s offered?” Woman: “That depends on what it is.” Mason says nothing. Woman: “I don’t give a damn what it is.” Mason: “That’s better.” (200). Indeed Mason in his original incarnation will even twist evidence to get a guilty client acquitted, and does so in The Case of the Howling Dog (1934). “I’ve told you before, and I’m telling you again, that I’m not a judge and I’m not a jury. I’m a lawyer. The district attorney does everything he can to build up a strong case against the defendant. It’s up to the lawyer for the defendant to do everything he can to break down the case for the district attorney. . . . [A defense lawyer is] a partisan, a representative hired by the defendant, with the sanction of the state, whose solemn duty it is to present the case of the defendant in its strongest light. That’s my creed and that’s what I try to do.” (290-291). At the end of this powerful novel, after Mason has twisted the evidence so that the client he knew to be guilty has been acquitted by a jury and can never be tried again, an ambivalent Della Street says to him: “You are a cross between a saint and a devil.” “All men are,” he replies. (294). If the original Mason seems an amoral and unattractive character, from Gardner’s perspective this was already a sanitized version of what he wanted to present. A chapter in The Case of the Counterfeit Eye (1935) contains a fascinating dialogue between Mason and the newly elected district attorney Hamilton Burger. “You’ve got a reputation for being tricky,” Burger says, “and I find that you are tricky, but I think they’re legitimate tricks. . . . I think an attorney has a right to work any legitimate trick in order to bring out the truth. . . . I notice that your tricks aren’t for the purpose of confusing a witness, but for the purpose of blasting preconceived notions out of his head, so that he can tell the truth. . . . District attorneys have a habit of wanting to get convictions. That’s natural. The police work up a case and dump it in the lap of the district attorney. It’s up to him to get a conviction. In fact, the reputa-tion of a district attorney is predicated on the percentage of convictions he gets on the number of cases tried. . . . When I took this job . . . I wanted to be conscientious. I have a horror of prosecuting an innocent person. . . . Your courtroom technique is clever, but it’s all of it founded on having first reached a correct solution of the case. When you resort to unorthodox tricks as a part of your courtroom technique I’m opposed to them, but when you use those tricks to bring about a correct solution of a mystery I’m for them. My hands are tied. I can’t resort to unorthodox, spectacular tactics. Sometimes I wish I could. . . .” Mason replies: “I don’t ask a man if he’s guilty or innocent. When I start to represent him, I take his money and handle his case. Guilty or innocent, he’s entitled to his day in court, but if I should find one of my clients was really guilty of murder and wasn’t legally or morally justified, I’d make that client plead guilty and trust to the mercy of the Court. . . . If a person is morally justified in killing, I’ll save that person from the legal penalty if it’s possible to do so.” (171-174). The last sentence clearly refers to what Mason did for the guilty client in The Case of the Howling Dog. However, in a letter to his publishers from the same period Gardner said that he had toned down his conception of Mason “in order to make it appear that he wouldn’t defend a man and try to get him off if he thought that person was guilty of cold-blooded murder without any moral justification.” But he bitterly resented having to water down his Darwinian notion of law practice and would have preferred his books to reflect the real-world fact “that the burning question which confronts a man accused of crime who enters the office of any reputable criminal attorney is not the question of his guilt or innocence but the question of whether he has the necessary retainer available in the form of spot cash.” (DBH 123). Love him or hate him, he told the truth as he knew it. For Perry Mason as Gardner first created him, the core value is loyalty to his client, despite the client’s despicable character and acts, regardless of how unfairly the client deals with him. In The Case of the Velvet Claws Mason is retained by a seductive blonde who initially conceals her identity from him but turns out to be Eva Belter, a predatory and promiscuous woman whose wealthy husband owns a scandal magazine. When George Belter is shot to death, Eva tries to force Mason to keep her out of trouble by telling lies that make Mason himself seem to be the murderer. At what seems to be the climax of the novel, Mason—emulating the climactic scene between Sam Spade and Brigid O’Shaughnessy in Dashiell Hammett’s classic The Maltese Falcon (1930)—accuses Eva of the murder and, when she confesses her guilt, turns her and the evidence to convict her over to the police. This apparent betrayal of a client causes Mason’s secretary to lose faith in him, as Gardner explained to his publisher, “until the very last, when she suddenly realizes he was working for his client all the time instead of against