The World of Erie Stanley Gardner

by Charles W. Morion

FACTS about Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of the Perry Mason stories, are never quite up to date. Like Gardner himself, the statistics of his writing won’t hold still long enough to settle in any particular area. Yesterday’s peak becomes a mere way station en route to greater heights, just as the summer he sets out to spend “relaxing" at his camp in the Pacific Northwest is soon including a safari into remote Mexico, a fishing trip by houseboat on the Sacramento Delta waters, a brief supervisory interval at his ranch near Temecula, California, and a week or two of business negotiations at his Palm Springs house.

Wherever he goes, Gardner keeps on with his daily stint of the writing that has made him probably the most widely read of all living authors. Now in his seventies, he continues to produce as abundantly and successfully as ever: his 1966 output consisted of two travel books, one Donald Lam-Bertha Cool mystery, the series he writes under the pseudonym A. A. Fair, and one Perry Mason. The total sales of his books— 130 titles in all — at the year’s end stand at some 165 million copies, and the current rate remains steady at 20,000 copies a day. He has been translated into 21 languages, and the 292 one-hour Perry Mason television shows bring in revenues from all over the world, and will continue to do so through new outlets and as reruns for many years to come. When the series completed its ninth year and new productions ceased in June, 1966, Variety estimated that Raymond Burr, an actor, had been earning about $1 million annually from his role as Perry Mason, which should indicate fairly substantial TV rewards for Gardner, who was, after all, the creator-proprietor of the whole enterprise.

“The dollar volume of my one-man fiction factory is gigantic, says Gardner, “the profits are enormous. He pauses, as if for a courtroom emphasis, before concluding in his stentorian tones, “And the taxes are astronomical.”

Unlike some occupants of the higher income brackets, Gardner is not at all aggrieved about taxes. “I don’t mind,” he says, “if the government gets more than anybody else of what I earn, and it wouldn’t do me any good if I did. But I can’t stand petty squabbles. I hate paper work, so I tell mv accountants never to claim deductions they aren’t absolutely sure of, If they are going to make a mistake, let them make it against me. I haven’t the time to bicker about details.”

Keeping abreast of the details in Gardner’s way ol life is full-time work for a large and extraordinarily devoted staff. Aside from fuel, stores, and water, one of his archaeological expeditions into Baja California may require the use of eight or ten types of vehicle: airplanes, helicopters, and all sorts of wheeled carriers for rough cross-country travel, some of them specially made for his own distinctive requirements. His several homes are maintained in readiness for occupancy at all times, with ink in the inkwells, food in the freezers, and clothing in the closets. The photographic equipment and supplies in his own quarters at the Rancho del Paisano in Temecula, his principal base, would be a respectable inventory for many a retailer. His wife and married daughter live in a home of their own, and it would be fair to say that simply being a participating member of the Gardner establishment is an occupation in itself, taking precedence over all else. “My wife and I,” says Gardner, “have an amicable separation. She likes to live in Oakland, where her relatives are and where my daughter lives with the two grandchildren. Once or twice a month I go up and we have a family luncheon and get-together, and I keep good friends with my wife. I was never cut out to be a husband living in a house anywhere; I particularly dislike living in a city.”

Gardner’s success with his fiction undoubtedly lies in the real-life quality of his characters and their problems, for which he can draw on his own dazzling accomplishments as a trial lawyer, but his background in other fields is remarkable. So many varied interests are usually for the dabbler, but Gardner is an all-or-nothing man of great curiosity, stubbornness, and intellectual power, and above all, a perfectionist. He could have distinguished himself as a criminologist, penologist, businessman, lay psychologist, photographer, naturalist, hunter and guide, or rancher. Gardner would have made an excellent chief of police, for he is an authority on police work, but his sympathy for the underdog— the small malefactor on whom society pins so much of its own miscellaneous guilt —would hardly square with such a function. He is an ardent conservationist, detests those who leave litter on a campsite, and always carries on his trips into the wilderness a device for crushing tin cans, which are then buried too deep to be dug up by animals. He speaks passable Spanish and enough Cantonese to be able to order a complicated Chinese dinner by telephone, with much politesse included in the conversation. By temperament Gardner is restless, a romantic, an adventurer, something of a mystic, anthropomorphic, hospitable, generous, impulsive, an unselfconscious original given to abrupt and often disconcerting decisions, a hard worker, a rare combination of idealism and sophistication, and interested more than in anything else in the individual human being, whoever he may be. His love of the outdoor life and the wilderness finds him spending most of his time west of the Sierra, and he harbors, although he would deny any such prejudice, the prickly distrust of the Californian toward “the East.”

