Steve Englehart, witness for the defense
By Steve Englehart – My choice would have to be Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason books—or at least the first 80 of them. (Gardner wrote 84, but he was slowing down at the end.) They don’t aspire to be great literature, but they do aspire to be—and succeed at being—highly entertaining. If I tell you there’s at least one murder, and often more, in each book, the parents among you may wonder if comics really do rot brains, but murders to Gardner were just off-screen pegs on which to hang Mason’s feats of deduction: There’s no overt violence.
I devoured these books as a kid, surely starting at around age 9 with their serializations in the old Saturday Evening Post. With Gardner turning out three a year, featuring ongoing characters involved in dangerous tales, they had all the things we love about comics—but being novels, and excellent mysteries, they were far more complex. They revolve around Mason, Los Angeles’ leading attorney; his loyal secretary and aide de camp, Della Street; and the droll private detective Mason employs, Paul Drake. Mason’s opponents are, at first, the none-too-bright Sgt. Holcomb, and later the far more cunning Lt. Tragg. The district attorneys changed regularly until the TV series hit and Hamilton Burger settled into a regular role. TV caught a lot of the books’ essence, but the “real” Mason was more dynamic and involved, often pushing the law to its limits—and sometimes beyond—to save his clients’ lives.
Gardner was a lawyer, apparently one just as resourceful as Perry Mason, but after spending the day defending his clients, he would go home and pound out pulp stories at night for a variety of continuing characters. He was already successful as a writer when he created Mason in The Case of the Velvet Claws in 1933. And even after Mason made him financially independent, he continued to write other series (the private-eye duo of Donald Lam and Bertha Cool being the main one). In addition, he undertook to apply his legal skill and his money to helping actual people, by forming The Court of Last Resort, a group devoted to rectifying miscarriages of justice. Perry Mason would have done that, and Perry Mason was Erle Stanley Gardner.
But the final reason I recommend these books is the way Gardner did his writing. He loved the great outdoors, and unlike most writers, he got out into it. As soon as his sales allowed him to do so, he would take extended camping trips into the wilderness, accompanied by a secretary or three. Every morning he would get up and dictate—yes, dictate—several chapters of his current story, then head off on a hike in the afternoon. In the evenings he’d sit beside a campfire and amuse all his guests, then sleep out under the stars, all the while letting his subconscious develop the story he’d dictate the next morning. In short, he lived the life all writers want, which makes him an inspiration to anyone who thinks words might be his or her own life.
Steve Englehart must have learned something from Erle Stanley Gardner, since Steve has created more hits than any other writer in comic book history. He’s been writing comics for nearly 25 years, with notable runs on Marvel’s The Avengers and Captain America. Currently he is writing The Night Man and The Strangers for Malibu.
