Shared a mansion with “The Cleaning House of Crime” and supposedly fought “organized crime twenty-four hours a day.”Ī San Francisco lawyer/adventurer and Sinophile.Īppeared in two novels one first published in CosmopolitanĪ crusading New York attorney, full of tricks, and an obvious predecessor to Perry Mason.Ī Mexican adventurer and soldier of fortune.Īnother scam artist. CHARACTERĪ well-heeled criminologist/psychologist.Ī wealthy dandy who “smoked monogrammed cigarettes and didnt care about money.” So, if you’re ever prowling around a yard sale or a flea market and spy an old, tattered pulp with a Garner story in it going for pocket change, pick it up. A lot of them have been rounded up in assorted collections and anthologies, but many have - even years later - never been reprinted. Later, some of them popped up in such slicks such as The Country Gentleman, Cosmopolitan and The Saturday Evening Post.
These misfits appeared in all kinds of pulps, not just Black Mask and Argosy, but also Clues, All Detective, Dime Detective, Detective Story, Dime Detective, Detective Action Stories, Double Detective, This Week, Detective Fiction Weekly, not to mention West and some other cowboy pulps.
And in what was surely a recurring motif, many were quiter wealthy something that must have appealed to Depression-era readers. Most of them were at least colourful, some were definitely eccentric and a few of them were just plain weird. They were con artists, private eyes, lawyers, flim flam men, cowboys, angle players, career diplomats, and corner cutters, more than willing to bend and twist the law to achieve their goals, whether it was to see justice done or simply to relieving some criminal of his ill-gotten goods. Most of them were the good guys, but I think it’s fair to say that few of them were angels. Long before he hit it really big with Perry Mason (and moderately big with Bertha Cool and Donald Lam), the endlessly inventive Erle Stanley Gardner created dozens and dozens of colourful and sometimes downright odd characters for the pulps of the twenties and thirties, before turning towards the more lucrative field of novels. Erle Stanley Gardner’s Other Series Characters
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