Heroes Who Shoot Straight

THE CASE OF THE CAUTIOUS COQUETTE (275 pp.) -- Erie Stanley Gardner--Morrow ($2.50).

Lawyer-Detective Perry Mason wasn't looking for all the trouble he got. He was just trying to find the hit & run driver who had put his client in the hospital; all he wanted was a fair settlement. Of course, any Erie Stanley Gardner fan could have told Perry Mason he was headed for plenty of trouble. Before The Case of the Cautious Coquette is over, Mason gets tangled up with a dazzling blonde gold digger, unwittingly puts his own fingerprints on a murder weapon, runs down a smart killer who has the cops going around in circles, gets settlements from two self-confessed hit & run drivers, and gives a stuffy district attorney plenty of what-for right in open court.

The Case of the Cautious Coquette, Erie Stanley Gardner's 61st crime novel, is a good example of the stream-of-action technique, the ingenious but credible situations and the direct, undecorated prose that have made him the best-selling author alive. In 25-c- Pocket Book editions alone, 28 of his books have sold more than 30 million copies in less than nine years. Fourteen Gardner titles have gone over the million mark; The Case of the Lucky Legs alone has hit the incredible figure, for a detective story, of 2,000,000. In all editions, hard and paper cover, Gardner's books have sold more than 37 million copies,* are now moving over the counters at the rate of six or seven million copies a year in the U.S. and Canada alone.

Bar & Black Eyes. Gardner's position in the mystery field is towering in the face of the fact that the average detective story in the U.S. sells a mere 3,000 in the original trade edition and nets its author about $800. A story fortunate enough to be picked as a Crime Club semimonthly selection may sell about 10,000 copies, while Gardner's trade-edition average over the past five years has been 24,000. But position with whodunit fans is only half the story. Author Gardner is not only the most popular practitioner, he is also the most prolific. In the past 16 years, writing as Erie Stanley Gardner and under the pseudonym of A. A. Fair, he has ground out an average of nearly four books a year.

In the search for speed on the assembly line he has gone from typewriter to electric typewriter to direct dictation and finally to dictating machines. Now he has as many as four secretaries at a time taking the stuff off records, rattles off 6,000 to 7,000 words a day; in a high-speed burst he has hit as much as 235,000 words a month.

At 59, Author Gardner is a solid, energetic man to whom writing is a serious, dollars & cents business. As a boy, he followed his mining-engineer father from his home state of Massachusetts to the Klondike and finally to California, where the family decided to settle down. His school years were a running revolt against teachers and formal education, but he did get through high school. He tried boxing, took some thorough beatings, decided to read for the law after a deputy district attorney bawled him out for taking part in an unlicensed fight. One day when he was 21, he showed up with two black eyes to take his bar exam, passed it and hung out his shingle.

Sound Intuition. Around Ventura and Oxnard, Calif., where he practiced, Gardner is still remembered best as a rough & tumble lawyer whose early career consisted of spectacular fights in behalf of underdog clients. He was a smart trial lawyer who frequently, like his own Perry Mason, relied heavily on psychology to break down witnesses and sway juries.

Lawyer Gardner was building a good legal practice, but law work interfered with his traveling, hunting and fishing. His partners were constantly embarrassed by his absences, spent much of their time pleading for postponements until he returned. One day in July 1923, Gardner got a $2 check for a couple of jokes he had sent in to the Chicago Herald and Examiner. Three days later Young's Magazine sent him $15 for a brief skit. Gardner decided he wanted to write, went to work on his first detective story. He used the name of Charles M. Green because "I knew my stuff was going to be rotten and didn't want to prejudice editors against my own name when I got ready to use it."

Gardner's intuition was sound. From Black Mask came a rejection and the comment: "This is the most puerile story I have ever read." Gardner rewrote the story and Black Mask bought it. It also bought the next three as well. He spent less & less time in court, more & more at his typewriter.

By September of 1932, Gardner had become facile enough to spill out his first book, The Case of the Velvet Claws, in 3 1/2 days. In that same month he knocked out eleven novelettes and a 27,000-word feature story. In one 25-day period the year before, he had written eleven stories averaging 12,000 words apiece, while putting in half days at his office, arguing an appeal in a Los Angeles court, studying Chinese and trying lawsuits. Not one story was rejected, not one had to be revised, but Gardner admits "I darned near killed myself that month."

Ovens & Pies. British Novelist Evelyn Waugh has confessed that he wishes he could write Gardner-like whodunits, and Mystery Writer Margery Allingham says of Gardner: "Now there's a chap who produces a beautiful neat shape. He describes an elegant knot and pulls the whole thing out neatly as though it had been done by a conjuror." Gardner's own definition of what makes a good mystery story is more earthy: "It's like apple pie. I could give you all the ingredients, tell you how hot your oven must be and how long to leave the pie in. It might come out good; it might taste lousy. But if you get a good piece of pie, and eat it after a good meal, you'll like apple pie."

He knows that Perry Masons are found only between book covers: "In fiction, detectives must be glamourous; in real life, they must get results and sore feet. A fictional detective solves the crime by deductive reasoning, by pure observation and sheer cunning; he does it on his own. In real life, the detective gets as much as 90% of his information from tips and squeals, but you've got to stay away from this in books."

Gardner lives on a 3,000-acre ranch about 100 miles from Los Angeles, with a staff of eight--including a business manager, secretaries and household help. His mail is peppered with requests for legal aid, and frequently he rides forth to aid the underdog. His conditions for taking on such cases are unvarying: the person must have been convicted of a major crime, he must have no money, he must have exhausted all other legal means.

As lawyer for last-resort cases, Gardner works without fees, has sprung two men out of the death cell and helped get two others out of the penitentiary. But Erie Stanley Gardner, counsel for the defense, is no sentimentalist. "There are a lot of guilty people in jail," says he. "You'd be surprised, but your chances of being murdered are pretty good."

As author, Gardner is devoted to whodunits, believes they have won a firm place in U.S. letters. "We talk of escape literature and look down our noses at it. But all literature is a form of escape. The readers demand it, I am interested in readers. To hell with editors. You can dig your own literary grave if you listen to editors. The detective story is a far more inspiring sermon than one from the pulpit. It reassures the reader about life, makes him believe that justice always triumphs. The western story and the detective story go hand in hand. They are full of sincerity and guts, heroes who shoot straight and heroines as pure as the driven snow."

*Not counting sales of translations in 13 languages.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.