Miker,
Re your comment below:
> That's interesting, K. I recall an earlier
post
> mentioning
> a pre-Perry Mason protagonist occurring in a
few
> Black Mask
> (?) stories, but I didn't know that he much
besides
> Perry
> Mason stories once he got started on
them.
In addition to the Masons, Gardner wrote a popular series of
PI novels about a disbarred lawyer-turned-private-eye named
Donald Lam and his lady boss, Bertha Cool. These were written
under the pseudonym of A.A. Fair. I believe he wrote
approximately one Lam/Cool book for every two or three
Masons.
He also wrote a ten-book series about Doug Selby, the young
DA of a rural Southern California community, probably as a
way of making up for making prosecutors look so bad in the
Mason books.
Both the Lam/Cool series and the Selby series debuted in the
late '30s.
There were also quite a number of stand-alones.
> I thought CASE OF THE VELVET CLAWS was
entertaining
> and
> might try a few more of the early ones one of
these
> days.
It's kind of interesting that Gardner didn't realize how much
his readers would come to enjoy the courtroom scenes in the
Mason books. Out of the first four Mason novels, two, VELVET
CLAWS and LUCKY LEGS, don't have any courtroom sequences
whatsoever, and, in a letter to his editor, Gardner expressed
misgivings about the trial scenes in the second and fourth
books, SULKY GIRL and HOWLING DOG.
Almost against his will, Garnder invented the legal thriller.
I still think the court scenes in HOWLING DOG and the fifth
Mason novel, CURIOUS BRIDE, among the most gripping I've ever
read.
The '30s Masons, in my opinion, contain some of Gardner's
crispest writing. Those who find his style pretty
nuts-and-bolts (not an altogether unfair criticism in later
entries) may be surprised at how well Gardner turned a
narrative phrase in the '30s.
JIM DOHERTY
__________________________________________________ Do you
Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.
http://mailplus.yahoo.com
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 30 Nov 2002 EST