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Erle
Stanley Gardner
from Dec. 25,
2006
I’ve never been able to figure out why
Raymond Chandler felt he owed such a literary debt to Erle Stanley Gardner.
He told Gardner that he’d once copied a Gardner story so closely that he
couldn’t submit it for publication. I guess he felt it would look like
plagiarism. But what did he learn from Gardner? Certainly not style.
Certainly not dialogue. Certainly not structure. Writers learn from unlikely
sources, true enough. But Chandler seemed to lavish so much praise on Gardner
you have to wonder what inspired him exactly.
But
Chandler was a snob and when you examine the nature of his praise, you get a
sense he was being condescending. He said that only when you wrote at great
speed (as Gardner did) could you make such unbelievable plot turns palatable to
otherwise sensible readers. I’ve always wondered what Gardner made of that. He
was no fool.
All
this comes to mind because I had several doctor appointments in the past few
weeks and I’m always careful to bring fast and uncomplicated reads along with
me. For the last few doc visits I brought along Perry Mason novels. Early Perry
Mason novels, I should note, when Mason was still a creature of Black Mask
rather than The Saturday Evening Post. Throughout his career he was wise
enough to recognize one of the great true American boogeymen, big business. His
social conscience came from his days as a lawyer when he represented Native
Americans, black Americans, and Latino Americans in towns that did not want
them.
I
still find the Masons good reads. True, Gardner worked with stereotypes—The Bad
Wife, The Crooked Cop, The Loyal Servant—and he told his stories largely
through (sometimes interminable) dialogue but while I’m reading them I’m almost
always caught up in the puzzle he’s given us. Nobody is what they claim to be.
Everybody has a secret, usually a nasty one, the exception being the tortured
person Mason has agreed to take on as a client, usually while shunning much
more lucrative work.
The
early Masons were written before Gardner decided to make his work “timeless.”
There is little place description in the later books. He didn’t want to “date”
them. I like the history I get from the first dozen Masons, from all of the
Doug Selbys and even from the A. A. Fairs written during the war years. I enjoy
sitting in the tea rooms, bars, mansions, hotels, and trains of the Thirties
and early-Forties. His work became far less interesting when it was shorn of
any physical specificity.
The
Masons owe much more to the Golden Age than most critics seem to have noticed.
Their plot pieces are no less unlikely, the clues no less exotic and the
conclusions no less bombastic. But I’m not complaining. Most Golden Age stuff
except for John Dickson Carr is difficult for me to gak down. But somehow
Perry, Della, and Paul make it all fun again.
Click here to check out
Erle Stanly Gardner’s Perry Mason books at Amazon.
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This article
originally appeared on Ed Gorman’s blog, New Improved Gorman, on Dec. 25,
2006. It is reprinted here by permission. Ed wrote dozens of novels in a variety
of genres, but his most popular work (and my favorite of his work) was in the
crime and western genres. His ten Sam McCain mysteries—set in the fictional
Iowa town of Black River Falls during the 1950s, ’60, and ’70s—are
suspenseful, mysterious, and often funny excursions into small town America.
The New York Times called Sam McCain, “The kind of hero any small town
could take to its heart” and The Seattle Times called McCain “an
intriguing mix of knight errant and realist…”
But Ed was also a tireless reader and
promoter of other writers’ work. His blogs—there were three, none of them
operating at the same time—are treasure troves for readers of crime, horror,
and western fiction both old and new. Ed died Oct. 14, 2016.
Click here to
check out Ed Gorman’s Sam McCain novels on Amazon. As of today, June 17, 2024, the Kindle editions of Breaking Up is Hard to Do and Fools Rush In—Sam McCain books 6 and 7—are on sale for $0.50 and $0.75, respectively.
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