Erle Stanley Gardner.

The son of mining engineer Charles Walter Gardner and Grace Adelma Waugh, Erle Stanley Gardner was born on July 17, 1889, in Malden, Massachusetts. The family moved frequently, living in Portland, Oregon, and the Klondike during the Gold Rush before settling in the mining town of Oroville, California. Gardner graduated from Palo Alto High School in 1909 but was expelled from Valparaiso University in Indiana early in his freshman year for fighting. He supported himself as a boxer and promoter of illegal wrestling matches before a job as a typist in a law office sparked his interest in law.

Without attending law school, Gardner passed the California bar exam in 1911 at age 21 and opened his first law office in Merced, California. His fluency in Chinese helped him build a clientele among Chinese immigrants, who called him T’ai chong tze The Big Lawyer. In the early 1920s, Gardner began writing for pulp magazines under the pseudonym Charles M. Green, later using many pen names including A.A. Fair, to avoid flooding the market. His breakthrough came in 1933 with the debut of Perry Mason in The Case of the Velvet Claws and The Case of the Sulky Girl. The character proved instantly popular, leading to a film series starting with The Case of the Howling Dog 1934 starring Warren William. Gardner’s Perry Mason novels were serialized in the Saturday Evening Post for 20 years. The TV series Perry Mason premiered in 1957, starring Raymond Burr, and became a massive hit. Gardner also co-founded the Court of Last Resort in the 1950s, an organization that investigated potential wrongful convictions, and wrote the non-fiction book The Court of Last Resort 1957, which won an Edgar Award.

Gardner married Natalie Frances Talbert in 1921, but the couple became estranged after 1935. He later married one of his long-serving secretaries, Agnes Jean Bethell, in 1968, two years before his death. Gardner was an ardent sportsman and traveler, spoke fluent Chinese, and was inducted into the Bowhunters Hall of Fame. He lived at Rancho del Paisano in Temecula, California, where he died of cancer on March 11, 1970.

Erle Stanley Gardner’s creation, Perry Mason, inspired generations of legal dramas. The CBS TV series Perry Mason 1957-1966 starring Raymond Burr set a standard for courtroom drama and was revived as TV movies starting in 1989. Gardner’s prolific output—nearly 100 novels each selling over a million copies—made him the best-selling American writer of his time, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His work with the Court of Last Resort influenced criminal justice reform, and he was honored with the Mystery Writers of America’s Grand Master award. Today, Gardner is remembered as the master of the legal thriller and the creator of Perry Mason, an enduring figure in American pop culture.