From CrimeReads: In 1936, Erle Stanley Gardner was thinking of killing off his most famous character, Perry Mason. Instead, he created a new kind of lawyer. From J. Kingston Pierce.
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Erle Stanley Gardner was in a quandary. Even something of a snit. The year was 1936, and as crime writer/critic Dorothy B. Hughes recalls in her 1978 biography, Erle Stanley Gardner: The Case of the Real Perry Mason, Gardner was seriously entertaining the notion of phasing out Perry Mason as a protagonist.
By then, he’d already published nine novels featuring that Los Angeles criminal defense attorney; his younger secretary with the “perfect” legs, Della Street; and Paul Drake, the droop-shouldered private eye whose 24-hour investigative agency never seemed to find time for clients other than Mason. The books had sold well, allowing Gardner to end his own marginally satisfying legal career and become a full-time—and remarkably prolific—author. Hollywood had further promoted the series, with Warner Bros. adapting six Mason yarns for the silver screen in half as many years. However, Warners had recently decided not to renew its option on the character (its last Mason picture, The Case of the Stuttering Bishop, would be released during the summer of 1937), and Gardner had begun to quarrel with his publisher over the text and titles of his novels. In the midst of all this, explains Hughes, he was losing faith in his shrewd and determined advocate. His solution: to send Mason off on a trip to China, never to return, and replace him with “a brand-new character, similar in many respects to Perry Mason, [only] a little more refined, a little less daring, a little more sophisticated.”
As we all know, of course, Gardner eventually recovered from his spasm of pique, changed his mind about sending Perry packing, and went on to feature him in more than 80 novels before passing away in 1970, at age 80. But the author didn’t meanwhile abandon his idea to develop another series lead. In 1937, he added to his writing responsibilities the creation of a new succession of books starring Douglas Selby, the scrappy district attorney for fictional Madison County, California.
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