3/16/2021 0 Comments Erle Stanley Gardner Biography
Among the best cases of this period are Lazy Lover; Hesitant Hostess which deals with Masons breaking down a single prosecution witness; and Lucky Loser and Foot-Loose Doll with their spectacularly complex plots.Most of his reputation stems from Perry Mason and other memorable characters that he created.
Gardners best novels offer abundant evidence of his natural storytelling talent. He spent much of his childhood traveling with his mining-engineer father through the remote regions of California, Oregon, and the Klondike. In his teens he not only boxed for money, but also promoted a number of unlicensed matches. Gardner attended high school in California and graduated from Palo Alto High School 1909. Erle Stanley Gardner Biography Iso University InHe enrolled at Valparaiso University in Indiana that same year but was soon expelled for striking a professor. He was admitted to the California bar in 1911 and opened an office in Oxnard, where he practiced law until 1918. As a lawyer he represented the Chinese community and gained a reputation for flamboyant trial tactics. ![]() Gardner worked as a salesman for the Consolidated Sales Company from 1918 until 1921. He then resumed his legal career in Ventura, California from 1921 until 1933. With the sale of his first novel in 1933 he gave up the practice of law and devoted himself to full-time writing, or more precisely to dictating. Thanks to the popularity of his series characterslawyer-detective Perry Mason, his loyal secretary Della Street, his private detective Paul Drake, and the foxy trio of Sergeant Holcomb, Lieutenant Tragg, and District Attorney Hamilton BurgerGardner became one of the wealthiest mystery writers of all time. Characterization and description are perfunctory and often reduced to a few lines that are repeated in similar situations book after book. Indeed virtually every word not within quotation marks could be deleted and little would be lost. For what vivifies these novels is the sheer readability, the breakneck pacing, the convoluted plots, the fireworks displays of courtroom tactics (many based on gimmicks Gardner used in his own law practice), and the dialogue, where each line is a jab in a complex form of oral combat. The 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. Asked what he does for a living, he replies: I fight or I am a paid gladiator. He will bribe policemen for information, loosen a hostile witnesss tongue by pretending to frame him for murder, twist the evidence to get a guilty client acquitted and manipulate estate funds to prevent a guilty non-client from obtaining money for his defense. Besides Velvet Claws, perhaps the best early Mason novels are The Case of the Howling Dog and The Case of the Curious Bride (both 1934). In these novels the tough-guy notes are muted, love interest plays a stronger role, and Mason is less willing to play fast and loose with the law. Still the oral combat remains breathlessly exciting, the pace never slackens and the plots are as labyrinthine as before, most of them centering on various sharp-witted and greedy people battling over control of capital. Mason, of course, is Gardners alter ego throughout the series. In several novels of the second period, however, another author-surrogate arrives on the scene in the person of a philosophical old desert rat or prospector who delights in living alone in the wilderness, discrediting by his example the greed of the urban wealth-and power-hunters.
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