“He refers to us as ‘you people back there,’” says Helen King, the editor at William MorrowCompany, Gardner’s publishers, “as if the East were encased in amber circa 1942.”

GARDNER was born in Malden, Massachusetts, the son of a mining engineer, whose occupation gave him a much-traveled childhood and schooling in Massachusetts, Oregon, and California. While he was a high school student in Palo Alto, he held down a part-time job as a typist in a lawoffice, and he took on a similar full-time job, at twenty dollars a month, in Willows, California, after his graduation.

Gardner’s only venture into the higher learning was brief, at Valparaiso University in Indiana. “I learned more law there,” he recalls, “in a period of three or four weeks than I ever learned anywhere in anything like the same amount of time.” This was partly through his liking for one of the law professors and partly through his misadventures with another member of the faculty, which nearly landed him in jail.

The university had no athletic facilities, and Gardner wanted to keep up with his boxing, at which he was better than average, by sparring with other students in his third-floor room. The hubbub was noticeable downstairs, but Gardner refused to defer to the professor in charge of the building and give tip his exercises. “We tried to box without moving our feet,” he recalls. “The experiment was only partially successful.”

What became Gardner’s first experience in legal matters as applied to himself began one night when the professor stormed into Gardner’s room. “He said he was a boxer himself and ordered everybody out,” says Gardner, “but one of the students refused to go unless I told him to, contending that it was my room.” The professor tried to throw the student out, but failed ignominiously. “His knowledge of boxing,” says Gardner, “did not include anything that was practical. It was quite a shambles.”

With the thought of beating the professor to the next move, Gardner and the student went to town and tried to swear out a warrant for the professor’s arrest on the ground that he had been the aggressor. On an earlier night the other students in the dormitory had gone on a bottle-smashing rampage in the corridors. Gardner had stayed out of the rumpus and even tried to persuade the others to give up their plan for a demonstration.

“The authorities, I think, blamed me for the whole thing,” his story goes on, “because I had been something of a ringleader in the short time I was there. I understand they had a warrant out for my arrest alleging criminal conspiracy. I did some rapid thinking.

“If I had ever taken the stand in my own behalf, I would have had either to commit perjury or to admit that the ringleaders had asked me to participate in the bottle smashing. Once I had admitted that, I would be asked for their names. I would either have had to break the code or be guilty of contempt of court.

“At that point I decided to get the hell out of Valparaiso for good. I am sorry I couldn’t have stayed. The university virtually owned the town of Valparaiso, and if they had decided they wanted me in jail, I probably would have gone to jail, or perhaps to prison, regardless of what the real facts might have been.

“So, I ducked the cops who were trying to serve the warrant. I caught a train to Chicago and left for Eugene, Oregon. I dodged the sheriff there, who was looking for me on telegraphed instructions from Valparaiso. I went out to the railroad camp and worked on railroad construction, a place so tough that no deputy sheriff would come anywhere near it. I worked there until the thing blew over, and then went back to studying law in law offices.”

Many years later the university invited Gardner to be the principal speaker at some major occasion concerning its law school. Knowing that he would be unable to bring himself to go and not to tell the story of his bout with the authorities, he declined.

Gardner’s energetic practice of law began with his admission to the California bar at age twentyone, and in 1923 he suddenly disclosed to himself and the world his talent for writing fiction for pulp magazines. His productivity was so great and his stories so original that he was soon very much the master of his own affairs. “I was a small-time lawyer in a small town,” says Gardner, “and I couldn’t see any real future in it. When my third year of selling stories brought me in $28,000, I saw that here was work that I liked, and I could take it with me and live the way I wanted to live anywhere in the world.”

After some nine years of spare-time writing and practicing law, Gardner gave up his legal work altogether in the early thirties. He was in reality anything but a small-time lawyer. He was fond of nosing about in odd statutes rarely applied to ordinary cases; he was especially capable as a crossexaminer and at anticipating the tactics of his opponents; and he became celebrated for the novelty — and success — of his courtroom performances, usually as defense counsel for some friendless and penniless offender.

“I have built up a law practice,” Gardner wrote his father in the early days of his career, “in which I am dealing with large numbers of clients of all classes—except the upper and middle class.” He became the hero of the California Chinese, whose status at the time was a cut below even that of the Mexicans, and his fees as their legal champion tided him over several lean intervals.

Many of the Perry Mason stories were taken directly from Gardner’s courtroom successes, and his practice was soon including middleand upperclass clients as his reputation grew.

