The earliest published stories of Erle Stanley Gardner, dating back to the middle 1920s, were written in a style that might best be described as non-existent. Around the end of the decade he began to be heavily influenced in terms both of style and story substance by Dashiell Hammett, and he remained more or less in Hammett’s shadow during the first few years he was writing novels including the earliest cases of Perry Mason, which began to appear in 1933.

   Mason as portrayed in the first nine novels about him could almost be a Hammett character: a tiger in the social Darwinian jungle, totally self-reliant, asking no favors, despising the weaklings who want society to care for them. Then a sea-change came over the character. The Saturday Evening Post offered Gardner a ton of money for permission to serialize the Mason novels before their book publication, but part of the deal was that the character had to be toned down to conform to the magazine’s “family values” ideology.

   Money talked. Mason from then on became a much tamer character, still skating on the thin edge of the law but always as advocate for a client we knew was innocent, so that we readers could delight in his legal tricks without the moral qualms we might experience if we thought the client might be guilty. Still, the earliest Masons remained in print unaltered, and many of us are especially fond of the novels of Gardner’s Hammett years. But how many readers know that there are more such novels than the first nine Masons?

   THE CLUE OF THE FORGOTTEN MURDER (1934) first appeared under the aegis of Gardner’s lifelong publisher William Morrow but under a pseudonym (Carleton Kendrake) and with the first noun in the title spelled CLEW. It’s unlikely that any of the novel’s original readers caught on that Kendrake and ESG were the same man, simply because a number of other writers were attempting to channel Hammett in the early Thirties, and also because the book’s protagonist doesn’t dominate the action from page one like the early Mason and isn’t even introduced until Chapter 7.

   Until then our viewpoint characters are, first, a crime reporter for a big-city newspaper and, after about thirty pages, one of the paper’s publishers. We open late at night in the Police Headquarters basement press room where reporter Charles Morden is learning about a number of incidents, among them the murder of a private investigator which doesn’t seem terribly interesting, not at the time anyway.

   Another item does capture Morden’s attention: a man driving a rental car with an attractive young woman was arrested on suspicion of DWI and then, being accused of having pulled some gas station hold-ups, has identified himself as Frank B. Cathay, a prominent citizen in the smaller nearby community of Riverview. Morden’s paper prints a story to this effect. Then the real Cathay comes forward, claims that his wallet was stolen by a pickpocket who used the ID inside to pass himself off as Cathay, and threatens to sue the paper for libel.

   At this point publisher Dan Bleeker decides to counterpunch by having Morden thoroughly investigate Cathay, hoping to turn up something that will make Cathay drop the suit. When Morden is murdered and Cathay dies (possibly of poison) shortly after the reporter’s body is found, Bleeker hires criminologist Sidney Griff, who is something of a cross between a Hammett character and Philo Vance, and from this point forward Griff takes center stage.

   At the climax we find him channeling not Vance or a Hammett sleuth but Carroll John Daly’s pistol-packing PI Race Williams, standing on the outside of a speeding taxi “with one foot on the running board, clinging to the rod of the windshield support with his left hand” while with his right he engages in a running gun battle with the murderer in another car, a battle which ends of course with a crack-up.

   To suggest the labyrinthine nature of the plot I’ll quote a remark from Bleeker to Griff in Chapter XVII. “My God, this case is full of women, and every woman has at least one alias. We started with the hitch-hiker, who gave the name of Mary Briggs to the police. We now find her in a hotel registered under the name of Stella Mokley, and probably that’s not her real name. [It is.] Then, there’s this Stanway woman, who apparently is Blanche Malone [a woman whose actual married name is Lorton but who was married to a certain Peter Malone and therefore claims to have been Cathay’s legal wife]; and there’s Alice Lorton [actually the daughter of the woman who calls herself Malone and Stanway], who built up a fictitious Esther Ordway [who Lorton claims was her roommate although in fact she had none]. I wouldn’t doubt if it turns out that Mrs. Cathay really isn’t Mrs. Cathay at all [which is exactly what is claimed by Blanche Malone, who also calls herself Stanway].”

