His output was prodigious. He wrote 1,200,000 words annually during most of the 1920s and 1930s. That is a novel a month, plus a stack of short stories, for a fifteen-year stretch. In 1932, his most productive year, he wrote an unimaginable 2,400,000 words—the equivalent of a full-length novel every other week.

In 1932, he finally took a vacation, an extended trip to China, since he had become so financially successful. That is also the year in which he began to submit his first novel, The Case of the Velvet Claws. It was rejected by several publishers before William Morrow took it, and Gardner published every mystery with that house for the rest of his life. Thayer Hobson, then the president of Morrow, suggested that the protagonist of that book, Perry Mason, should become a series character and Gardner agreed.

The Mason novels became an immediate success so Gardner resigned from his law practice to devote full time to writing. Eager to have privacy, he acquired parcels of land in the Southwest and eventually settled into the “Gardner Fiction Factory” on a thousand-acre ranch in Temecula, California. The ranch had a dozen guest cottages and trailers to house his support staff of twenty employees, all of whom are reported to have called him “Uncle Erle.” Among them were six secretaries, all working full time, transcribing his dictated novels, non-fiction books and articles, and correspondence.

He was intensely interested in prison conditions and was a strong advocate of reform. In 1948, he formed the Court of Last Resort, a private organization dedicated to helping those believed to have been unfairly incarcerated. The group succeeded in freeing many unjustly convicted men and Gardner wrote a book, The Court of Last Resort, describing the group’s work; it won an Edgar for the best fact crime book of the year.

In the 1960s, Gardner became alarmed at some changes in American literature. He told the New York Times, “I have always aimed my fiction at the masses who constitute the solid backbone of America, I have tried to keep faith with the American family. In a day when the prevailing mystery story trends are towards sex, sadism, and seduction, I try to base my stories on speed, situation, and suspense.”

While Gardner wrote prolifically about a wide variety of characters under many pseudonyms, most notably the thirty novels about Cool and Lam, all his books give evidence of clearly identifiable characteristics. There is a minimum of description and a maximum of dialogue, and Gardner’s heroes are not averse to breaking the exact letter of the law in order to secure what they consider to be justice. They share contempt for pomposity. Villains or deserving victims are often self-important, wealthy individuals who can usually be identified because Gardner has given them two last names (such as Harrington Faulkner).