It was inevitable that Gardner would win most of his cases. He exuded assurance and self-confidence in any situation. The resonant, carrying quality of his voice and his succinct manner of speech would hold the attention of even the dullest juror, and his presentation was so well prepared as to make opposing positions seem rickety indeed.

Stocky, powerfully built, with regular features, ruddy outdoor coloring, a penetrating gaze through the large round lenses of his spectacles, careless in his dress, Gardner has always given the impression &emash; a quite valid one—of pent-up energy under firm control. There was nothing of the matinee idol in his appearance to alarm the jurors, who found it easy to regard him as one of themselves. The hostile witness could rarely remain insouciant under Gardner’s questioning and was soon worrying about worse to come unless Gardner, a master of histrionism, was amiably coaxing him along in a fabrication too absurd to need demolition. Always underlying these techniques was Gardner’s tireless rummaging through the lawbooks for just the right precedent to fit his client’s needs.

The more spectacular of Gardner’s feats were recounted by the late Alva Johnston in an article, “The Case of Erle Stanley Gardner,” published by the Saturday Evening Post in 1946 and by Morrow as a small book a year later, a circumstance that eventually took Gardner into a new activity in behalf of the underdog, a department established in Argosy magazine and titled “The Court of Last Resort.”

THE Case of Erle Stanley Gardner,” which had made much of Gardner’s quixotic willingness to defend the penniless and friendless whom he thought unjustly accused, brought him a flood of mail from prisoners and their relatives. To a man under the death sentence or serving a long prison term, the idea of help from a phenomenally successful lawyer who would work for nothing was attractive. “Just about every hopeless case in the United States was dumped on me,” says Gardner. Most of the appeals were typical of what prisoners call “the bum beef,” plainly without merit, but a few of them got under Gardner’s skin.

On a camping trip in Baja California with his old friend Harry Steeger, publisher of Argosy and some thirty other magazines, Gardner laid out the problem: what could be done for the innocent man who was wrongfully convicted of a serious crime? It was unlikely that an outsider, however expert, could put the whole machinery of criminal jurisprudence into reverse simply by reason of believing in the innocence of one whom a jury had found guilty. Police, prosecutors, and the courts are jealous of their responsibilities, and the jury trial is supposed in itself to ensure justice to the defendant.

Reopening a criminal case that had already gone all the way through the prescribed legal channels was a battle against inertia, delay, heavy expenses, and the natural reluctance of the authorities to admit that they had done a terrible injustice to an innocent, even blameless, citizen. If an individual tried to reopen such cases, it would be easy to brush him aside as a publicity hunter, a sensationalist. Gardner and Steeger agreed that a small committee or board of the right sort would be necessary: they would have to be experts, well known and respected, and sufficiently well off to serve without pay and be beyond any need of personal gain from the project. Argosy would bear the expense of investigations and report in its pages how the project fared.

Gardner estimates that trial judges and juries are right 90 percent of the time, perhaps even 95 percent. In almost every case, two witnesses tell opposing stories. “The judge or the jury tries to tell who is lying,” Gardner writes. “Sometimes a graceful, artistic liar gets the nod. A judge isn’t infallible.

“So our Court of Last Resort offered something new, an opportunity for the public to take a real interest in the cases of men who had been wrongfully convicted. The public is seldom interested in law, but it is always interested in justice.”

Gardner’s book The Court of Last Resort, published in 1952 by William Sloane Associates and reprinted by Pocket Books in an enlarged edition in 1954, is a remarkable handbook on criminal jurisprudence and penology, made appallingly real by the cases themselves, full of extraordinary insights on the part of its author into human behavior, the ennobling as well as the destructive. What might sound like an easy generalization is the distillate, coming from Gardner, of all but unique firsthand experience. If he is writing about a prison chaplain or a parole board, an institution for juveniles, or the menus in a penitentiary, he knows not only the facts of his subject but also the developments that made them what they are. A circumstance whose cause and origins are unexplained is intolerable to Gardner.

Gardner carried on with the Court of Last Resort for about fourteen or fifteen years. Pressure of his own work caused him to give up his association with it in the early sixties. He believes, on balance, that the effort was justified. Much was learned, and Gardner became more convinced than ever that some review of the facts in a case should be systematically available, just as the appellate courts now review errors of law. If no errors of law occurred, the case is closed and at any rate hard to reopen, even if nightmarish errors of fact are discovered later on. One remedy, Gardner feels, would be creation of a board in each state with power to review the facts if an error had been made. His book makes other proposals for the improvement of standards of proof, an upgrading of police work into a substantial and honorable career, supplying competent public defenders to penniless defendants, and a system of trained medical examiners to investigate and make full reports on all suspicious deaths.

