Master Plotter

By Martha Duffy

ERIE STANLEY GARDNER

by Dorothy B. Hughes Morrow; 350 pages; $15

They used to laugh at his early efforts in the Black Mask offices. One story, The Shrieking Skeleton, was marked up as the lead piece for an issue, just to give the editor a good scare. The art of suspense did not come easily to Erie Stanley Gardner. He never did learn much about writing character, not to speak of description. But he became a master plotter and one of the most prolific and successful authors who ever lived; 82 Perry Mason novels, which have sold over 300 million copies, are only part of his output (over the years he took several pseudonyms).

He was an obsessed producer of fiction. At one point he set himself a quota of 1,200,000 words a year, 365 days a year (days off had to be made up). He flailed away with two-finger typing until he discovered dictation. Thereafter he kept several secretaries, including three sisters named Walter, frantically busy. He thought of his mysteries as sets of components, so he rigged up a gizmo called a "plot wheel," a device with spokes radiating from the center indicating characters, situations, complications. He spun his wheel until there were points where spokes collided. Presto: another book.

Throughout a long, immensely profitable career, Gardner had only one hardback publisher, Morrow, which also produced this maddening biography. Dorothy Hughes is modest enough to say in her introduction that she may have been picked for the task because she wrote long, favorable reviews of his books. It seems more likely that impenetrable discretion won her the job. Gardner was clearly a very eccentric man, an upstart as a boy in California, a brazen and unorthodox young lawyer in Ventura County, Calif. Many of Mason's more bizarre tactics resembled his creator's. In the most famous, Gardner sprang a group of Chinese from gambling charges by substituting other Chinese at the addresses where they were to be picked up; the local prosecutors could not tell the difference.

He lived apart from his first wife for much of his life. He preferred to lead a flock of people deeply attached to him. His second wife was one of the Walter sisters, Jean, whom he married less than two years before his death at 80. She was the model for Delia Street. Sam Hicks, an all-round outdoorsman, also devoted his life to Gardner; he was transmogrified into Paul Drake. This nucleus was joined by a large assortment of pretty women and hunting pals. They sometimes camped out in the desert, especially in Gardner's beloved Baja California.

The group's seeming misfit was the moody indoorsman Raymond Chandler, who told his host that he had learned how to build suspense by constructing his own characters on the framework of an Erle Stanley Gardner story. The Master was pleased; he never read anything but the competition and found them all, including Agatha Christie, inferior plotters. Yet he could be generous in praise of others' use of character and atmosphere.

Hughes' book is interesting for the long quotations from Gardner about mystery writing. These are wise, and written with breathtaking authority. There is also an excellent 29-page bibliography. One suspects that Gardner would disapprove of the rest: the prim prose, the slapdash production (pages are numbered only fitfully; there is one flying leap from 186 to 204), the amateurish illustration. Gardner was a pro.

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