WHEN READERS think about Erle Stanley Gardner, they mostly conjure Perry Mason, partly for the eighty-six novels in which the trial lawyer was the primary character, but also for the long-running television series that starred Raymond Burr and is still a late-night staple in re-runs.
But Gardner also wrote thirty novels under the A.A. Fair pseudonym, all about the private detectives Bertha Cool and Donald Lam. The Bigger They Come (titled Lam to the Slaughter in the U.K.), the first novel in the series, was published in 1939, but Gardner’s authorship was not revealed until the end of World War II. For most authors, thirty books would be a full career but for Gardner it was fewer than a quarter of the 130 novels he produced.
Many readers prefer the novels about this unlikely detective duo to his more iconic defense lawyer because the characterization is sharper than in the Mason and other novels and they have the one element noticeably lacking in much of Gardner’s other works—humor.
Bertha Cool is the senior member of the team. A large, gray-haired woman in her sixties, she founded the private investigation agency in 1936 when her husband Henry Cool died. Her twinkling eyes give her a grandmotherly appearance that is belied by her tough-mindedness and equally tough language. Her battles with weight are an ongoing challenge, as she has weighed as much as 275 pounds. She prefers to wear loose, unconfining garments and has been described by her partner as looking like “a cylinder of current jelly on a plate” when she walks.
Donald Lam is a disbarred lawyer who has had many brushes with the police. In The Bigger They Come he is hungry, desperately in need of a job, and he manages to convince Mrs. Cool that, despite his diminutive appearance—he is five feet, six inches, tall and weighs 125 pounds—he is man enough to be a detective. He tries to prove it by never backing down from a fight but usually gets beat up. Though small, he is considered very attractive by most women, though Elsie Brand, the firm’s pretty and shy secretary, proves elusive in spite of Lam’s relentless pursuit.
After being hired by Mrs. Cool, Lam’s first assignment is simply to serve a subpoena but he is unable to locate the man. In fact, no one seems able to find him.
As it happens, the book was based on a real-world quirk in the law that Gardner, a lawyer, discovered and, as a crusader for much of his life, wove into the plot. He learned that there are certain conditions in Arizona that made it possible to commit murder with impunity as long as the murderer never left the state. Although a work of fiction, when it was published lawmakers were made aware of this loophole in the law and closed it.
There were numerous elements in the Cool-Lam series that returned on a regular basis. References to Mrs. Cool’s weight are common (with various books listing it between 160 and 275 pounds), as are numerous mentions of her avaricious greed and her foul mouth, though the most common epithet quoted is the mild, if bizarre, “fry me for an oyster.”
Most books remind readers of Lam’s quick wit and profound knowledge of the law. Although he often is referred to as disbarred, he claims he wasn’t ever officially disbarred but that he merely talked to much. When Bertha asks him what he talked too much about, he is both embarrassed and feisty when he acknowledges that he told someone how he could commit a murder and get away with it. (Although the methods were different, other lawyers in fiction—and, let’s be honest, probably in real life—explained to clients that murder was the solution to their problems, notably Melville Davisson Post’s Randolph Mason and Lawrence Block’s Ehrengraf.)
Gardner’s style changed quite a bit over the years. He started his career as a writer for the pulp magazines that flourished in the 1920s and 1930s. Authors were famously paid a penny a word by most of the pulps, but the top writers in the top magazines managed to get all the way up to three cents a word. This munificent fee was reserved for the best of the best of their time, some of whom remain popular and successful to the present day (Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich), some of whom only are remembered and read by the modest coterie that avidly reads and collects pulp fiction (Carroll John Daly, Arthur Leo Zagat, Arthur J. Burks). One who earned the big bucks regularly, especially when he wrote for Black Mask, the greatest of the pulps, was Erle Stanley Gardner.