her, and . . . they get back to a basis of Della Street worshiping Mason’s fighting loyalty.” (DBH 106). Describing exactly how Gardner pulled off this feat would ruin a fascinating novel for those who haven’t read it, but his strategy is a brilliant creative variation on the often slavishly imitated Maltese Falcon denouement. If Mason the samurai stands for Gardner’s ideal of good lawyering, what is his notion of a bad lawyer? In The Case of the Caretaker’s Cat (1935) Mason is consulted by a crippled servant at the mansion of the late Peter Laxter, whose grandsons and testamentary legatees are trying to make the man get rid of his beloved cat. Mason sends a letter claiming without any firm legal basis that the provision in Laxter’s will requiring the caretaker’s continued employment impliedly allows him to keep the cat, and that any action against the animal would breach that condition and lead to the forfeiture of their bequests. The grandsons consult Nathaniel Shuster, whom Mason holds in absolute contempt. “He poses as a big trial lawyer, but he’s a bigger crook than the people he defends. Any damn fool can win a case if he has the jury bribed.” (21). “If there’s anything in reincarnation, he must have been a Chinese laundryman in a prior existence. Every time he snickers, he sprays his audience, like a Chinese laundryman sprinkling clothes.” (22). “He’s a disgrace to the profession, and he gets us all into disrepute.” (33). “Shuster will try to egg his clients into a fight, and I’ll either have to back up or play into his hands. If I back up, he makes his clients believe he’s browbeaten me into submission, and charges them a good fee. If I don’t back up he tells them their whole inheritance is involved and soaks them a percentage. That’s what I get for running that bluff about a forfeiture of the inheritance.” (23). Sure enough Mason’s adversary is the shyster his name suggests. “It’s going to be a hard fight; it’s going to be a bitter fight. I’ve warned my clients of that. You’re a resourceful man. You’re a sly man. If you don’t mind the expression, I’ll say you’re a cunning man. Lots of us would take that as a compliment; I take that as a compliment myself. Lots of times my clients say, ‘Shuster is cunning.’ Do I get sore? I don’t! I say that’s a compliment. . . . I warned my clients that Winifred [Peter Laxter’s disinherited granddaughter] was going to try to break the will. I knew she’d try it by every means in her power, but she couldn’t claim the grandfather was of unsound mind, and there’s no question of undue influence. So . . . she picked on Ashton and his cat.” Shuster refuses to settle the dispute unless “Winifred signs an agreement that she won’t contest the will. . . .” Mason: “I don’t know anything about Winifred. I’ve never met her and haven’t talked with her. I can’t ask her to sign anything.” Shuster, rubbing his hands gleefully: “We couldn’t settle on any other basis. It’s a matter of principle with us. . . .” Mason, finally losing his temper: “You know damn well I’m not representing Winifred. You knew that that letter of mine meant exactly what it said, but you knew you couldn’t kid your clients into paying big fees over a cat, so you dragged in this will-contest business. . . . You’ve frightened your clients into believing they’ve got to get Winifred’s signature on a release. That’s laying the foundation for a nice fat fee for you.” Shuster screams: “That’s slander!” Mason, to the grandsons: “I’m not your guardian. I’m not going to break my neck trying to save your money. If you two want to give that cat a home, say so now; that’s all there’ll be to it. If you don’t, I’ll make Shuster earn his fees by dragging you into the damndest fight you’ve ever been in. . . .” (25-29). The moral is clear: a good lawyer will do almost anything for a client but will not generate a dispute for the lawyer’s own profit. At first Gardner was ambivalent about what he must have regarded as a Faustian bargain. In December 1936, just after completing the first Mason novel that the Post accepted for serialization, he described the book to his publisher as a case “with lame canaries and moving vans and silenced rifles and firebugs and trick garages and substituted amnesia victims and what the hell have we. . . . No real life lawyer would ever have been mixed up in a mess like that.” (DBH 131). But only a few years later, in The Case of the Perjured Parrot (1939), Gardner denounced precisely the kind of lawyer he had told his publishers he had originally wanted to portray as a hero. Mason, reading his mail, says to Della Street: “Oh, Lord, here’s another one. A man, who’s swindled a bunch of people into buying worthless stock, wants me to prove that he was within the letter of the law.” (6). The echo of Melville Davisson Post’s early Randolph Mason tales9 resounds loud and clear for those with ears. “You know, Della,” Mason continues, “I wish people would learn to differentiate between the reputable lawyer who represents persons accused of crime, and the criminal lawyer who becomes a silent partner in the profits of crime. . . . I never take a case unless I’m convinced my client was incapable of committing the crime charged. . . .” (6). In