“We were not trying to make a statistical showing,” Gardner says reflectively, “but we did help in saving the lives and freedom of several innocent men. I think we interested the public in a state of affairs previously more or less unknown to it.”

WHEN Gardner began writing for the pulp magazines in 1923, the market for books of mystery fiction was narrow and relatively unrewarding to the author. Willis Kingsley Wing, the New York literary agent who has represented Gardner in his magazine and radio dealings for almost thirty years, sums up the economics of the field:

“At the time there were few ‘general’ pulps: Short Stories, Argosy, Blue Book, Redbook, Peoples, Munsey’s, Adventure, and one or two others. Each offered diversity, such as adventure, sea, war, historical adventure, Western, some detective and mystery stories, and science fiction. A few pulps offered only one type of story, among them Detective Fiction Weekly, Black Mask, Western Story, and Ranch Romances. In the general pulps, the mystery or detective action story came to be somewhat standardized on, so to speak, the conservative side. There was keen competition, and the rates showed it. Adventure was paying as high as ten cents a word to its top writers. Most of the others were getting by with rates of one to two cents. If an author could dream up a sixty-thousand word serial and sell it, he could buy some time for speculative writing for Collier’s or the Saturday Evening Post or even aim at book publication.

“Books did not make much money in their original form, and there were only two reprinters, A. L. Burt and Blue Ribbon, and later Garden City entered this field. They all used the plates of the original publishers. The books were hardbound and sold at one dollar, mainly through department stores.

“Erle was handled at the first stage of his writing career by Robert Thomas Hardy, who had all the good pulp writers. I am sure Bob Hardy had his eye more on the pulps for his pulp writers and the slick magazines for those who were up to it than on the book publishers. The magazine machinery ground furiously and fast; whoever wanted to make good as a writer kept his editors well supplied with his stuff. This all began to change in the early thirties, and some two hundred and fifty new mystery and suspense titles were issued in hard covers by 1939.”

One of the widest popular misconceptions about Gardner is that the output of his “fiction factory” is the work of a writing staff. Nothing could be further from the fact, for the notion fails to take into account his incredible productivity: in one month in 1932, according to Alva Johnston, he turned out 224,000 words while still working two days a week at his law practice, and his first Perry Mason novel, The Case of the Velvet Claws, was dictated in that same year in three and a half days.

Velvet, Claws was turned down by several publishers before it reached acceptance by Thayer Hobson at Morrow. Despite his own ten years of success as a pulp writer before that, Gardner counts Hobson as his discoverer and patron. “Once his respect has been given to his editor or his publisher,” says Willis Wing, “Gardner is easily the most loyal of men.”

Some years before Hobson retired from Morrow, Thayer Hobson and Company was formed and acquired all Gardner book rights. The company became agents for his British and foreign rights, licensing book rights to Morrow in the United States and to other publishers abroad. Hobson lives today on his ranch at Comfort in west Texas, where he breeds registered Appaloosas.

How much advice Gardner ever needed is debatable. What he lacked in urban sophistication he made up for with his inventiveness and quickness to learn. Hobson is credited with guiding him into specializing in a character rather than trying to turn out new characters in a new locale in each book, as most of his contemporaries were doing. Hobson felt that faced with a large output of booklength mystery fiction, the booksellers would find it best to go along with an author who stuck to a major character, made no basic change in the situation of the character, and produced novels about him with regularity. While others were erratic in production, as the comparatively short list of Dashiell Hammett books indicates, shifting their setting and experimenting with new characters, Hobson pressed Gardner to standardize his work with Perry Mason, even to the extent of using the same unchanging title formula for each story.

Neither of the principals foresaw the dimensions that Perry Mason would eventually attain. Something over twenty years ago Gardner was trying to explain why he had launched the Bertha CoolDonald Lam series under the pseudonym A. A. Fair. His thirty or forty titles up to that time had sold around thirty-five million copies, but Gardner was hunting for a change, partly to stimulate his own production and partly as protection against a decline in Perry’s following. His feeling at the moment seemed to be that Perry’s clock was running down.

“It’s like this,” he said. “You create a character and some more to go with him. You invent situations for those characters. And you write thirtyfive books about those characters and their situations, and you might be said, in a sense, to have skimmed the cream from those characters.”

Perry proved to have been not even at his halfway mark on the occasion of these misgivings. He was a radio hero, sponsored uninterruptedly by Procter & Gamble for thirteen years, and he became so solid a TV property that Gardner was unable to spend the time necessary to start Bertha Cool and Donald Lam on their television career, as he has long wanted to do. “I’m in the position of competing with myself,” he complained, a couple of years before the Perry Mason series came to what may be a temporary end. The newer characters, whose cream is still far from skimmed, will inevitably reach the TV screen, once casting problems are resolved and the right actress can be found to play Bertha Cool: middle-aged, overweight, greedy, unscrupulous, smart but not quite smart enough — the durable foil for Donald’s seemingly guileless youthfulness and his encyclopedic knowledge of the law and everything else.

