Sun 31 Oct 2010
Four by ERLE STANLEY GARDNER from the Sixties: Reviewed by Mike Nevins.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[10] Comments
ERLE STANLEY GARDNER —
The Case of the Amorous Aunt. Morrow, hardcover, 1963. Reprint paperback: 1st Pocket printing, June 1965. (All four titles have been reprinted many times.)
A young woman and her opportunistic boy friend ask Perry Mason to help get the woman’s aunt out of the clutches of a handsome stranger who may be a professional killer of women.
But it’s the Bluebeard who turns up dead, in a bordertown motel unit next door to the aunt, so that Mason winds up having to try a murder case in a country where he’s an alien and with a client whose story simply doesn’t square with the facts.
The long meaty courtroom scenes are distinguished by Mason’s demolition job on a tricky district attorney and a shifty prosecution witness, with help from a young local lawyer who might have become the Mason of the next generation if Gardner had written a new series around him.
But, like so many other Mason novels of the Sixties, this one is pockmarked with dozens of inconsistencies, incredibilities and careless oversights in plotting, although there is one neatly planted clue amid the debris.
The Case of the Daring Divorcee. Morrow, hardcover, 1964. Reprint paperback: 1st Pocket printing, 1965.
The pace is as vigorous as usual in this adventure and the plot elements as exciting, including a mysterious woman who flees Mason’s office leaving behind a handbag containing a twice-fired gun.
Add a will contest, a gun-switching ploy, some elaborate schemes to discredit eyewitnesses, and a full measure of familial and financial flimflams, and the basis exists for a spectacular display of Masonry.
Unfortunately it never comes. Even the courtroom sequences this time around the track are wretchedly constructed, with dear old Hamilton Burger introducing totally irrelevant evidence just so that certain story elements can be furthered, and with a rabbit-out-of-chapeau Mason solution that rests on hopelessly silly reasoning and explains nothing.
Fiasco.
The Case of the Phantom Fortune. Morrow, hardcover, 1964. Reprint paperback: 1st Pocket printing, November 1965.
This time the opening scenes are rather sluggish, and so inconsistent with later developments that they seem to be part of a different book.
The fireworks start to go off when Mason plays fast and loose with the penal law in trying to protect his client’s wife from a blackmailer, but soon finds his client charged with the extortionist’s murder, and himself suspected of attempting to hang a felony rap on an innocent man.
Although the pace and intellectual excitement never let up once the story proper gets under way, and the solution packs a beautiful wallop, the usual quota of holes in the plot remain unplugged, and — a fault rare in Gardner — too many characters speak in impossibly textbookish sentences.
The Case of the Horrified Heirs. Morrow, hardcover, 1964. Reprint paperback: 1st Pocket printing, February 1966.
The best part of this one comes early, in a brilliant courtroom sequence where Mason proves that his client, the former secretary of another attorney, was framed on a narcotics charge.
Trying to learn who framed the girl and why, Mason discovers a connection with a scheme to forge two contradictory wills, which as usual leads to a murder trial, although this one winds up with a twist unique in the Mason canon.
Wonderful ingredients, wretched construction, unfair solution — in short, standard late-model Gardner with all the strengths and all the flaws.
October 31st, 2010 at 9:57 pm
Some observations. Note that in all cases that Perry Mason’s name on the cover is as large as Gardner’s, and on the one at the top, very much larger. Perry Mason was very hot on TV at the time, and the minimal artwork on the covers shows that that’s all Pocket thought they needed to sell the books.
They were probably right.
Off on another tangent, Gardner’s Perry Mason books were the first mysteries I discovered in the “grown up” section of the local library, once they decided to allow me to go back there. With Gardner as a guide, I never looked back. (This would have been in the mid-50s or so.)
Even as the Mason books deteriorated in quality (as most observers believe) by the time the 1960s came along, I doubt that you could make me admit it, even if I realized it, which I probably didn’t.
I think that Mike, in these reviews, should be commended for his clarity and insight, pointing out as he does both Gardner’s pluses and minuses. Even by the late 70s, if you’d asked me, I think I’d have named Gardner (along with others such as Christie and Carr) as one of my favorite mystery writers.
