Erle Stanley Gardner (1889-1970) was an American lawyer and author, best known as the creator of Perry Mason, and as such more or less the inventor of the Law Procedural trope.
He was born in Massachusetts, but his family moved to Palo Alto, CA. He studied law independently—back in the day, it was much more common to study law independently, or under a mentor—and passed the California bar exam in 1911. He spent some twenty years practicing law, and in the meantime, he began writing stories. He hit the big time as an author in 1933 with his first Perry Mason novel, The Case of the Velvet Claws. The Perry Mason books became massive bestsellers and, within Gardner's lifetime, were adapted into radio, film, and a hugely successful television series. (Gardner appears in a Creator Cameo as a judge in the last episode of the Raymond Burr Perry Mason show.)
Even after Perry Mason became successful, Gardner wrote many other stories and novels. He wrote nine novels featuring a crusading DA named Doug Selby that were basically a Perspective Flip of the Perry Mason books. He wrote even more fiction under pen names. In his spare time, he founded the Court of Last Resort, an organization dedicated to freeing people who were unjustly convicted of crimes.
Works by Erle Stanley Gardner with their own pages:
- Perry Mason series
- Lester Leith series
- The "Cool and Lam" series, originally written under the pseudonym "A.A. Lam"
Other works by Erle Stanley Gardner contain examples of:
- Friendly Local Chinatown: In Murder Up My Sleeve and its sequel The Case of the Backward Mule, protagonist Terry Clane has friends in the city's Chinatown and part of the novels are set there.
- I Know A Guy: In The Case of the Backward Mule, Terry's Chinese manservant Yat Toy has a lot of "cousins" who are able to provide a variety of useful objects and information at short notice, and even at one point an entire apartment (though that one required a few weeks' work).
- Orgy of Evidence: In "The Clue of the Screaming Woman", the killer attempts to frame a local recluse for a murder. However, believing Sheriff Eldon to be a doddering old fool, he badly overplays his hand.
- Rats in a Box: In The Case of the Backward Mule, the police put the suspected murderer and a man who's been interfering in the police investigation in a holding cell together to find out what they say to each other when they think nobody's listening. The scene is told from the viewpoint of the second man (the protagonist, Terry Clane), who thinks it's just a coincidence he's been put in a room with somebody he needed to talk to until the police detective explains it to him later.