Helen King, who has been at Morrow for many years, says that although Gardner is a perfectionist, he is easier, up to a point, to work with than writers of less consequence.

“But when it comes to an honest difference of opinion,” says Miss King, “it is rather like two determined dogs over one bone. We’re still tugging at several after all these years.

“One case in point is Bertha Cool. She is rough and tough, and to me, a thoroughly amusing character. But on occasion she is too profane — certainly for the school lists —and you’d think a suggestion to cut one ‘sonofabitch’ meant vitiating her whole character. I’ve a file the length of War and Peace to prove it.”

Gardner, who is “Uncle Erle” to himself and his friends, is equally unbridgeable on the timing of his characters’ doings, according to Miss King: “ ‘Uncle Erle,’ we’ll say, ‘it has to be later than that for Perry Mason to have discovered the body, run into Tragg, interviewed two suspects, and flown to Las Vegas and back. It’d take him that long to get to the airport.’

“ ‘Dammit,’ thunders Uncle Erle, ‘you people back there will ruin my story. One thing Perry Mason has is pace, and if you go having him crawl from one thing to the other, there won’t be any more Perry Masons because nobody will read them.’

“Come to think of it,” Miss King continues, “at the rate Gardner moves, Perry’s pace must seem snail-like to him. A telephone call might reach him at the ranch one day, but the next he may be at his hideout in Washington State or hunting lost mines in the American desert.”

INTRINSIC quality is a perfectly good reason for the success of Gardner’s books. A Dane or an Australian or a Czech can pick up any one of them and find himself at grips with a plausible tangle of legal and human problems, well stocked with action and tension, all guided to an unforeseeable denouement by the dependably triumphant Perry Mason (or Donald Lam).

Early on in the Perry Mason series — say at about the twentieth title — the public began to sense that Gardner was a prodigy. His rate of output alone was unique, causing one school of critics to decide that stories produced in such quantity were necessarily no more than average and to take a generally ho-hum-another-Gardner tone in their reviews. No such attitude was taken by the mass circulation weeklies, whose editors, forever sampling and responding to “reader-reaction,” were publishing Perry Mason with eagerness —by no means all that Gardner could write of him but as much as a formula of fairly well assorted contents for their magazines would permit. The fact was that Perry simply did not begin to sag as he approached middle age: one of his adventures continued to prove just as readable as its predecessors. An addict of mystery fiction who had never read a Gardner book could reasonably say on going through any Perry Mason story, no matter when it was written, that he had enjoyed it and would welcome another. If a newcomer had achieved a half dozen books in a series of comparable virtues, he would certainly have been acclaimed as one to watch, possibly as a new champion in the making.

An unknown number of Gardner titles have been pirated overseas. A piracy suit in his behalf is still going on in the Mexican courts after five years. A new Mexican copyright law has brought that situation under control, and Gardner is among the first authors to have all his books under legal protection there. Piracy in India, often with titles, names of characters, and locales changed, was widespread, but a new contract with a Madras publisher will doubtless bring an end to that. “We still receive,” reports Henriette Gelber, who is in charge of Gardner’s foreign rights at Morrow, “about one hopeful letter a week from individuals in India requesting permission to translate one—or all — of the Perry Mason books into Hindi, Tamil, Gujarati, Malayalam, Urdu, Telugu, Kannada, or Bengali.” A considerable quantity of Gardner in English-language editions is exported from the United States and England to other countries, especially Sweden. An American traveler tells of a Czech railroad porter who recently refused a tip because he had been given a Perry Mason paperback.

In American editions alone, seventy-four of Gardner’s titles have crossed the million mark in sales, twenty-two have exceeded two million, and two three million. Overseas sales give him a phenomenal audience, as the following list of his foreign publications suggests. His books are published in England, Australia, Czechoslovakia (in Czech and Slovak), Denmark, Holland, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Israel (in Hebrew and Rumanian), Hungary, India (in Tamil), Italy, Japan, Yugoslavia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Brazil, Spain, Mexico, Argentina, and Sweden.

