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ERLE STANLEY GARDNER by William F. Nolan
Page Number Nine If Gardner thought it important, he would come down to the station and make a call from the telephone there (Tuska, p. 102). Gardner was far too restless to settle in a single location, and during the years he owned the ranch in Temecula he also traveled to a variety of other "hideouts" at scattered locations: to Paradise Camp in the timber country of northern California, to a desert retreat in Yucca Valley, to a house in Palm Springs, to another in Oceanside, to a cabin at Shasta Lake north of the San Francisco Bay, to a date ranch outside Indio, to a house in Portland, Oregon-and to a place he called "Camp Hood," on the Hood Canal in Washington State. Where he went, his "girls" went with him to handle his continuous stream of dictation. Their number increased as he built his mountain of prose, and he eventually employed six full-time secretaries. He came to depend on them as part of his essential team. Writing, to Gardner, remained an exacting business. Far from the popular notion that he casually whipped out his novels, improvising each scene out of thin air at his Dictaphone, he actually spent many hours on each of them. Before beginning dictation, he worked out all of his plots in longhand with painstaking care in a variety of notebooks over a period of days or weeks. He would never start to dictate until every plot problem had been solved, every character fully delineated-and with the final courtroom fireworks laid out in detail. Letters to Thayer Hobson, Gardner's publisher and longtime friend, attest to the hard work he put into each book. Hobson pointed out that Gardner had a great appreciation for his readers and that he did not ever want to let them down. He did not write for a publisher; he wrote for the people. Gardner loved animals, and the ranch at Temeeula gave him the opportunity to fulfill his bigheartedness. He began by taking in a number of stray dogs (one neighbor called the place "dog heaven' ) and added horses, a baby coyote, a chipmunk-and even a pet mouse. He delighted in the fact that wild birds would wing down to eat from his hand. Nature was sacred to Gardner. Everything living, including the land and the rocks and the trees, were interchangeable to him, all part of a mysterious universe. By September of 1937, Gardner's career had taken another upward turn when The Saturday Evening Post (a market he had been courting for years) serialized his eleventh Mason novel, The Case of the Lame Canary. (Over the next two and a half decades the Post serialized another fifteen Mason stories.) A second major slick, Country Gentleman, contacted Gardner, asking him to come up with a new series character that they could feature in their pages. He responded by creating the small-town district attorney Doug Selby (who appeared outside the pages of Country Gentleman in nine books over the next twelve years). In writing about Selby, Gardner crafted a fictionalized projection of himself, reflecting his early Oxnard days.
Late Writings and Multimedia Success
Despite the money earned from his pulp and slick sales (and from the Mason novels), Gardner was low on funds by the fall of 1938. His annual cost-of-living expenses had climbed to thirty thousand dollars, and he was forced to ask his publisher for an advance against future royalties. In an effort to provide additional income, he decided to create a new series under a pen name; he chose A. A. Fair. The series featured the adventures of an oddball pair of private investigators, Bertha Cool and Donald Lam. |