the Mason novels published between the late 1930s and the late 1950s, not only are the clients always innocent but the ruthlessness is muted, “love interest” plays a stronger role, and Mason becomes increasingly more stodgy, to the point that by the end of this middle period he refuses even to drive above the speed limit. But the oral combat remains as breathlessly exciting as ever, the pace as frantic and the plots as twisty, the best of them centering on various sharp-witted and greedy people battling over control of capital. Mason of course is still Gardner’s alter ego but in several novels of these years he creates a second surrogate in the person of a philosophic old entrepreneur who delights in living on his own in the wilderness, as Gardner himself did. One of the most interesting of these stand-ins is Fremont C. Sabin, whose obituary is summarized in the first chapter of The Case of the Perjured Parrot (1939). Just touching sixty, he represented a strange figure of man; one who had wrung from life all that it offered in the way of material success; a man who literally had more money than he knew what to do with. . . . [F]or the most part he did not believe in philanthropy, thinking that the ultimate purpose of life was to develop character; that the more a person came to depend on outside assistance, the more his character was weakened. . . . . Sabin had believed that life was a struggle and had purposely been made a struggle; that competition developed character; that victory was of value only as it marked the goal of achievement. . . .Gardner’s admiration for this man is so obvious that it comes as no great surprise when later in the book he turns out not to be dead at all. Most of the Perry Mason novels Gardner wrote during the roughly twenty years that constitute his middle period are still highly readable today and a few offer rewards out of the ordinary. The Case of the Rolling Bones (1939) features two courtroom scenes, a wild complex plot, subtly planted clues to the truth and a pair of first-rate Mason scams, one on the street when a cop tries to give him a speeding ticket and another in court when he uses his office switchboard operator to play mind games with a hostile witness. A full-blown jury trial complete with closing arguments is the centerpiece of The Case of the Careless Kitten (1942), in which Della Street is charged with helping to hide a key prosecution witness. The Case of the Crooked Candle (1944) is considered in some quarters the finest pure detective novel in the Gardner canon, with its exceptionally long trial sequence, diagram, timetable, and detailed technical testimony about tides. In The Case of the Half-Wakened Wife (1945) the sky falls in on Mason more thunderously than in almost any other novel: not only is he fired by his client in mid-trial but gets sued for defamation of character by someone he wrongly accused of the murder his client is being tried for. The Case of the Fiery Fingers (1951) features two jury trials with separate defendants and one of Mason’s longest and most sustained cross-examinations of a hostile witness. There are many other gems in the canon awaiting rediscovery by readers with the good sense to overlook the formulaic elements that even in the best of Mason’s cases are repeated endlessly.10 For our purposes the most important of these is criminal lawyer A.B. Carr, who “looked more like a successful actor than a practicing attorney. . . .” (8) and (although by this time Gardner hated Hollywood) seems tailor made to be played by John Carradine or some other preternaturally slim purveyor of movie menace. The fascination of the nine-volume D.A. series (1937-48) is that here Gardner reversed the polarities of the Perry Masons: the prosecutor and sheriff are the heroes and the defense lawyer a shyster whose highest priority is (in Gardner’s own words of a few years before) whether his client “has the necessary retainer in the form of spot cash” and whose cunning tricks on behalf of the guilty are confounded again and again like those of Squire Mason in Arthur Train’s Mr. Tutt stories.12 But there’s a fundamental difference between Gardner’s series and Train’s. In the Mr. Tutt tales the duel is typically legalistic, with Squire Mason wielding some arcane rule of law in order to assist his evil client and Ephraim countering with an even more arcane rule of law. Carr in the D.A. series typically serves his odorous clients by hocusing evidence and Selby defeats him by detective work that ferrets out the truth. Carr first appears in the third and perhaps finest Selby book, The D.A. Draws a Circle (1939), when he buys a house in Madison City, claiming he wants a retreat from the hurly-burly of Los Angeles criminal practice. Hardly has he moved in when a nude corpse is found in the barranca between Carr’s house and that of lovely Rita Artrim, who was so outraged at the prospect of a shyster neighbor that she’d consulted Selby about legal means of forcing him out. Lying side by side in the body are two bullets from different guns. Whichever bullet entered the man first killed him instantly, and Selby soon suspects that Carr has covered for the murderer by himself shooting