Television is still fairly new in some other parts of the world, and Perry Mason’s foreign sales have yet to feel its full invigoration. There can be no doubt that the 292 one-hour shows on prime time have already made Perry Mason one of the most celebrated fiction characters of modern times in the United States. The effect on book sales cannot be precisely measured, but the same degree of exposure has sold a wondrous amount of everything else. Perry is far more famous than Gardner, while one suspects that if Raymond Burr were to appear today on the streets in almost any world capital, he would be engulfed in a mob of prospective clients.

ABOUT halfway up the side of a small mountain are the buildings of the thousand-acre Rancho del Paisano, in a grove of live oaks affording solid shade from the hot desert sun. The trees, whose vast and twisting limbs indicate their great age, are forever shedding from their dark green abundance quantities of small leaves that have turned dry. ft is characteristic of Gardner’s standard of maintenance that the first visible activity around the place of a morning is a complete sweepup by a Mexican worker on the ranch, so that one sees, on strolling from a guesthouse over to breakfast in the main house, nary a dead leaf but only the tidying marks of the broom on the bone-dry gravelly soil. It is all so neat, like a newly raked bluestone driveway, that one hesitates to leave a footprint on it.

Temecula, which at this writing is little more than a four-corners hamlet, will doubtless be a city with traffic lights and a park department in the near future, so sprightly is the tempo of the Southern California developers. It is visible from Gardner’s ranch, across a few miles of intervening desert and dry wash, but it consists of hardly enough to be seen, a dot on the map more or less equidistant from San Diego and Los Angeles, some forty miles from the coast.

Gardner’s only near neighbors are an aged Indian couple with a tiny ranch, on which they just manage to subsist. The Vail Ranch, a 91,000acre old-style cattle outfit across the road from the Rancho del Paisano, was sold recently to developers for $21 million, and this has already given Gardner more of a shut-in feeling than he can comfortably tolerate. Save for a few cleared fields and pastures on the Vail property, the whole countryside is rough desert as far as one can see, a pale green varied by wild lilac and mustard and flowers in the spring and a buckskin gray-tan the rest of the year.

Most of the main house on Gardner’s ranch is taken up by a living room, handsomely and comfortably furnished in a deceptively casual-looking Western manner, with much good leather and natural wood finish, and giving an impression of a sunny spaciousness. Its assortment of newspapers and periodicals laid out on a vast low table would suffice for the library of a good club. The principal window commands a vista sweeping from the coastal mountains in the west, through the desert to the north, to higher and more distant reaches in the east. The western horizon is hazy, which could result to some extent from the warm desert temperatures meeting the cooler airs of the coast, but Gardner gloomily attributes this to the spread of metropolitan smog. Almost any day now he will be forced to pack up and flee, he seems to feel, if the embrace of creeping civilization is to be evaded, although one doubts that an equivalent of the Rancho del Paisano could be created anywhere else in the world.

Everything about the ranch represents the carefully contrived fulfillment of some pertinent want on the part of the owner. It all works perfectly and apparently without human effort. Meals seem magically to serve themselves on the long refectory table at one side of the living room, a stout and immaculately polished piece of furniture which, like everything else in the room, is made to withstand hard use for another century or two. The guesthouses, partly hidden from one another in the grove of live oaks, are each equipped with reading matter, bar supplies and a thermos bucket of ice, and electric heaters against the morning chill. A typical Gardner invitation to a friend some years ago went like this: “Come whenever you can, stay as long as you like. If I have to be away for a time, don’t let that make any difference. Use any one of the cars that you want and drive it to wherever you are bound for when you leave. When you are through with it, leave it in a parking lot and mail me the ticket, and I’ll send someone in to bring it back.”

Difficulty in finding domestic help for so isolated a location has cut down the number of Gardner’s guests in recent years, but the hospitality of the ranch is undiminished. Gardner eats and drinks moderately, worries about his weight, and leads an unbelievably active life for a man of any age. He gets up with the dawn, dictates for two or three hours on a tape recorder, and sits down to breakfast around 8:30 or 9:00 with any guests who may be on the ranch. The meals are handsomely presented and simple —simple, that is, in the sense of the aphorism that So-and-so is a man of simple tastes: all he wants is the best of everything.

A short distance below the main house is the office building, where Gardner’s secretariat — six or seven full-time workers who take care of correspondence and voluminous files and records — are stationed. The quality and completeness of the business information relating to the “fiction factory” would approximate that of a large, wellmanaged corporation.

The backbone of the secretarial organization consists of three sisters: Jean Bethell, Ruth “Honey” Moore, and Peggy Downs. These three sisters were Gardner’s secretaries when he was in the law business, took a great interest in his writing career, and when he left the law, came with him. Honey runs the financial details, the books and office staff. Peggy has charge of the files and the ranch and dogs when Jean and Gardner are away. Owing to the efficiency of the three sisters, he can put his hand on any document and just about any letter that he has received during the past thirty years. “The detail work these girls do is astonishing,” he says.

