The fledgling lawyer soon found himself gaining a rep among the Chinese and Mexican communities, with whom he developed some long-standing friendships. He stuck around, picking up what legal knowledge he could, and three years later, in 1911, without ever attending university or law school, he passed the state bar exam and began practicing the law himself. Somewhere around this time, young Erle eventually decided that a little knowledge of the law might come in handy, so he landed a gig as a typist at an Oxnard, California law firm. He once boasted he was kicked out of Indiana’s Valparaiso university for “slugging a professor.” He also participated in (and allegedly organized) several illegal boxing matches. A bit of a roughneck as a lad, he was constantly getting into brawls. He was born in Massachusetts, but his father’s job as a mining engineer took the family all over–sometimes as far as the Klondike. But Gardner did more, much more…Īstoundingly, he was not just a writer, but also a practicing lawyer, a humanitarian and an adventurer. If that were all he ever did, he’d still rank a bio on this site, given that Mason, in his earliest books, was little more than a unliciensed private eye who just happened to practise law in between shootouts, fisticuffs and other hard-boiled shenanigans. He was best known, of course, for creating the world’s most famous fictional lawyer, Perry Mason. In his heyday, a ten-year-span from roughly 1926 to 1936, he produced and sold an average of one million words of fiction a year, certainly earning his billing as “King of the Woodpulps.” And he was amazingly, staggeringly prolific (check out his seemingly endless bibliography below). Green, Kyle Corning, Les Tillray and Robert ParrĪlthough critics sneered and many felt that he was not a very good writer (Rex Stout, for example, once claimed that the Perry Mason books weren’t even novels), by the time of his death ERLE STANLEY GARDNER was the bestselling American mystery writers of all time.
Fair, Grant Holiday, Carleton Kendrake, Charles J.
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