into the corpse just so as to be able to create a reasonable doubt if his client is brought to trial. At the climax it’s revealed that Carr’s plot was even more devious than suspected, but this is typical of the tactics Selby confronts in subsequent books. By the time the series ends, with The D.A. Takes a Chance (1949), Carr has been forced to marry a woman who knows too much about one of these schemes and is rooting about for a way of divorcing her without freeing her to testify against him. Pete makes his first appearance in “Among Thieves” (September 1937) when the firm is retained to defend a young man named James Raymore who is charged with the cold-blooded murder of his lover’s husband. Hardly has he set foot in the small city of Loma Vista where the crime took place than Pete learns he’s in a hub of political corruption that has been cloned, as it were, from York City in Gardner’s Ken Corning series, and suspects that Raymore was the victim of an official frame-up. Posing as a real-estate sharpshooter ready to pay whatever bribes it takes to get a certain piece of property rezoned, Pete is put in touch with the slimeballs who run the city and begins playing them against each other in the tradition of the Continental Op in Hammett’s Red Harvest (1929). He uses a worthless check to open an account in the local bank under a phony name but then discovers that the name he’s chosen for himself happens to be that of a wealthy investor, which means he’s inadvertently committed the crime of forgery. Before this long and lightning-paced tale is over he gets trapped in the middle of a gun duel between political gangsters, extracts a confession from a wounded conspirator by pretending to be a doctor (“The anterior sclerosis shows symptoms of a traumatic regurgitation in the cardiac reflexes”)15 and falsely telling the man he’s dying, endures a flogging with rubber hoses in the back room of police headquarters, and sues the city’s political boss for assault and false arrest. In “Leg Man” (February 1938) the firm is retained by Mrs. Olive Pemberton to keep a certain red-headed golddigger from starting a lawsuit against her husband Harvey. Posing as Olive’s long-lost brother, Pete visits the Pemberton residence, wangles an invitation to stay on for a few days, and that evening begins spying on Harvey’s brokerage business from the adjoining office suite which helpful Olive has conveniently rented and bugged. Then Pete conjures up a noble scam to recover Harvey’s passionate love letters from the redhead—a plan that calls for him to impersonate in rapid succession a masked burglar, a cop and a second cop—but the con game is interrupted when Harvey is found murdered and helpful Olive tries to frame Pete for the crime. An inspired combination of speed, luck, bluff, fast talk and nimble brainwork pull Pete out of the fire in this wonderful mini-novel. In “Take It Or Leave It” (March 1939) the firm becomes entangled in another web of politics and murder reminiscent of Gardner’s earlier Black Mask tales about Ken Corning. With Mayor Layton Spred and the municipal council of the city of Marlin facing a recall election after the exposure of massive corruption, the editor of the leading anti-administration newspaper is found shot to death on Spred’s doorstep. The mayor claims he acted in self-defense, shooting at what he thought was a prowler, but when the ballistic evidence makes him out a liar, he and his lovely daughter Millicent retain J&B for the defense. Pete visits Marlin posing as a slot-machine racketeer, edges into the smoke-filled back rooms where the city’s crooked politics is conducted, charms all the females and hocuses all the evidence in sight, and figures out the real murderer while Cedric L. Boniface sits in the law library researching precedents. Pete’s solution is of arguable fairness but the story is briskly paced and with a beautifully simple and ironic key gimmick. One of the many strengths of the short-lived Wennick series is its sardonic treatment of sacred cows. In these tales as in many Gardner novels, sex and marriage are economic weapons and combat over money is the order of the day in both home and office. There’s a wonderful exchange between Wennick and E.B. Jonathan when the old man discovers Pete has been chasing one of the secretaries. Jonathan: “How are you going to play with fire without getting your fingers burnt?” Wennick: “How the hell am I going to warm my hands over a cold stove?” Jonathan (who is paying alimony to two much younger ex-wives): “You don’t need to warm your hands. . . . [Women] will get you in the long run. . . . After the fighting begins, your home will seem like hell. . . . [A]limony, eating into your salary like a cancer. . . . When they see the infatuation waning, they try to find some way of capitalizing.”16 In both “Among Thieves” and “Take It Or Leave It” the police are tools of the politicians who wallow like pigs in graft, corruption, and violence. But whatever one thinks of the social criticism in the Wennick stories, they are first and foremost grand tales, told by a superb natural storyteller at the top of his form. Gardner was no expert on the history of the kind of fiction he wrote