   And those complications barely mention any of the men in the case! If you think the plots of Perry Mason novels are too twisty, perhaps you should give this one a miss. But it all seems to make sense if you think about it long and hard enough. There’s not a great deal of law here except for a brief discussion of the legal difference between accidental death and death by accidental means which crops up again a few years later in DOUBLE OR QUITS (1941), one of the earlier novels about Bertha Cool and Donald Lam which Gardner turned out as A.A. Fair, a byline which lasted decades longer than did Carleton Kendrake. Or than another pseudonym he used only once, a year after Kendrake’s debut and swan song.

   THIS IS MURDER (Morrow, 1935), first published as by Charles J. Kenny, is less of a brain-buster but also more like a Hammett novel, reminiscent of THE MALTESE FALCON and THE GLASS KEY in that, like Sam Spade and Ned Beaumont, its protagonist is with us from first page to last, and even more like THE GLASS KEY in that it deals with two corrupt political bosses fighting to gain power in the forthcoming election.

   District Attorney Phil Duncan, who is reasonably honest but allied with sleazy power broker Carl Thorne, is asked to look into the disappearance of Ann Hartwell, the half-sister of Thorne’s mistress Doris Bender. When Bender receives a note claiming that Hartwell has been kidnaped and demanding $10,000 ransom, the DA’s poker buddy Sam Moraine, a wealthy advertising executive, is chosen to deliver the money, mainly because the exchange of woman for money is to take place at sea and Moraine has a yacht.

   He comes to suspect that there’s something phony about the set-up but hands over the money and recovers the woman, only to be arrested by the Feds as his yacht puts in to port. No sooner has his buddy the DA pulled him out of that mess than he finds himself hip-deep in another when Ann Hartwell’s husband, a struggling and insanely jealous dentist, tries to kill him.

   Then thanks to some detective work by his secretary Natalie Rice, who seems to have an interest in the case more personal than any Della Street ever had, Moraine learns that that the kidnapping was indeed a hoax: Ann Hartwell went out to sea only hours before the “ransom” payment, and left for the docks in a taxi she entered near the home of political boss Peter Dixon, Carl Thorne’s enemy.

   Moraine plans to go out into the windy night and pay a surprise visit to Dixon but is kept from leaving his office by the DA and his chief investigator and sends Natalie Rice to Dixon’s house instead. While still closeted with the DA he gets a phone call from a terrified Natalie and, after another encounter with the furious Dr. Hartwell, makes his way to the Dixon house, which is in total darkness thanks to a tree having fallen over a power line.

   There he finds Dixon’s body, a broken window and a candle apparently snuffed out by the wind. Next morning the DA forces him to go to the morgue and view a dead body: not Dixon’s but that of Ann Hartwell, which has been found nearby. A little later Moraine discovers what’s behind Natalie’s involvement in the case, appropriates a suitcase filled with papers incriminating Carl Thorne and his machine, and makes plans to go on the run.

   The climax takes place at a Grand Jury hearing with Moraine cross-examining witnesses—he’s not a lawyer but the DA lets him behave like one—and, as if he’d suddenly become a Perry Mason clone, gets the real murderer to confess on the stand.

   Certainly THIS IS MURDER is closer to the Hammett model than THE CLUE OF THE FORGOTTEN MURDER was. But neither the Continental Op nor Sam Spade nor Ned Beaumont got involved in their dangerous escapades because the danger gave them what we today might call an adrenaline rush, which is precisely the reason Sam Moraine gives for his involvement.

   Still, he’s closer to a Hammett character than that bush-league Philo Vance figure Sidney Griff from FORGOTTEN MURDER. Both novels are still readable more than eighty years later, but few readers will deny that Gardner was wise not to bring back either of their protagonists and to stick, most of the time anyway, with Perry Mason.