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Photo and Biography (Main Page) Novel Reviews Websites Critical Reviews Other Works --- =Critical Reviews =

__**ThrillingDetective.com review: **__

//"...Although many critics felt that Erle Stanley Gardner was not a very good novelist (Rex Stout, for example, once claimed that the Perry Mason books weren't even novels!), Gardner was one of the best selling writers of all times, and certainly one of the best-selling mystery authors ever. He was best known for creating the world's most famous fictional lawyer, Perry Mason. If that were all he ever did, he'd probably still rank a bio on this site, given that Mason, in his earliest books, was little more than a private eye licensed to practice law... The fact is, before he'd even written a single novel, Gardner was one of America's most successful writers. He was truly the king of the pulps, writing millions and millions of words, cranking out a steady barrage of characters in everything from Black Mask to Argosy. Most of his stories dealt with one side or the other of the law (and often, both). A contemporary of Carroll John Daly and Dashiell Hammett, Gardner had the longest run of any author in Black Mask, and wrote more stories for the magazine (more than a few under pseudonyms) than any other author. In fact, he probably created more characters, particularly continuing characters, for the magazine than any one else. Asked once why he wrote, Gardner confessed that "I write to make money, and I write to give the reader sheer fun." He succeeded on both counts. He favoured action and dialogue over characterization or overly-complicated plots, and tended to stress "speed, situation and suspense." It was just what the pulps wanted..." //

Smith, Kevin Burton. "Authors and Creator: Erle Stanley Gardner". ThrillingDetective.com. 11 May 2009 . Literature Resource Center -Gale Group review: __**
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//"...The first nine Masons are steeped in the hard-boiled tradition of **Black Mask** magazine, their taut understated realism leavened with raw wit, sentimentality, and a positive zest for the dog-eat-dog milieu of the free enterprise system during its worst depression. 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 witness's 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).// //From the late 1930s to the late 1950s the main influence on Gardner was not **Black Mask** but the// //Saturday Evening Post, which serialized most of the Masons before book publication. 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 Gardner's alter ego throughout the series, but in several novels of the second period 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. Among the best cases of this period are **Lazy Lover; Hesitant Hostess** which deals with Mason's breaking down a single prosecution witness; and **Lucky Loser** and **Foot-Loose Doll** with their spectacularly complex plots.// //Gardner worked without credit as script supervisor for the long-running// //Perry Mason television series (1957-66), starring Raymond Burr, and within a few years television's restrictive influence had infiltrated the new Mason novels. The lawyer evolved into a ponderous bureaucrat mindful of the law's niceties, just as Burr played him, and the plots became chaotic and the courtroom sequences mediocre, as happened all too often in the television scripts. But by the mid 1960s the libertarian decisions of the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warran had already undermined a basic premise of the Mason novels, namely that defendants menaced by the sneaky tactics of police and prosecutors needed a pyrotechnician like Mason in their corner. Once the Court ruled that such tactics required reversal of convictions gained thereby, Mason had lost his raison d'etre.// //Several other detective series sprang from Gardner's dictating machine during his peak years. The 29 novels he wrote under the byline of A. A. Fair about diminutive private eye Donald Lam and his huge irascible partner Bertha Cool are often preferred over the Masons because of their fusion of corkscrew plots with fresh writing, characterizations, and humor, the high spots of the series being **The Bigger They Come** **Beware the Curves.** And in his nine books about small-town district attorney Doug Selby, Gardner reversed the polarities of the Mason series, making the prosecutor his hero and the defense lawyer the oft-confounded trickster. But most of Gardner's reputation stems from Perry Mason, and his best novels in both this and other series offer abundant evidence of his natural storytelling talent, which is likely to retain its appeal as long as people read at all.// " Nevins, Francis M. "Literature Resource Center: Author Resource Pages". Literature Resource Center: Gale Group. 11 May 2009 .