but he clearly knew Melville Davisson Post’s “The Corpus Delicti” (1896) and, with full acknowledgment of his source, developed the heart of that story—the lawyer’s ability and willingness to advise a client how to commit a cold-blooded murder, admit the deed in open court and walk away free—into The Bigger They Come (1939), first and one of the finest of the Cool and Lam novels. Here’s the crucial conversation between Lam and his new employer. Cool: “Donald, . . . I know all about your trouble. You were disbarred for violating professional ethics.” Lam: “I wasn’t disbarred and I didn’t violate professional ethics.” Cool: “The grievance committee reported that you did.” Lam: “The grievance committee were a lot of stuffed shirts. I talked too much, that’s all.” Cool: “What about, Donald?” Lam: “I did some work for a client. We got to talking about the law. I told him a man could break any law and get away with it if he went about it right.” Cool: “That’s nothing. Anyone knows that.” Lam: “The trouble is I didn’t stop there. . . . I don’t figure knowledge is any good unless you can apply it. I’d studied out a lot of legal tricks. I knew how to apply them.” Cool: “Go on from there. What happened?” Lam: “I told this man it would be possible to commit a murder so there was nothing anyone could do about it. He said I was wrong. I got mad and offered to bet him five hundred dollars I was right, and could prove it. He said he was ready to put up the money any time I’d put up my five hundred bucks. I told him to come back the next day. That night he was arrested. He turned out to be a small-time gangster. He babbled everything he knew to the police. Among other things, he told them that I had agreed to tell him how he could commit a murder and get off scot-free. That he was to pay me five hundred dollars for the information, and then if it looked good to him, he had planned to bump off a rival gangster.” Cool: “What happened?” Lam: “The grievance committee went after me hammer and tongs. They revoked my license for a year. They thought I was some sort of a shyster. I told them it was an argument and a bet. Under the circumstances, they didn’t believe me. And, naturally, they took the other side of the question—that a man couldn’t commit deliberate murder and go unpunished.” Cool: “Could he, Donald?” Lam: “Yes.” “Cool: “And you know how?” Lam: “Yes. . . .” Cool: “And locked inside that head of yours is a plan by which I could kill someone and the law couldn’t do a damn thing about it?” Lam: “Yes.” Cool: “You mean if I was smart enough so I didn’t get caught.” Lam: “I don’t mean anything of the sort. You’d have to put yourself in my hands and do just as I told you.” Cool: “You don’t mean that old gag about fixing it so they couldn’t find the body?” Lam: “That is the bunk. I’m talking about a loophole in the law itself, something a man could take advantage of to commit a murder.” Cool: “Tell me, Donald.” Lam [laughing]: “Remember, I’ve been through that once.” (69-71). At the climax Lam demonstrates his own thesis by getting up in a courtroom, confessing to a murder (which in fact he didn’t commit) and daring the legal system to punish him for it.18 The ambience of this series gave Gardner the opportunity to build novels around the sort of grand scams that previously he had confined to magazine stories. Only rarely does a Lam novel deal centrally with lawyer characters and legal themes, but on those occasions Gardner is at his most Darwinian. In Beware the Curves (1956) Lam winds up in Orange County, masterminding the strategy of law school classmate Barney Quinn who is defense counsel at the trial of John Ansel for the six-year-old murder of his employer Karl Endicott. Detective work has convinced Lam that the real murderer was banker Cooper Hale but he has no evidence to prove it. The defense rests without putting on a case. Closing arguments begin and, following Lam’s script, Barney Quinn manipulates the district attorney into committing himself to an unequivocal theory of what had happened. “He sketched Ansel, emotionally upset, blowing hot and cold. First he intended to kill Endicott then he intended not to. He had thrown his gun away and had intended to leave [Endicott’s] house. Then opportunity had presented itself and he had snatched [a second] gun from the bureau and had killed Endicott.” (215). The judge instructs the jury that they can find Ansel guilty of first-degree murder, second-degree murder or man-slaughter. Conferring with Quinn after the jury has retired, Lam explains his strategy. “The district attorney walked into the trap. . . . If the killing was committed with the gun lying on the dresser . . . it had to be manslaughter.” Quinn: “And suppose the jury convicts him of manslaughter?” Lam: “[T]hen come to the rail for a whispered consultation with me.” (217). The jury indeed returns a manslaughter verdict and after the whispered conference with Lam comes a scene reminiscent of Melville Davisson Post’s earliest Randolph Mason tales as Quinn moves to set aside the verdict. “The crime of manslaughter outlaws within a period of three years. In other words, there can be no prosecution or conviction for manslaughter after a