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ERLE STANLEY GARDNER by William F. Nolan
Page Number Three In Erie Stanley Gardner's Ventura, by Richard L. Senate, Gardner's daughter, Grace, recalled their life together in these years: "[My father] believed in exercise and began each day with an outdoor workout. . . . Noon was the main meal of the day and he always came home for lunch. [We ate] good, wholesome food (p. 51). Despite his insistence on "good, wholesome food, Gardner was also a fervent meat-and-potatoes man. As Senate recalled: "When Mason wins a tough case, he and his staff go out ~or a thick steak (medium rare), garden salad and a baked potato. When Gardner won a case, he would go to Ventura's Pierpont Inn and enjoy a thick steak (medium rare), a garden salad and a baked potato (p. 3). Concerning his courtroom performances, the New York Times reported that Gardner radiated self-confidence. . . his voice was resonant... [and] his way with a hostile witness was plain wizardry. . . . In behalf of his clients, he nosed about in forgotten statutes... to find just the right precedents ... [and] at the proper dramatic moment he would spring the precedent on judge and jury. No one who had known him as a lawyer ever had to look far. . . to find where Perry Mason came from. (Hughes, pp. 62-63) In 1921, however, Gardner was still a dozen years away from the creation of his legendary character; Mason would have to wait in line behind a host of other fictional heroes. However, Gardner did break into print that year with a fifteen-dollar sale to the rough-edged pulp magazine Breezy Stories. "Nellie's Naughty Nighty, printed in the August 1921 issue, so upset his conservative mother that she refused to read a word beyond the title. How could a good Methodist boy end up in such a shocking publication? Pulp Fiction Gardner needed additional income to supplement what he was earning as a lawyer and attempted to start a mail-order law course. When it failed, he turned to pulp writing. The cheap-paper pulp magazines had begun to flourish during the 1920s and grew to become a huge open market for writers over the next two decades. Gardner was determined to tap into this burgeoning market. There was one big catch. His first sale had been a fluke, since he knew absolutely nothing about the techniques of professional writing. Over the course of the following two years his manuscripts were consistently rejected. Out they would go, and back they would come. This did not surprise or discourage him. "I wrote the worst stories that ever hit New York, he later admitted (Hughes, p. 77). "My stories were terrible.. . . I didn't know how to plot [and] I had no natural aptitude as a writer (Nolan, p. 96)." Gardner refused to give up. By 1923 he was using the pen name Charles M. Green on all of his fiction, and it was under this appropriate byline that he had mailed a luridly melodramatic novelette, "The Shrieking Skeleton," to Black Mask magazine. The circulation manager, Phil Cody, read it and sent a blistering in-house note to the editor, George Sutton: "This story gives me a pain in the neck . . . it's pretty near the last word in childishness, and the plot has whiskers like unto Spanish moss on an old oak. Cody went on to say that the characters "talked like a dictionary" and that the story was "puerile, trite, obvious, and unnatural (Fugate, p. 44)." Cody added several other strong negative comments, and the manuscript was quickly returned to Green. By mistake, Cody's note was included with the story. To Gardner, it was a welcome revelation. Up to that time he had never received any editorial criticism. Using Cody's rejection note as a guide, he rewrote the entire manuscript page by page, word for word. It took three long nights of typing to finish the revision. Then he mailed it back to the magazine. Sutton was so embarrassed by the whole incident that he bought the story... [for] a hundred and sixty dollars. That did it. I was launched on a literary career (Hughes, p. 79). |