The Life and Times of Perry Mason: The Evolution of Today's Legal Thrillers

Abstract

NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2012 9 PHOTO: EVERETTCOLLECTION E rle Stanley Gardner lasted only one month in Indiana’s Valparaiso University law school. More interested in boxing than law, he organized illegal matches and later bragged he was suspended for punching a professor. Whatever happened, the school swiftly showed him the door. This didn’t augur well for a young man who had only completed high school and just entered his twenties. His story, however, took one of those twists stranger than his fiction . Gardner’s wealth and worldwide fame would come about because of his creation of fiction’s most famous lawyer, Perry Mason. Gardner was a tireless man who would accumulate seven pseudonyms and write over 150 novels, but first he studied law on his own while working as a typist. He passed the California Bar exam in 1911, about a year after leaving Valparaiso. He practiced for a while, getting whatever clients he could among the Chinese and Mexican immigrants, took a job as a tire salesman for a few years, then returned to the law, joining a firm in 1921. He began to write at night—thousands of words each night—banging away for two years before getting his first pulp publication . The floodgates opened. He became Black Mask’s most prolific author and appeared in many other magazines, both pulps and slicks. In 1932 he earned $20,000 writing short stories, no mean sum in the Depression and an enormous output in the heyday of a penny a word. Perry Mason’s debut came in 1933 with Gardner’s first novel, The Case of the Velvet Claws, and continued through eighty-nine titles, several of which were published after his death. The first screen appearance of Mason, starring Warren William, followed a year after his debut in The Case of the Howling Dog. Three others with William and then one TheLifeandTimesofPerryMason The Evolution of Today’s Legal Thrillers CRIME&MYSTERY INTERNATIONAL J. MADISON DAVIS Raymond Burr as Perry Mason in the CBS series that aired from 1957 to 1966. 10 WORLD LITERATURE TODAY with Ricardo Cortez followed. (Both of these actors share the distinction , coincidentally, of playing the Sam Spade character in pre-Bogart adaptations of The Maltese Falcon.) Warner Brothers played loose with Gardner’s characters. Perry Mason became a gourmet and a sophisticate, more like S. S. Van Dyne’s popular Philo Vance. Mason even marries his secretary Della Street in one of these movies, destroying the will-theywon ’t-they game Gardner played so successfully through years of the television series. Forawriterusuallymoreobsessed withpaychecks,Gardnerwasnothappy with Warner Brothers. He insisted on control of his characters in the future, a major reason CBS television’s Perry Mason (1957–68) was so successful. There was sufficient romantic possibility in Perry Mason that CBS also proposed a soap opera (which became The Edge of Night) based on the novels , but Gardner refused to let them use his characters’ names. He even exerted control over casting the television series. Raymond Burr generally played a “heavy,” like the murderer in RearWindow, a cop, or other such roles. He supposedly showed up to audition for Hamilton Burger, Mason’s nemesis, but Gardner took one look at Burr and immediately chose him as Mason, over network objections. Burr’s dark sex appeal attracted women viewers, widening the audience, and perhaps producing a significant shift in television to less pure heroes. To create Mason, Gardner had drawn from his own experiences at the inelegant end of the law. Mason never appeared in short stories, but one of Gardner’s continuing characters was attorney Ken Corning, who represents clients framed by corrupt police and officials. American crime fiction from the 1930s casts a skeptical eye on John Law, and police are uncommon as heroes until the postwar period. In 1937, incidentally, Gardner flipped the roles of his main characters by creating a series in which Doug Selby, district attorney, must outwit a crafty shyster. Mason, it must be said, is about 50 percent shyster himself, although he is always on the side of the innocent. As the novel series became more popular, Mason’s toughness softened to make him more palatable for serialization in the...