In more recent years, I have found myself dismayed by the jumps in logic and deductive reasoning that are made in the Mason books — and all the more so in the later ones, where the action has been tamed down and Gardner’s reputation relied more and more on the detective work.
I’ll have to start reading the earlier ones, the ones that caught my attention back when I was in junior high, and see how well they hold up today.
Or maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll keep my memories the way I remember them.
— Steve
November 1st, 2010 at 2:26 pm
I have heard it said that the deterioration of Gardner’s books was due to him ultimately dictating rather than physically writing them. I must say that I find that quite believable. Having tried it myself, it does feel as though you are using different parts of the brain. Actually typing or writing allows you to keep track of your mistakes much more easily.
November 1st, 2010 at 2:50 pm
It’s difficult to argue against that theory, and I’m not going to.
But if Gardner’s books from the 1940s don’t hold up plotwise, and I have a feeling that maybe they don’t, that makes the case weaker that it was his dictating them that made the stories the poorer for it. (I’d have to check to see when he shifted to having his secretary type up his dictaphone notes.)
And there’s no reason that “writing” by dictation can’t work, if you don’t mind doing some editing and/or proof reading when you’re done. It’s a problem that some well-known writers have today, dictated stories or not.
See for example my review of a recent Jack Higgins book: https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=3799
Purely as an aside, my spellchecker doesn’t recognize the word dictaphone.
November 1st, 2010 at 6:42 pm
I’ve found an Erle Stanley Gardner website, and there is a photo of him dictating a novel into a dictaphone “circa 1940”. Darn! It seemed such a good theory, too…
November 1st, 2010 at 10:43 pm
Bradstreet, I noticed the same thing. I was thinking the dictating might have led to the decrease in quality in the 1960’s, but he had been using the dictation format since his pulp days.
What I believe happened involved the fact that Gardner was born in 1890 and the dictation system worked fine in his younger days when he was in his prime. But by the 1960’s he was in his seventies and probably pretty jaded with the Perry Mason series. Plus by now he was pretty well off because of the TV royalties, etc and probably simply did not have that drive and desire that he had his whole career.
I’ve noticed that most writers seem to have a decrease in the quality of their work as they get older. There are exceptions of course but as a general rule their best work is done in their younger years. Gardner in his seventies I think was beyond the point where he was doing his best work.
November 2nd, 2010 at 12:14 pm
The PERRY MASON 50TH ANNIVERSARY DVD set has a mini-documentary abut Erle Stanley Gardner. Part of that doc is a excerpted recording of Gardner’s dictation for one of his last novels (can’t recall which one at the moment).If you’ve ever heard Gardner’s speaking voice (which Raymond Chandler once described as “having the delicate chiaroscuro of a French taxi horn”), you may infer that his interest was less in performance than in getting the words down.
By way of comparison, Rod Serling dictated all his TV and film scripts; not surprisingly, the dialog is all-important, and Serling was a kind of frustrated performer himself.
Of course, this is apples vs. oranges. Every writer uses the method that works best for himself. There can also be little doubt that Gardner knew that the times were passing him by, that he couldn’t write the same story in 1964 that he did thirty years earlier.
Sometimes, we as readers have to learn to make allowances for things like time, age, known skills, and our own ideas about how to do things.
That’s what I believe, at any rate, and it makes me perhaps a less discerning, but more compassionate reader.
I can live with that.
November 2nd, 2010 at 2:10 pm
I think if you look at almost any highly prolific genre writer, their later work shows signs of decline. Christie and Carr come to mind immediately. It’s also true of two of “my” writers, Street and Crofts. Even Carolyn Wells’ books, no great shakes to start with, decline later in her career. This also is true of J. S. Fletcher (though his last, posthumously published novel, completed by Torquemada, is surprisingly good–review forthcoming).
Edgar Wallace is an exception (whatever you think of his work, it’s pretty even in quality) throughout the 1920s, but then he died in his fifties.
November 2nd, 2010 at 7:27 pm
Sometimes it’s tough to tell an older relative that he shouldn’t be driving any more. Realizing when it is that you should take the keys away, and then actually doing it, is never easy.
As I said in my first comment, I think Mike Nevins did a superb job in pointing out both the pluses and minuses in these four novels.
I also agree with Mike Doran, who says you can be forgiving and make allowances, while at the same time realizing that the later Mason books don’t compare to those that were written when Gardner was in his prime.