Gardner had learned and honed his craft in the pulps, so it is not surprising that the earliest Perry Mason novels were hard-boiled, tough-guy books, with Mason as a fearless, two-fisted battler, rather than the calm, self-possessed figure that most readers remember today. Reading the first Mason novels, The Case of the Velvet Claws, published in 1933, and The Case of the Careless Kitten, published twenty years later, it is difficult to remember that they were written by the same author. Both styles, by the way, were first-rate, just different.
Gardner was born in Malden, Massachusetts, in 1889. Because his father was a mining engineer, he traveled often as a child. As a teenager, he participated in professional boxing as well as promoting unlicensed matches, placing himself at risk of criminal prosecution, which gave him an interest in the law. He took a job as a typist at a California law firm and after reading law for fifty hours a week for three years, he was admitted to the California bar. He practiced in Oxnard from 1911 to 1918, gaining a reputation as a champion of the underdog through his defense of poor Mexican and Chinese clients.
He left to become a tire salesman in order to earn more money but he missed the courtroom and joined another law firm in 1921. It is then that he started to write fiction, hoping that he could augment his modest income. He worked a full day at court, followed that with several hours of research in the law library, then went home to write fiction into the small hours, setting a goal of at least 4,000 words a day. He sold two stories in 1921, none in 1922, and only one in 1923, but it was to the prestigious Black Mask. The following year, thirteen of his stories saw print, five of them in Black Mask. Over the next decade he wrote nearly fifteen million words and sold hundreds of stories, many pseudonymously so that he could have multiple stories in a single magazine, each under a different name.
His output was prodigious. He wrote 1,200,000 words annually during most of the 1920s and 1930s. That is a novel a month, plus a stack of short stories, for a fifteen-year stretch. In 1932, his most productive year, he wrote an unimaginable 2,400,000 words—the equivalent of a full-length novel every other week.
In 1932, he finally took a vacation, an extended trip to China, since he had become so financially successful. That is also the year in which he began to submit his first novel, The Case of the Velvet Claws. It was rejected by several publishers before William Morrow took it, and Gardner published every mystery with that house for the rest of his life. Thayer Hobson, then the president of Morrow, suggested that the protagonist of that book, Perry Mason, should become a series character and Gardner agreed.
The Mason novels became an immediate success so Gardner resigned from his law practice to devote full time to writing. Eager to have privacy, he acquired parcels of land in the Southwest and eventually settled into the “Gardner Fiction Factory” on a thousand-acre ranch in Temecula, California. The ranch had a dozen guest cottages and trailers to house his support staff of twenty employees, all of whom are reported to have called him “Uncle Erle.” Among them were six secretaries, all working full time, transcribing his dictated novels, non-fiction books and articles, and correspondence.
He was intensely interested in prison conditions and was a strong advocate of reform. In 1948, he formed the Court of Last Resort, a private organization dedicated to helping those believed to have been unfairly incarcerated. The group succeeded in freeing many unjustly convicted men and Gardner wrote a book, The Court of Last Resort, describing the group’s work; it won an Edgar for the best fact crime book of the year.
In the 1960s, Gardner became alarmed at some changes in American literature. He told the New York Times, “I have always aimed my fiction at the masses who constitute the solid backbone of America, I have tried to keep faith with the American family. In a day when the prevailing mystery story trends are towards sex, sadism, and seduction, I try to base my stories on speed, situation, and suspense.”
While Gardner wrote prolifically about a wide variety of characters under many pseudonyms, most notably the thirty novels about Cool and Lam, all his books give evidence of clearly identifiable characteristics. There is a minimum of description and a maximum of dialogue, and Gardner’s heroes are not averse to breaking the exact letter of the law in order to secure what they consider to be justice. They share contempt for pomposity. Villains or deserving victims are often self-important, wealthy individuals who can usually be identified because Gardner has given them two last names (such as Harrington Faulkner).
Whether the books feature Perry Mason, D.A. Doug Selby, Bertha Cool and Donald Lam, or non-series characters, Erle Stanley Gardner’s writing always entertains. You don’t sell more than 300,000,000 books by failing to deliver.
—OTTO PENZLER