Gardner’s style changed quite a bit over the years. He started his career as a writer for the pulp magazines that flourished in the 1920s and 1930s. Authors were famously paid a penny a word by most of the pulps, but the top writers in the top magazines managed to get all the way up to three cents a word. This munificent fee was reserved for the best of the best of their time, some of whom remain popular and successful to the present day (Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich), some of whom only are remembered and read by the modest coterie that avidly reads and collects pulp fiction (Carroll John Daly, Arthur Leo Zagat, Arthur J. Burks). One who earned the big bucks regularly, especially when he wrote for Black Mask, the greatest of the pulps, was Erle Stanley Gardner.

Gardner had learned and honed his craft in the pulps, so it is not surprising that the earliest Perry Mason novels were hard-boiled, tough-guy books, with Mason as a fearless, two-fisted battler, rather than the calm, self-possessed figure that most readers remember today. Reading the first Mason novels, The Case of the Velvet Claws, published in 1933, and The Case of the Careless Kitten, published twenty years later, it is difficult to remember that they were written by the same author. Both styles, by the way, were first-rate, just different.

Gardner was born in Malden, Massachusetts, in 1889. Because his father was a mining engineer, he traveled often as a child. As a teenager, he participated in professional boxing as well as promoting unlicensed matches, placing himself at risk of criminal prosecution, which gave him an interest in the law. He took a job as a typist at a California law firm and after reading law for fifty hours a week for three years, he was admitted to the California bar. He practiced in Oxnard from 1911 to 1918, gaining a reputation as a champion of the underdog through his defense of poor Mexican and Chinese clients.

He left to become a tire salesman in order to earn more money but he missed the courtroom and joined another law firm in 1921. It is then that he started to write fiction, hoping that he could augment his modest income. He worked a full day at court, followed that with several hours of research in the law library, then went home to write fiction into the small hours, setting a goal of at least 4,000 words a day. He sold two stories in 1921, none in 1922, and only one in 1923, but it was to the prestigious Black Mask. The following year, thirteen of his stories saw print, five of them in Black Mask. Over the next decade he wrote nearly fifteen million words and sold hundreds of stories, many pseudonymously so that he could have multiple stories in a single magazine, each under a different name.