Gardner fans did not, in fact, expect his fast‐paced detective stories to be literary gems, which they were not. Gardner, creator of the redoubtable defense law yer Perry Mason, as a master storyteller. But-in his eagle-eye watch over the radio and TV Perry Masons, in his friendship with Raymond Chandler, and above all in his no-nonsense but humane dealings with the publishing world, Erie Stanley Gardner emerges as quite a voice and quite a guy.As the best‐selling American author of the century, Erie Stanley Gardner often insisted that he was “not really a writer at all,” and to be sure, there were many critics who enthusi astically agreed with him.īut millions of readers who have bought more than 170 million copies of his books in American editions alone, looked upon Mr. And few readers, though they'll appreciate the awesomely detailed bibliography, will need to know quite so much about Erie's Temecula Camp retreat or his hospitality. Hughes writes without much style, and she probably overrates Gardner's work-likewise the importance of his contribution to criminal justice via his Court of Last Resort (which investigated cases of allegedly innocent men convicted of crimes). ''I'm going to be the greatest mystery writer in the world despite your distracting requests for new titles,'' Gardner wrote to his publisher, along with tart replies to editorial queries (''I don't know and the reader won't care'') and loving-angry harangues. Anti-artiste Erie saw himself as a ''hardheaded businessman-lawyer who, due to circumstances he couldn't control, happened to write,'' a no-talent who started out with ''the worst stories that ever hit New York City'' and stolidly taught himself how to turn a literary profit: Black Mask stories, Cool & Lam mysteries, two Perry Masons a year-a writing rate of as much as 100,000 words a month dictated to an adoring rotating stable of live-in secretary-assistants. Using the correspondence and autobiographical notes of a writer who ''kept possibly the most extensive records of anyone of his time,'' Hughes sketches in some of the personal life-''black sheep'' California youth, maverick law career, a ''born bachelor'' semi-married for 56 years-but the growth and operation of Gardner's traveling ''Fiction Factory'' (via camper) is the ringing cash-register heart of the book. Fair, and if mystery writercritic Hughes is too worshipful and haphazard to probe very deeply, she does cover enough provocative ground to establish that ''Uncle Erie'' was a most atypical man of letters. An odd bird, Erie Stanley Gardner, a.k.a.

Erie stanley gardner