period of three years has elapsed from the date of the crime. . . . [S]ince the defendant has now been convicted of a manslaughter which was perpetrated more than three years ago, the Court has no alternative but to release him. . . .” (220). The novel ends with the innocent man convicted but released on a technicality and the guilty man, untouchable for the crime he committed, implausibly sentenced to life without parole after being framed by a woman on the periphery of the plot who has a penchant for having sex with men and then charging them with rape. Such breath-taking cynicism would have been unthinkable in a contemporaneous adventure of Perry Mason. One of the finest demonstrations of the Gardner contract at work is found in one of the last novels of the period. In The Case of the Lucky Loser (1957) an anonymous woman hires Mason over the phone to sit in court during a trial and let her know his conclusions. Wealthy young Ted Balfour is charged with involuntary manslaughter after allegedly getting drunk at a party and driving his car over an unidentifiable drifter whose “skull was smashed like an eggshell.” (37). A day of testimony convinces Mason that the chief prosecution witness is lying and that there will probably be a hung jury. In the next morning’s paper he reads that the jury had indeed split and that Ted’s attorney had then agreed to accept the verdict of the trial judge provided the penalty be limited to a fine and suspended sentence. (This sounds obscene in today’s post-MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) era but was not all that shocking in the Fifties.) Later that day Mason is retained by the seductive young wife of Ted’s uncle to visit the palatial home of Addison Balfour, the dying tyrant who rules the family with an iron hand, and convince the old man that his grandson is indeed innocent. Addison offers Mason a huge fee if he’ll take over Ted’s defense from the attorney who brokered the plea bargain. “You’re not like most of these criminal lawyers. You don’t want just to get a client off. You try to dig out the truth. I like that. . . .” (79-80). Then the police find a bullet in the crushed skull of the drifter and, concluding that Ted deliberately shot the man and then faked the hit-and-run to mutilate the man’s face and body, charge him with Murder One. Mason goes into court and argues, with full citation to several California appellate decisions, that Ted can’t be tried because, having been found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the same matter, he’s already been once in jeopardy and any further prosecution would violate the Fifth Amendment. This move reminds us of how Melville Davisson Post’s satanic lawyer Randolph Mason defended the guilty murderer in “The Corpus Delicti”—except that Gardner has made a solemn contract with us and we know Mason is not exerting his wiles on behalf of someone we don’t want to see beat the system. Like the jurists in Post’s early tales, Judge Cadwell is taken aback by the apparently outrageous legal result demanded by the lawyer named Mason who’s arguing before him. “It comes as a shock to the Court to think that a defendant could place himself behind such a barricade of legal technicality.” (138). Unlike Post’s trial-level judges, Gardner’s refuses to let law trump justice. “I feel a higher court should pass on this matter. . . . If I hold the defendant for trial . . . , the matter can be taken to a higher court on a plea of once in jeopardy.” (138). Eventually of course Mason sees the truth and exposes one of the most convoluted plots his creator ever dreamed up. There is no better index of how far his concept of lawyering had changed since the early 1930s than the memoranda he dictated in his capacity as adviser to the TV series.”[O]ne of the first things to do is to start with some character who is to become Perry Mason’s client and to make the audience like that character. . . . Therefore when I see these scripts come in [where, although Gardner doesn’t put it this way, the client is a Holmesian ‘Bad Man’] I feel that we are selling our character down the river. I want to vomit at the idea of the great Perry Mason with his sense of justice, his basic faith in human nature, descending so low as to be hired to represent a person of that caliber. . . . [I]t is a basic rule of the Perry Mason stories that the audience must want the character to be represented by Perry Mason to come out on top.”19 During the program’s decade-long run Gardner somehow found time to dictate new Perry Mason novels, but to an increasing extent he came to think of them as fodder for the TV series and they soon began showing the marks of the medium’s infantile restrictions. The court-room tiger of the earlier books, evolved into the kinder, gentler lawyer of the middle period, now mutated into a close cousin of the character Raymond Burr was portraying every week on the small screen, a ponderous bureaucrat mindful of the law’s niceties. The last ten or twelve years’ Mason novels are as chaotic as most of the episodes of the weekly TV episodes. Plot holes left unplugged, ludicrous motivations, mush-witted reasoning, characters who know things they couldn’t