Quote of the Day (Erle Stanley Gardner, With a Most Un-Perry Mason-Like Character)

“I’m Ed Jenkins, known from end one of the country to the other as ‘the phantom crook,’ and proud of it too. I’m not a second-story bird or a yeggman. I sit tight, watching the game and asking nothing but to let alone. They won’t leave me alone, though. Crooked politicians, ham detectives, cheap crooks, local bosses of the tenderloin, all of ‘em tie into me at times, thinking I can’t raise a how. By the time the smoke blows away, I’m usually sitting somewhere near the top of the heap, a little richer in money, and a little farther removed from any possible police protection. The cops don’t figure they’re hired to protect me. They think it’s up to them to pinch me….Oh, well, it’s all in a lifetime.”—American crime-fiction writer Erle Stanley Gardner (1889-1970), “Three O’Clock in the Morning,” originally published in Black Mask Magazine, July 1925, reprinted in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, November/December 2023 

Well, I could have written about Erle Stanley Gardner because today is the 136^th anniversary of his birth (see my blog post from 16 years ago).

But I have been meaning to write about him for a while, because 100 years ago this month, his short story “Three O’Clock in the Morning” was published in the pulp magazine Black Mask.

When I read the reprint of this tale in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, I was struck by its low-life lingo, a far cry from the later seasons of the much-loved TV series adaptation of his Perry Mason mysteries. 

The tone was closer to the show in its first few seasons, when Gardner’s great lawyer-detective was ready to pull a stunt so unorthodox that it invariably left prosecutor Hamilton Burger sputtering about “tricks,” and  the extensive location shooting and shadowy night-time scenes suggested a TV counterpart to film noir.

The short story also made me think a bit more about the limited-series reboot of the attorney starring Matthew Rhys that HBO pulled the plug on after only two seasons.

While this more recent version viewed early 20^th-century characters through 21st-century eyes, in ways that often diverged dramatically from how Gardner conceived Perry, devoted secretary Della Street, and private detective Paul Drake, it did capture something fundamental about the era when this amazingly prolific author first began writing.

At this time, Prohibition unwittingly unleashed dark forces in which the lines between "good"  ("the cops") and evil ("Crooked politicians, ham detectives, cheap crooks, local bosses of the tenderloin") became far more tenuous.

Reading this story made me wonder how much of it was based on scruffy types whom Gardner, still maintaining his legal practice at this point, might have met, versus how much “Ed Jenkins” was meant to meet the expectations of the “hard-boiled” crime market that Black Mask helped create by publishing Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Cornell Woolrich, among others?

To me, this just goes to show how, over a long career, a writer can evolve, even when trying to fit into the conventions of genre fiction, as Gardner was clearly trying to do.