Me, I love the Perry Mason books, all of them.
November 9th, 2010 at 5:22 am
Isaac Asimov once pointed out that he wrote differently with a quill pen, a ball point, and a typewriter, and I can certainly testify that I write somewhat differently on a pc than a typewriter or by hand. Different skill sets I suppose connecting with subtle differences in how we communicate. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see how dictating a book could change your style.
John Creasey never rewrote, but later in his career he would write early of morning, then put the work aside for a year and a half during which time he sent it out to five trusted professional readers who then returned it with suggestions and corrections which he incorporated in his afternoon writing sessions. i’m not entirely sure, but I think he dictated his work too.
I’ve known radio and television personalities who sparkle in front of a microphone and are duds when you switch it off — and vice versa. The medium is certainly part of the message. Reading a book on-line is subtly different than reading a physical book in your hand.
Gardner was certainly past his prime, but all things considered what is notable here is how many good points there still are in these. Almost any writer who writes that much about a single character over so many years is going to slip into decline, but like Steve I recall reading my first Perry Mason’s with a good deal of excitement, and it wasn’t until later years I brought anything like critical judgement to the process — though fairly early I noticed the early books in the series were somewhat less predictable in structure and action.
I think what we may all be missing is that by the time these books were written Gardner would have been hard pressed to make many major changes if he wanted to. His readership and his publishers likely would not have welcomed any real innovation, and while it might have pleased a few critics I doubt many fans would have wanted it.
At some point you become a prisoner to certain forms of success. There is a point where a writer is fulfilling expectations more than creating.
Some writers manage to pull a rabbit out of the hat, or like Rex Stout to play some clever late variations on the theme, but far more like Gardner find their niche and don’t stray much from it.
I can still pick up a Perry Mason and read it with enjoyment. True I may have to park a few critical observations to one side — particularly in the later ones — but I can still admire them for the easy readability and the simple storytelling skill of keeping the pages turning and a surprizing amount of suspense considering you know Perry will win and prove his client innocent.
S.S. Van Dine tended to always introduce the killer on the same page and virtually the same line, but even knowing that I still enjoy the Philo Vance books. I would argue that fair play and (gasp!) even who done it isn’t all that important to many mysteries. For the life of me I probably couldn’t identify the killer in half of my favorite Nero Wolfe outings, or tell you how Wolfe nailed him — while other incidents related to Wolfe and Archie and company are clear as if I just finished the volume. Stout wrote good mysteries, I’m not saying he didn’t. I am saying the mystery and solution is the least of the factors of why I still read and reread him.
If fairplay and detection was all that mattered even he best mystery novels would be impossible to enjoy on rereading.
I’ve always thought the whole Detection Club idea that we were reading this genre for the ‘game’ was so much nonsense. I don’t think one reader in a thousand actually gives a hoot who done it. The plays the thing, and Gardner was a master at the play. He created a world and a set of characters in it we returned to again and again. That was far more important to his success than who done it in any individual entry.
If all we cared about was fair play, clues, and the solution those Dennis Wheatley casebooks would be the finest the genre had to offer instead of mere curiosities.
To some extent Edmund Wilson was right. Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd? I would argue most mystery fans don’t. It’s the journey and not the destination we crave, we really don’t care if it was Colonel Mustard in the library in the final analysis, the victim and the killer are just means to that end. Gardner kept the journey interesting and that was all his readers really wanted.
The Perry Mason books were movie popcorn, and most of us don’t want the expensive gourmet stuff at the theater — we want the cheap generic stuff with too much salt and dripping in buttery oil — the trick is to keep it fresh, and if in the end Gardner didn’t always manage that, he kept it fresher longer than anyone could reasonably have been expected to.
November 9th, 2010 at 5:35 pm
For those of you who have not read Edmund Wilson’s essay on Roger Ackroyd, a good chunk of it is available online at
http://books.google.com/books?id=auPpqXw6bGQC&pg=PA257&lpg=PA257&dq=edmund+wilson+roger+ackroyd&source=bl&ots=1Zw_3OF_WV&sig=Yu0-xyWOfyKZ68CWNjTGFW03F8s&hl=en&ei=6cjZTNrWNoqisQOi04i3Bw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CEQQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q&f=false
— Steve