January 18

Following is a January 18, 1960 article courtesy of Newsweek Magazine. The office diagram below was patterned after Erle's old Downtown Ventura, California bank building office, across the street from The Erle Stanley Gardner Museum. Many think that Los Angeles provided the model for the buildings and streets. Not so. Trying to find a street mentioned in a Mason story can be a futile effort. Streets and locations mentioned in the Mason books can be found or referenced to our Downtown Ventura streets however. Our beautiful Courthouse (Gardner City Hall /Ventura City Hall), of which I am very partial, is just "up the hill" as mentioned in the Mason books. Erle practiced law there, and we will be adding more information. (Click on the "Downtown Tour" link above to get a feel of the layout.)

What kind of man is Perry Mason? A great one, sure. But what, for example, does he really look like? In the movies, when played by Warren William, he was suave, sleek-haired, and thinly mustached: Seen in his present television image, he is hefty, jowly, and slightly pop-eyed.

In 61 novels, Erle Stanley Gardner never has gotten around to telling the readers which image to believe. Even Perry's law offices have fared better than their tenant. Although his headquarters are skimpily described, it is possible, by close research, to extract enough details from the books to make a floor plan (see above). But to make a face plan for Perry is something else again.

Befuddling: Gardner has stated that he left Perry featureless for a reason: The he-reader is supposed to graft his own face onto the blank; the she-reader, the face of her ideal. (Another reason could be that it seldom enters Gardner's head to describe anything.) To further befuddle the fan, Gardner has quarreled with the Perry portrait offered by the movies. He still speaks with anger of the first, in "The Case of the Howling Dog" (1934), which outraged the author by showing his hero as a drunk. (Gardner drinks lightly, smokes never.) Soured on Hollywood, Gardner turned his back at first when television came along and offered him a round $1 million for video rights. Now he says he finds the current Perry show (produced by his old friends, ex-actress Gail Patrick and Cornwell Jackson, her husband) thoroughly to his taste. Of Raymond Burr, he says: "On TV, he is Perry Mason."

Perry as a character— what there is of him—is clearly based on Gardner; even the dim physical impression supports this. Almost nobody recognizes the world s favorite author when he goes out. "I' m a nondescript son-of-a-gun," he says. "If I saw myself coming down the street, I d say ‘there s a nondescript character' ." Perry's creed as a professional man sounds much like the one that governed Gardner, the lawyer, some 45 years ago when he was successfully defending virtually the whole Chinese tenderloin district of Oxnard, Calif. Perry said in "The Case of the Velvet Claws": "I'm a lawyer. I take people who are in trouble, and I try to get them out of trouble. I'm only presenting the defendant's side . . . It s sort of an obsession with me to do the best I can for a client. My clients aren't blameless. Many of them are crooks. Probably a lot of them are guilty. That's not for me to determine. That's for the jury to determine."

No Woo: Perry will not take a case he shuns cases which are dull. His personal life is decidedly tame, and his relations with his secretary, Della Street, the only woman in his life, are decorous to a degree which irks some of his fans. During the war, servicemen kept writing Gardner's publisher demanding that Perry wake up and pitch some really adequate woo at Della. Gardner, although he wrote during the war years in a way that should have won him a Navy "E" for production, never did comply with this demand. The best they got, says Mrs. Helen B. King, Gardner's editor at William Morrow—and one of the few readers who know the complete works— was an embrace for Della every ten books or so and some such endearment as, ‘Good work, old girl ."