New mural on the bike path honors the work of Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of Perry Mason

By Joy Pearson

“I think crime pays. It keeps coming back, like a bad penny.”  Erle Stanley Gardner  

As you bicycle, run, or walk along the Bike to the Sea bike path, you’re in for a surprise. A new mural celebrating the world-famous Perry Mason author, Malden native-born Erle Stanley Gardner, has been added to two existing murals on the trail near the Main Street intersection. The new mural was unveiled by Malden Arts on May 19 in a celebration of both the mural and the extraordinary person it honors.

Malden Arts was formed in 2006 and has made public art its focus since 2016. Board member Sharon Santillo said, “public art is truly uplifting for all in the community.” The group commissioned a series of murals throughout the city which feature famous artists and other notable figures who hail from Malden. Past murals have celebrated the work of Ed Emberley, Norman Greenbaum, Frank Stella, Keith Knight and the five Malden Wonder Women.

To commission the new mural, Santillo contacted former Malden firefighter Fred Seager, a local artist and co-founder of the Malden Sketch Group in 1995, which is still operating today. Over the years, Seager has painted a series of murals inside Malden’s district firehouses. Seager liked the idea of doing a mural of Gardner and said, “I started looking at some Perry Mason book covers” to add “colorful fun along the bike path.”  The City of Malden provided funding.

In case you wonder who Erle Stanley Gardner was, he is best known as the creator of Perry Mason, a fictional criminal defense lawyer featured in the early television series of the same name. Dorothy B Hughes, his biographer, said Gardner was “one of the wealthiest mystery writers and most widely-read authors of his time.” His life’s work, as champion of the underdog, also had a significant impact on the U.S. criminal justice system.

Erle Stanley Gardner was born in 1889, in Malden, Massachusetts. At age 10, he and his family moved west following his father’s profession of mining engineering. Gardner’s schooling was sporadic. As he said, he “severed academic connections with high school and college” -i.e., he was suspended several times from high school, stopped going, and went to work in a law office until his father sent him to Palo Alto High School, from which he graduated in 1909. He was then sent to Valparaiso University in Indiana for law school but escaped after four weeks before being arrested for pranks and for suing his professor.

Back in California, based on his quite unorthodox informal legal training, he took the bar examination at age 21 and passed. He became a law clerk and hung out his own shingle by agreeing to take over petty work from the constitutional lawyer who was happy for him to do so. However, he said, “The more successful I became as an attorney, the more I was called on to be in one place. I found out that wasn’t what I wanted.”

In the burly and wicked town of Oxnard, California, police wanted to reimburse themselves the $2,000 they had paid private detectives to clean up the city. They did this by arresting and charging 21 Chinese folks $10 each for gambling. Gardner outmaneuvered the police and deviously defended these victims of police discrimination. As such, he became well-loved by the Chinese people who lived there. He later broke up a courtroom into laughter with a double jeopardy plea between the judge and the city attorney.

Soon cases poured in for him. Gardner said,” I realize now that I have annoyed many, many people as I went through life.” Nevertheless, his work in Ventura County lasted some 20 years.

Gardner started writing seriously in 1921. He said frequently, “I want it understood that I have no natural aptitude as a writer…I couldn’t construct what I wanted to write…It was like trying to sign my name with my left hand.”

He decided to try writing for the new pulp fiction field in 1923, under the pen name Charles M Green. Rejection after rejection came in, but he kept writing. After he had been up most of three nights, he sent a rejected story back with revisions, thanking the editor for including the reader’s criticism, which had been inadvertently included and unkind. That story launched his literary career.

Hughes says that Gardner nightly pounded out a novelette every third day while working in a very busy law office daily. He used about a dozen pen names, and wrote about 15 series, becoming one of the pulp fiction magazine Black Mask’s most popular contributors.

By 1932, after Gardner acquired a dictating machine and a series of secretaries, all of whom called him “Uncle Erle,” he worked less and less at law. Because he wanted solitude when he wrote, after lawyering until 11 P.M., he retreated to his self-made ‘camp wagon,’ a fully provisioned half-ton truck with compound transmission and oversized tires, to furiously write stories. In 1933, when his first Perry Mason novel was published, he was still writing pulp fiction. He called himself a fiction factory of one.

After he stopped lawyering in 1933, Gardner energetically kept writing. A Perry Mason radio drama aired for 12 years, from 1943 to 1955, and Gardner was able to get many of the Mason novels serialized in the Saturday Evening Post.

When the new broadcast medium of television captured Gardner’s interest, he discontinued the radio shows. Gardner himself personally insisted on casting the less experienced Raymond Burr as Perry Mason. Between 1957 and 1966, the Perry Mason series was the most popular program on television. In all, Gardner wrote more than 600 pulp fiction novelettes and stories under 11 different names so as not to interfere with his simultaneously written Perry Mason stories. He wrote 82 Perry Mason stories, the last being published posthumously, in 1973.

As early as 1936, he sold his Hollywood house and traveled with friends and secretaries for more than a year with up to four trailers. In his travels, he (“my dog Rip, actually”) discovered a site in Temecula, California, later to become his home for the rest of his life. He purchased 3,000 acres and built a knotty pine cabin. Over the years, his extensive network of friends not only came to visit, travel, hunt and fish in his beloved Baja California, but came to live at Rancho Del Paisano in cabins he built for them, even for their families and relatives. He wrote seven books about his travels in Baja California.

In 1946, because of an article written about Gardner in the Saturday Evening Post, Gardner became known as a champion of the underdog. When he was given a script from a young Los Angeles lawyer about a man facing a pending death penalty, Gardner got involved, agreeing that California was going to execute an innocent man. Through quick but careful work, Gardner got the man a reprieve and, later, life imprisonment, pending another investigation. In due time, Hughes says, the man was found innocent.

For his work for the wrongly accused, Gardner sought the help of the owner of Argosy, a pulp fiction magazine, “to get readers interested in the case of [criminal] justice.” He used his fame and wealth to form what he called, “The Court of Last Resort,” a board consisting of experts in criminal investigation. His team prevented dozens of innocent people from suffering executions and long prison terms. Cases were featured in Argosy and gained a lot of attention. Gardner had speaking dates before law organizations and law enforcement officials and received honors in the legal field. According to Hughes, “Perhaps nothing in his entire career meant as much to Gardner as the Court [of Last Resort].” His 1952 book, The Court of Last Resort, took the reader along with him by participating in the investigation as they read.

Gardner and others concluded that the state of criminal justice in the United States was ‘shocking’. The publicity he gave to cases made important changes in the law. At the Supreme Court of the United States, a ruling was made that a man on trial without funds for legal help would be entitled to a lawyer paid for by the state. Gardner helped in the fields of forensic science and criminology. He helped establish law enforcement foundations and annual conferences. In the late 1950s, the American Bar Association went to the Ford Foundation for funds to inaugurate the first full-scale investigation of American justice. Out of this investigation came President Lyndon Johnson’s establishment of a crime commission, the first in the United States.

When Erle Stanley Gardner died in 1970, at the age of 80, he had fictionally and figuratively lived more lives than most people.

Joy Pearson is a citizen reporter for Neighborhood View, where this article first appeared.