July 17, 1889—Erle Stanley Gardner, a colorful attorney who created the most famous fictional lawyer-detective of all time, Perry Mason, was born in Malden, Mass.Before writing proved so lucrative that he turned to it full-time in the 1930s, Gardner could be seen in the California communities where he lived and worked walking to court in his white Panama hat, pulling out his white cigarette holder, contemplating what he could do to defend his client.
Like Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor and Senator Al Franken, I grew up watching Perry Mason on TV (in my case, syndicated repeats rather than first-run episodes). I even read a couple of the novels turned out by the astonishingly prolific Gardner.
Gardner resembled Agatha Christie more than, say, P.D. James or Raymond Chandler in that he spent more time on plot and the jigsaw-puzzle mechanisms of the mystery genre than on character, atmosphere or style. The latter niceties would have interfered with the deadlines he set to produce his 82 Perry Mason novels, not to mention even more produced under the pseudonyms A.A. Fair, Carleton Kendrake, and Charles J. Kenny.
The Perry Mason series was a brand, even more so than the legal bestsellers turned out these days by John Grisham. In other words, you knew what you were going to get with a Perry Mason mystery, starting with the title, inevitably beginning, “The Case of the…” (Taking a page from my friend Pat, I might title a hypothetical one involving me as “The Case of the Rowdy Librarian.” “The Case of the Broke Blogger” might do if the first one’s taken.)
Mason’s services would be secured by a client who looked guilty as sin but who manages to convince the attorney that she’s innocent. (An inordinate number of these cases involved nubile women. Did that happen to have anything to do with Mason’s interest in the case?)
A few hundred pages later, having sorted through a whole set of other suspects, Mason exposes the real killer through a withering courtroom interrogation, often enlivened by what his opponent, hapless D.A. Hamilton Burger, always sputtered were “tricks.” A number of these stunts were based on Gardner’s own unorthodox tactics as an attorney in California from 1911 to 1933. (Once, after a cop had identified an Asian-American client in a case, he induced dozens of Chinese merchants to exchange identities, thereby flummoxing the cocksure flatfoot.)
Justice was served. Ah, sweet fantasy!
In the early 1970s, I rarely missed the 9 pm reruns of the show that run on Channel 11 in the New York area. All that time, young whelp that I was, I was never bothered by any of the following questions that occurred to older, more jaded minds:
* Did Perry ever lose? (Answer: As Senator Franken pointed out, he did—once, in “The Case of the Deadly Verdict”—but won on appeal.)
* How could Burger and Inspector Tragg be wrong so often?
* If these two men blundered so frequently, why didn’t The New York Times call for their ouster for a) incompetence, and b) routine miscarriages of justice against the least deserving in society?
* Mason and secretary Della Street sent a lot of knowing glances in each other’s directions. Neither seemed to have a significant other outside the office. Were they—gasp!—lovers? (Answer: Not in real life, though Raymond Burr and Barbara Hale were good and loyal friends. Burr’s statements to reporters about his “tragic” deceased wife and son—too “painful” for him to discuss—hid the fact that he was gay.)
If you wanted to know how the law really worked, you were probably better off in the Sixties watching the ’60 series, The Defenders, starring E.G. Marshall and Robert Reed as father-son attorneys who took on clients who might not be murderers but who might be regarded with disdain but sizable sections of the public then, including blacklist victims and abortionists.
You’d have to watch the long-forgotten, shamefully neglected Judd Hirsch 1974 TV movie, The Law, or Law and Order in the last two decades to find shows that tackled the moral compromises inherent in the American justice system.
But Perry Mason (for which Gardner possessed script approval) certainly endeared itself to millions over the years, for the following reasons involving aesthetics and justice:
* Filmed in black and white, it was particularly effective in night scenes that always preceded murders—making it a fine TV answer to film noir.
* At a time when women couldn’t exert creative power anywhere behind the camera, Gail Patrick Jackson—a brunette Hollywood actress who had once specialized in deliciously sharp-tongued banter in films like My Favorite Wife—co-produced the series. A post from a marvelous blog I found, “Hollywood Dreamland,” relates that it was her idea to cast Burr, Hale, and William Tallman—and that her friendship with Gardner was instrumental in getting the series made at all.
But Perry Mason (for which Gardner possessed script approval) certainly endeared itself to millions over the years, for the following reasons involving aesthetics and justice:
* Filmed in black and white, it was particularly effective in night scenes that always preceded murders—making it a fine TV answer to film noir.
* At a time when women couldn’t exert creative power anywhere behind the camera, Gail Patrick Jackson—a brunette Hollywood actress who had once specialized in deliciously sharp-tongued banter in films like My Favorite Wife—co-produced the series. A post from a marvelous blog I found, “Hollywood Dreamland,” relates that it was her idea to cast Burr, Hale, and William Tallman—and that her friendship with Gardner was instrumental in getting the series made at all.
* It provided employment to up-and-coming young actors, such as Burt Reynolds, James Coburn, Barbara Bain of Mission: Impossible, and Robert Redford.
* It reminded Americans that they had rights that could not be infringed by the police, even before the Supreme Court set these out, in no uncertain terms, in Gideon v. Wainwright (1963) and Miranda v. Arizona (1966)
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