possibly have known, solutions that don’t begin to explain who did what to whom, daisy chains of multiple coincidence, all are found abundantly in late Masons. Even the courtroom sequences are often as wretchedly constructed as their TV-series counterparts: in The Case of the Daring Divorcee (1964) Hamilton Burger introduces totally irrelevant evidence just so that certain story elements can be furthered, and in The Case of the Worried Waitress (1966) he forgets to present evidence that a crime was even committed. But even in these sad last years there are a few highlights. The Case of the Bigamous Spouse (1961) has a beautifully mounted plot and a variety of sharp comments on everything from sales technique and modern marriage to police lawlessness and the undertaking business. Much of The Case of the Ice-Cold Hands (1962) deals not with murder but with an intriguing civil issue: who owns the proceeds when a winning bet at the racetrack is made with embezzled funds? In The Case of the Phantom Fortune (1964) Mason all but reverts to his original incarnation, playing fast and loose with the penal law while protecting his client’s wife from a blackmailer, then finding himself suspected of trying to hang a felony charge on an innocent party. Mason is given superb cross-examination scenes in The Case of the Shapely Shadow (1960), The Case of the Reluctant Model (1961), The Case of the Mischievous Doll (1963), and The Case of the Amorous Aunt (1964), while The Case of the Troubled Trustee (1965) is distinguished by Hamilton Burger’s savage cross-examination of Mason’s client. At age 75 Gardner seems to have become painfully aware of the ease with which, before subsequent reforms in civil commitment law, unscrupulous relatives with a hired doctor and lawyer in their pockets could railroad a mentally sound senior into a death-trap sanitarium. The result of his concerns was The Case of the Beautiful Beggar (1965), the most excitingly inventive and deeply personal of all his late novels. A young woman who claims to be the niece of a wealthy 75-year-old entrepreneur (another Gardner self-portrait?) begs Mason to rescue her uncle from greedy relatives who have had the old man institutionalized and themselves appointed conservators of his property. Mason’s conduct of the proceeding over the old man’s competency and his gorgeous banking gimmick to get some of the client’s money back occupy the first half of the book. Late in the game comes the inevitable murder-and-trial complex which, as in so many late Gardner books, is routine, boring, and punctuated by incredible runs of lucky guesswork on Mason’s part. By the time the Mason TV series ended its run (with a case where the judge was played by Gardner himself), the decisions of the Supreme Court under Earl Warren had almost completely undermined what had always been the premise of the Mason novels: that a defendant menaced by the underhanded tactics of police and prosecutors needed a pyrotechnician like Mason in his or her corner. Once the so-called theory of trial by ambush had become obsolete, once the Court had ruled that convictions obtained by such tactics were unconstitutional and had to be reversed, Mason lost his raison d’etre. The new wave of Court decisions roughly coincided with Gardner’s discovery that he had cancer. He responded to both threats in the same way: by carrying on as if nothing had happened. No changes in the American legal system or within his slowly dying body could keep him from doing what he wanted with his own life or the life of the universe he had created.20 When Mason in The Case of the Velvet Claws said: “I fight!” he was speaking for Gardner too. What he had written in The Case of the Lucky Loser about Addison Balfour he lived in his own flesh. “Despite the sentence of death which had been pronounced upon him, he continued to be the same old irascible, unpredictable fighter. Disease had ravaged his body, but the belligerency of the man’s mind remained unimpaired.” (46). He kept on fighting till the end, which came on March 11, 1970. Now at last I’ve done both. To avoid redundant endnotes I provide bibliographical information in the text if feasible. Quotations from Erle Stanley Gardner novels are followed by a parenthesized number referring to the page(s) where the quotation is found in the first edition of the novel cited. Most quotations from Gardner’s correspondence and memoranda are followed by a parenthesis with the letters DBH and a number referring to the page(s) where the quotation is found in Dorothy B. Hughes, ERLE STANLEY GARDNER: THE CASE OF THE REAL PERRY MASON (Morrow, 1978). My thanks to Jon L. Breen, J. Randolph Cox and Marvin Lachman for a critical reading of this essay; to Lynn Munroe for locating one of the most elusive of Gardner’s lawyer stories; to Donald A. Yates for supplying crucial page references; and to Mary Dougherty, my own Della Street, for rescuing me from many a word-processing blunder. 1. Alva Johnston, THE CASE OF ERLE STANLEY GARDNER 58-62 (Morrow, 1947). 