Эрл Стэнли Гарднер: Жизнь и творчество американского писателя и юриста

American writer and lawyer (1889–1970)

Erle Stanley Gardner (July 17, 1889 – March 11, 1970) was an American author and lawyer, best known for the Perry Mason series of legal detective stories, but he wrote numerous other novels and shorter pieces and also a series of nonfiction books, mostly narrations of his travels through Baja California and other regions in Mexico. The best selling American author of the 20th century at the time of his death, Gardner also published under numerous pseudonyms, including A. A. Fair, Carl Franklin Ruth, Carleton Kendrake, Charles M. Green, Charles J. Kenny, Edward Leaming, Grant Holiday, Kyle Corning, Les Tillray, Robert Parr, Stephen Caldwell, and once as the Perry Mason character Della Street ("The Case of the Suspect Sweethearts"). Three stories were published as Anonymous ("A Fair Trial", "Part Music and Part Tears", and "You Can't Run Away from Yourself" aka "The Jazz Baby").

Gardner was born in Malden, Massachusetts, the son of Grace Adelma (Waugh) and Charles Walter Gardner. Gardner graduated from Palo Alto High School in California in 1909 and enrolled at Valparaiso University School of Law in Indiana. He was suspended after approximately one month when his interest in boxing became a distraction. He returned to California, pursued his legal education on his own, and passed the California State Bar examination in 1911. was the first of several organizations that advocate for the wrongly convicted, which among others include The Innocence Project, Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, and Centurion. In 1912, Gardner wed Natalie Frances Talbert. They had a daughter, Grace. where he remained until the publication of his first Perry Mason novel in 1933. Gardner enjoyed litigation and the development of trial strategy but was otherwise bored by legal practice. In his spare time, he began writing for pulp magazines. His first story, The Police in the House, was published in June 1921 in Breezy magazine. He created many series characters for the pulps, including the ingenious Lester Leith, a parody of the "gentleman thief" in the tradition of A. J. Raffles; and Ken Corning, crusading lawyer, crime sleuth, and archetype for his most successful creation, Perry Mason.

The Perry Mason character was inspired by Earl Rogers, a trial attorney who appeared in 77 murder trials but lost only three. He was recognized for the extensive use of demonstratives, e. g., visuals, charts and diagrams, during trial before it became common practice. Rogers is famous for his defense of, and attorney client disagreement with, Clarence Darrow, a fellow attorney who was charged with attempted jury bribery in 1912. While the Perry Mason novels seldom delved deeply into characters' lives, the novels were rich in plot detail which was reality based and drawn from his own experience. In his early years writing for the pulp magazine market, Gardner set himself a quota of 1,200,000 words a year. Much of the first Perry Mason novel,The Case of the Velvet Claws, published in 1933, is set at the historic Pierpont Inn near Gardner's old law office in Ventura, California. Gardner made an uncredited appearance as a judge in "The Case of the Final Fade Out" (1966), the last episode of the series.

Beginning in 1937 with the novel The D. A. Calls It Murder, Gardner wrote a companion series reversing the format of the Mason books. The protagonist was the resolute district attorney Doug Selby, battling in court against devious attorney Alphonse Baker Carr. Prosecutor Selby is portrayed as a courageous and imaginative crime solver; his antagonist Carr is a wily shyster whose clients are invariably "as guilty as hell." In 1939, under the pen name A. A. Fair, Gardner launched a series of novels about the private detective firm Cool and Lam. After World War II Gardner also published a few short stories for the "glossies" (magazines) such as Collier's, Sports Afield, and Look, but most of his postwar magazine contributions were nonfiction articles on travel, Western history, and forensic science. Gardner's readership was a broad and international one, including the English novelist Evelyn Waugh, who in 1949 called Gardner the best living American writer. He also created characters for various radio programs, including Christopher London (1950), starring Glenn Ford, and A Life in Your Hands (1949–1952).

Gardner had a lifelong fascination with Baja California and wrote a series of nonfiction travel accounts describing his extensive explorations of the peninsula by boat, truck, airplane, and helicopter. Gardner devoted thousands of hours to the Court of Last Resort, in collaboration with his many friends in the forensic, legal, and investigative communities. The project sought to review and, when appropriate, reverse miscarriages of justice against criminal defendants who had been convicted because of poor legal representation, abuse, misinterpretation of forensic evidence, or careless or malicious actions of police or prosecutors. The resulting 1952 book earned Gardner his only Edgar Award, in the Best Fact Crime category, and was later made into a TV series, The Court of Last Resort.

In 1912, Gardner wed Natalie Frances Talbert (July 16, 1885 – February 26, 1968). Their only child, Natalie Grace Gardner (née Walter; May 19, 1902 – December 5, 2002), the daughter of Ida Mary Elizabeth Walter (née Itrich; December 24, 1880 – March 3, 1961). Through his daughter, Gardner had two grandchildren: Valerie Joan Naso (née McKittrick; August 19, 1941 – November 12, 2007) and Alan G. McKittrick. Gardner's widow died in 2002, aged 100, in San Diego. She was a member of Jehovah's Witnesses. She was survived by her brother, Norman Walter.

Gardner died of cancer, diagnosed in the late 1960s, on March 11, 1970, at his ranch in Temecula. At the time of his death, he was the best selling American writer of the 20th century. The ranch, known as Rancho del Paisano at the time, was sold after his death, then resold in 2001 to the Pechanga Indians, renamed Great Oak Ranch, and eventually absorbed into the Pechanga reservation. The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin holds Gardner's manuscripts, art collection, and personal effects. From 1972 to 2010, the Ransom Center featured a full scale reproduction of Gardner's study that displayed original furnishings, personal memorabilia, and artifacts. The space and a companion exhibition were dismantled, but a panoramic view of the study is available online. In 2003, a new school in the Temecula Valley Unified School District was named Erle Stanley Gardner Middle School. In December 2016, Hard Case Crime published The Knife Slipped, a Bertha Cool–Donald Lam mystery, which had been lost for 75 years. Written in 1939 as the second entry in the Cool and Lam series, the book was rejected at the time by Gardner's publisher. Published for the first time in 2016 as a trade paperback and ebook, the work garnered respectful reviews. In 2017, Hard Case Crime followed the publication of The Knife Slipped with a reissued edition of Turn On the Heat, the book Gardner wrote to replace The Knife Slipped, and published a new edition of The Count of Nine in October 2018.

An unspecified article that Gardner wrote for True magazine is referred to by William S. Burroughs in his 1959 novel, Naked Lunch. Gardner's name is well known among avid crossword puzzle solvers, because his first name contains an unusual series of common letters, starting and ending with the most common letter of the English alphabet, and because few other famous people have that name. As of January 2012, he is noted for having the highest ratio (5.31) of mentions in the New York Times crossword puzzle to mentions in the rest of the newspaper among all other people since 1993. In 2001, Huell Howser Productions, in association with KCET, Los Angeles, featured Gardner's Temecula Rancho del Paisano in California's Gold. The 30 minute program is available as a VHS videorecording.