Opening at random one of the ledgers on his overseas publications, one finds under the heading “Italy” four single-spaced pages listing dates, titles, and various editions of Gardner books in Italian. The ledger pages are beautifully laid out, and one imagines that a smudge or erasure anywhere would cause the whole volume to be scrapped for a new unblemished production. The headings for Japan, Germany, and other lands are similarly comprehensive and neat.

Gardner naps briefly in the early afternoon. While he is at the ranch, he does his work in a separate building containing his own office, whose contents would take several pages to catalogue, a room crammed with memorabilia of all sorts — Oriental, Indian, Western, including the mounted horns of a Texas dogie measuring six feet three inches from tip to tip. An adjoining room houses his cameras and photographic supplies, still another his guns. He usually carries in his pocket, on the ranch, a snub-nosed .38 Smith and Wesson revolver, which he can produce with astonishing suddenness, but he stopped hunting game with a rifle many years ago on the ground that it gave the game no real sporting chance. He took up archery, at which he became good enough to hit thrown targets, and he has killed specimens of all the big game of North America with the bow and arrow, but his only pursuit of animals today is with the camera.

Gardner is especially proud of a black metallic bowl, kept on an ebony stand of its own near his desk. Of ancient Oriental workmanship, the bowl gives off a delicate humming sound when rubbed in a circular motion, an effect which Gardner believes can become hypnotic if protracted. He is leaving his papers and books to the library of the University of Texas, where his office will be duplicated, with all its contents in their present position. His own shelves contain several thousand volumes, including many scarce items of Western Americana and an extensive law library.

Termination of the Perry Mason TV series has reduced the tension of Gardner’s line of communications between Hollywood and wherever he happens to be. But the only easing off Gardner allowed himself after the series stopped was to give up working nights. Otherwise his day is as busy as ever: on reaching his Palm Springs house late one afternoon, having already carried on his before-breakfast dictation, with long-distance telephoning and correspondence occupying him through midday, followed by a 70 mph drive across the desert from the ranch, Gardner was immediately at his desk recording, microphone in hand, barking out a segment of Traps Need Fresh Bait, a next A. A. Fair title. Three quarters of an hour later Gardner sat down with his guests and enjoyed a whiskey or two before they all departed for dinner at a tiny Chinese restaurant fifteen miles out of town.

Gardner rarely travels anywhere without Jean Bethell, chief of the secretaries, and usually with one or two more, and he is almost always accompanied by Sam Hicks, manager of the Rancho del Paisano, himself a fictionlike character whose accomplishments would seem overdrawn in the context of any novel. The arrival of this entourage at a New York or Boston hotel is a marvelously entertaining scene of instant-everything: porters rushing in and out with typewriters, tape recorders, and miscellaneous luggage; room service setting up a table of drinks; telephones sounding simultaneously in two or three rooms; more room service popping in with sandwiches and coffee, bellboys with mail and newspapers; and Gardner, never the man to waste a moment of his waking hours, welcoming his first guests precisely on the dot of his arrival time.

JEAN BETHELL is often taken to be the prototype of Della Street, the indispensable secretary-strategist of Perry Mason’s office, but Della could hardly survive a weekend of Jean’s ordinary round. Of life on the Delta, Helen King writes:

“It is considered camping out, in the sense that there is no household or secretarial staff, the way there is at the ranch. Jean does most of the cooking in addition to her usual executive secretarial duties. She is the only woman in the world who can drop a frying pan, pick up the telephone, take down the conversation between Erle and the caller, and five minutes later have a perfect breakfast on the table: no overcooked eggs or burnt toast or boiled over coffee.”

Gardner’s chief secretary is slim, alert, and tireless; she is indeed the executive responsible for enabling Gardner to live and work the way he wants to. Like Della Street, she is the instant secretary, but her cooking goes far beyond breakfasts, and she can put a superb dinner on the table, if some kitchen crisis arises, without the rest of the company even being aware that it was she who did all the work from start to finish. Details of travel reservations, household accounts, business and social engagements, correspondence, and the neverending output of the fiction factory — all proceed smoothly under her direction, as docs the team play by the rest of the secretariat, a remarkably capable group. Gardner likes to regard himself as a meat-and-potatoes sort of man whose surroundings are stripped down to Spartan essentials, a view that might almost be believable, so subtle is Jean’s taste in the accessories of good living. She has worked for Gardner for a quarter century or more, gone along on even his toughest trips into the wilds, and her reaction as a reader of a Perry Mason story in the making has always carried great weight with Gardner.

