{"id":352,"date":"1995-08-01T12:00:35","date_gmt":"1995-08-01T16:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/eacottdesign.com\/combo\/?p=352"},"modified":"2016-01-30T13:22:05","modified_gmt":"2016-01-30T18:22:05","slug":"steve-englehart-witness-for-the-defense","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/eacottdesign.com\/combo\/steve-englehart-witness-for-the-defense\/","title":{"rendered":"Steve Englehart, witness for the defense"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Steve Englehart \u2013 My choice would have to be Erle Stanley Gardner\u2019s Perry Mason<\/strong> books\u2014or at least the \ufb01rst 80 of them. (Gard\u00adner wrote 84, but he was slowing down at the end.) They don\u2019t aspire to be great literature, but they do aspire to be\u2014and succeed at being\u2014highly entertaining. If I tell you there\u2019s 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\u2019s feats of deduction: There\u2019s no overt violence.<\/p>\n

I devoured these books as a kid, surely starting at around age 9 with their serializations in the old Satur\u00adday Evening Post. With Gardner turning out three a year, featuring ongoing characters in\u00advolved in dangerous tales, they had all the things we love about comics\u2014but being novels, and excellent mysteries, they were far more complex. They revolve around Mason, Los Angeles\u2019 leading attorney; his loyal secretary and aide de camp, Della Street; and the droll private detective Mason employs, Paul Drake. Mason\u2019s opponents are, at \ufb01rst, 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\u2019 essence, but the \u201creal\u201d Mason was more dynamic and in\u00advolved, often pushing the law to its limits\u2014and sometimes beyond\u2014to save his clients\u2019 lives.<\/p>\n

Gard\u00adner was a lawyer, apparently one just as re\u00adsourceful 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 al\u00adready successful as a writer when he created Mason in The Case of the Velvet Claws<\/em> in 1933. And even after Mason made him \ufb01nancially 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 Gard\u00adner.<\/p>\n

But the \ufb01nal 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 ex\u00adten\u00added camping trips into the wilderness, accompanied by a secretary or three. Every morning he would get up and dictate\u2014yes, dictate\u2014several chapters of his current story, then head off on a hike in the afternoon. In the even\u00adings he\u2019d sit beside a camp\ufb01re and amuse all his guests, then sleep out under the stars, all the while letting his subconscious develop the story he\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n

Steve Englehart<\/strong> must have learned something from Erle Stanley Gardner, since Steve has created more hits than any other writer in comic book history. He\u2019s been writing comics for nearly 25 years, with notable runs on Marvel\u2019s <\/em>The Avengers and <\/em>Cap\u00adtain America. Currently he is writing <\/em>The Night Man and <\/em>The Strangers for Malibu.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Steve Englehart \u2013 My choice would have to be Erle Stanley Gardner\u2019s Perry Mason books\u2014or at least the \ufb01rst 80 of them. (Gard\u00adner wrote 84, but he was slowing down at the end.) They don\u2019t aspire to be great literature, but they do aspire to be\u2014and succeed at being\u2014highly entertaining. If I tell you there\u2019s 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\u2019s feats of deduction: There\u2019s no overt violence. I devoured these books as a kid, surely starting at around age 9 with their serializations in the old Satur\u00adday Evening Post. With Gardner turning out three a year, featuring ongoing characters in\u00advolved in dangerous tales, they had all the things we love about comics\u2014but being novels, and excellent mysteries, they were far more complex. They revolve around Mason, Los Angeles\u2019 leading attorney; his loyal secretary and aide de camp, Della Street; and the droll private detective Mason employs, Paul Drake. Mason\u2019s opponents are, at \ufb01rst, 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\u2019 essence, but the \u201creal\u201d Mason was more dynamic and in\u00advolved, often pushing the law to its limits\u2014and sometimes beyond\u2014to save his clients\u2019 lives. Gard\u00adner was a lawyer, apparently one just as re\u00adsourceful 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 al\u00adready successful as a writer when he created Mason in The Case of the Velvet Claws in 1933. And even after Mason made him \ufb01nancially 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 Gard\u00adner. But the \ufb01nal 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 ex\u00adten\u00added camping trips into the wilderness, accompanied by a secretary or three. Every morning he would get up and dictate\u2014yes, dictate\u2014several chapters of his current story, then head off on a hike in the afternoon. In the even\u00adings he\u2019d sit beside a camp\ufb01re and amuse all his guests, then sleep out under the stars, all the while letting his subconscious develop the story he\u2019d 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\u2019s been writing comics for nearly 25 years, with notable runs on Marvel\u2019s The Avengers and Cap\u00adtain America. Currently he is writing The Night Man and The Strangers for Malibu.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":353,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[40,38,39],"class_list":["post-352","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-recommended-reading","tag-august-1995","tag-issue-7","tag-steve-englehart"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/eacottdesign.com\/combo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/eacottdesign.com\/combo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/eacottdesign.com\/combo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eacottdesign.com\/combo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eacottdesign.com\/combo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=352"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/eacottdesign.com\/combo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":368,"href":"http:\/\/eacottdesign.com\/combo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352\/revisions\/368"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eacottdesign.com\/combo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/eacottdesign.com\/combo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eacottdesign.com\/combo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eacottdesign.com\/combo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}