Over the life of this blog I have written 9 articles on Perry Mason, the lawyer-detective created by Erle Stanley Gardner. Gardner died in 1970 having written 150 mystery novels including 82 Perry Mason ones. His wife Jean Gardner, who passed away in 2002, acted as the executrix of Gardner’s estate and kept up the copyrights and keeping the books in print until she died. The estate is currently in the hands of Gardner’s daughter from a previous marriage.
The Perry Mason books were out of print for more than a decade before the publishing arm of the American Bar Association started publishing the books again under their in-house press, Ankerwycke Publishing. The great thing about the books being published again is that Ankerwycke is numbering the books so you can read the books in the order they were written. I grant that this is only important to a purist, but at the end of the first 5 books Gardner does reference the client sitting in Mason’s waiting room as the next case.
Gardner was a successful lawyer in the California of the 1920s and the world he writes of is one of privilege, wealth and racial stereotypes. I’ll be blunt. I don’t read the books because Gardner is a great novelist, he isn’t. I read the books because Raymond Burr was such a great actor and he is the Perry Mason I see in my mind’s eye when I read the novels.
You can order the hard copy books directly from Ankerwycke or from Amazon. You can get the books for half the Ankerwycke price from Amazon if you order the Kindle edition. The Perry Mason novels returning to print is something to celebrate.