Sam Hicks looks after everything in the Gardner establishments except what Jean and the secretaries take care of. He is unmistakably the Westerner—hunter, horse wrangler, mountaineer — in appearance tall, broad-shouldered, with a small waist, a steady blue eye, very quick and light on his feet. Sam weighs about 200 pounds, with no spare flesh at all, a powerful figure, but so well proportioned that one does not quite realize how big he is until shaking hands with him, when the other person’s hand simply disappears and is lost to sight in Sam’s hospitable grasp. Sam was employed by the post office department to deliver the mails on skis, a winter service he rendered near the little town of Bondurant, Wyoming, where he was born and grew up. Now in mid-forties, he lives with his wife, Ruby, and their four children in a house of their own on the Rancho del Paisano. Gardner thinks Sam is the greatest elk hunter of the West, and one gets the impression that breaking out a trail with a dogsled would still be an easy day’s work for him.

Sam was working for his father’s hunting and camping outfit, Ralph Hicks and Sons, when he first met Gardner on an elk hunt in 1946. They went out together again a few years later, and Sam came to the ranch in 1951 to stay and become Gardner’s trusted friend and right-hand man. Soft-spoken and unfailingly good company, he often serves with Jean as a kind of co-host. At sundown on a chilly afternoon Sam likes to take orders for hot cocoa, which he serves in huge cups with the words, glazed into their side, “California Demi-tasse.” The cocoa is thin, neither bitter nor sweet, delicious, and with a full-bodied flavor which proves to come from a hearty addition of bourbon whiskey.

Gardner has written at some length in his travel books about his conversations with animals. He is especially susceptible to stray or injured creatures, and any dog, starving and down on his luck, who stops by at the ranch is invited to settle in and make himself comfortable for the rest of his days. There are three such in residence at this time — small, nondescript, shrewd, all with the gay tail and the somewhat officious air of muttdom in general. They pay close attention to anything Gardner says, but like most servants of the mighty, they tend to snobbishness toward others. Save for an occasional halfhearted lunge at a quail taking a dust bath in the road, they are usually sunning themselves or enjoying the air conditioning inside. There is still a huge enclosure at the ranch — too luxurious to be called a cage —• that Gardner provided for a pet chipmunk some years ago. The chipmunk had the run of the ranch and used the enclosure as a sort of private preserve and stronghold; it eventually died of old age.

A coyote used to annoy Gardner by howling every night near his bedroom. Nothing seemed to deter it, until one night Gardner switched on his tape recorder for ten minutes, and then turned the playback up to full volume. The shock of what must have seemed to be his Doppelgänger was too much for the coyote, who went away and was never heard again.

Long stays in the wilderness have given Gardner an intimate knowledge of all North American game, but he is also an authority on “lost” mines and mineral rights as a result of his early law practice, and on the extraordinary remains left in Baja California by primitive man. Wall paintings in one of the caves discovered by Gardner in an isolated canyon depicted hunters who, in comparison with the animals in the painting, must have been around nine feet tall; he is still speculating on the possibility that a family of phenomenally tall brothers on a remote ranch a couple of hundred miles away from the cave might have descended from the same tribe that executed the murals.

The caves and rock paintings at a site called San Borjita had been visited by several explorers, but the largest of the nine new finds, called Gardner Gave, contains 136 figures of human beings and animals, which Gardner has described in detail in his book The Hidden Heart of Baja. A discovery of such importance could constitute a career for many a professional, but Gardner’s private satisfaction, one suspects, comes from viewing it as the outcome of long and arduous detective work: piecing together legends, gossip, superstitions, and fragments of fact gleaned in an almost uninhabited region, deciding where to concentrate the search, and finally locating the cave by helicopter and coming down for an on-the-spot recording of its wonders.

For the present, while Perry Mason is not in production, Gardner still tries to find time for all that he would like to do before getting into the Donald Lam-Bertha Cool involvement. No one who knows him expects him to slack off into anything like leisure, but new books, travels, business affairs, and the obligations of hospitality inherent in his work all keep him hustling from one day to the next,

A Chinese told Gardner years ago that he had undoubtedly been a Chinese in an earlier incarnation. The idea appealed to Gardner, giving him an abiding interest in the subject of reincarnation, and he often muses on what this person or that might have been in a previous life. This once led a friend, who was enjoying the pleasures of the Rancho del Paisano, to ask what he would like to be in his next reincarnation.

Gardner meditated the question with lawyerlike deliberation. “I think I’d like to be,” he replied wistfully, “a guest at the Erle Stanley Gardner ranch.”