2. For representative specimens of Gardner’s Western stories, see Erle Stanley Gardner, WHISPERING SANDS: STORIES OF GOLD FEVER AND THE WESTERN DESERT (Morrow, 1981) (Charles G. Waugh & Martin H. Greenberg eds.) and Erle Stanley Gardner, PAY DIRT AND OTHER WHISPERING SANDS STORIES (Morrow, 1983) (Charles G. Waugh & Martin H. Greenberg eds.) 3. These were collected in Erle Stanley Gardner, THE HUMAN ZERO (Morrow, 1981) (Martin H. Greenberg & Charles G. Waugh eds.) 4. A number of the Jenkins tales are collected in Erle Stanley Gardner, THE BLONDE IN LOWER SIX (Carroll & Graf, 1990), and Erle Stanley Gardner, DEAD MEN’S LETTERS (Carroll & Graf, 1990). 5. For a selection of early Pry adventures from Gang World, see Erle Stanley Gardner, THE ADVENTURES OF PAUL PRY (Mysterious Press, 1989). 6. An assortment of this character’s exploits can be found in Erle Stanley Gardner, THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF LESTER LEITH (Davis Publications, 1981) (Ellery Queen ed.) 7. The entire Corning series is collected in Erle Stanley Gardner, HONEST MONEY (Carroll & Graf, 1991) (Martin H. Greenberg & Charles G. Waugh eds.) 8. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., The Path of the Law, 10 Harv. L. Rev. 457 (1897). 9. See Francis M. Nevins, From Darwinian to Biblical Lawyering: The Stories of Melville Davisson Post, 18 Legal Stud. F. 177 (1994). 10. For tightly compressed but well-informed and accurate summaries of most of Gardner’s novels, see Jon L. Breen, NOVEL VERDICTS: A GUIDE TO COURTROOM FICTION (Scarecrow Press, 1984). 11. Johnston, note 1 supra, at 16. 12. See Francis M. Nevins, Mr. Tutt’s Jurisprudential Journey: The Stories of Arthur Train, 19 Legal Stud. F. 57 (1995). 13. Erle Stanley Gardner, Among Thieves, Black Mask, September 1937, at 8. 14. Id. 15. Id. at 29. 16. Id. at 11. 17. Frank E. Robbins, “The Firm of Cool and Lam,” in Francis M. Nevins (ed.), MYSTERY WRITER’S ART 142 (Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1970). This essay was first published in Michigan Alumnus Quarterly Review, Spring 1953. 18. The ploy works as follows: A commits a murder in California, then drives across the state line into Arizona where he proceeds to frame himself on a charge of obtaining property under false pretenses, although leaving a legal escape hatch open for himself. He then drives back to California, runs through the quarantine station at the border, is chased and caught by California policemen and locked up in the border town of El Centro. In due course he is legally extradited to Arizona to face the false pretenses charge. Once he clears himself and that charge is officially dropped, he confesses to the California murder. But when California moves to extradite him, he files a writ of habeas corpus, arguing that on these facts he can’t be compelled to return. “The only authority which one state has to take prisoners from another state comes from the organic law which provides that fugitives from justice may be extradited from one sovereign state to another. I am not a fugitive from justice. . . . [A] man is not a fugitive from a state unless he flees from that state. He doesn’t flee from that state unless he does so voluntarily and in order to avoid arrest. I did not flee from California. I was dragged from California. I was taken out under legal process to answer for a crime of which I was innocent. I claimed that I was innocent. I came to Arizona and established my innocence. Any time I get good and ready to go back to California, California can arrest me for murder. Until I get good and ready to go back, I can stay here and no power on earth can make me budge.” (269-270) (Citing In re Whittington, 34 Cal. App. 344, 67 Pac. 404 (1917), and People v. Jones, 54 Cal. App. 423, 201 Pac. 944 (1921)). Gardner’s friend Dean Wigmore “scoffed” at this device but, after the author had literally written a brief for him on the issue, “admitted that the alleged loophole in the law had greater possibilities than he had at first supposed.” Alva Johnston, note 1 supra, 16-17. Jones involved a man who had fled to Mexico after being convicted of manslaughter in Oklahoma. Mexican officials later took him forcibly across the border into California, where he was arrested by California authorities and held for extradition to Oklahoma. The court held that Jones’ contention of an illegal conspiracy between Mexican and U.S. authorities was unsupported by any evidence and that, even if his removal from Mexico were irregular under Mexican law, he couldn’t challenge that procedure in the courts of California. This case is easily distinguishable from the situation in The Bigger They Come. Whittington, which is much closer to the facts in the novel, was all but overruled by the California Supreme Court near the end of Gardner’s life. In re Patterson, 64 Cal.2d 357, 49 Cal. Rptr. 801, 411 P.2d 897 (1966). 19. Francis L. Fugate & Roberta B. Fugate, SECRETS OF THE WORLD’S BEST-SELLING WRITER: THE STORYTELLING TECHNIQUES OF ERLE STANLEY GARDNER 100 (Morrow, 1980). 20. The Case of the Fabulous Fake (1969) was the last Mason novel published in Gardner’s lifetime and the only one in which he made a concession to the mood of the times. In a sequence unconnected with the main plot, Mason defends his only minority client in the entire canon, a young black man falsely accused of a pawnshop robbery. |
