Word: gardners
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Black Eyes. Gardner's position in the mystery field is towering in the face of the fact that the average detective story in the U.S. sells a mere 3,000 in the original trade edition and nets its author about $800. A story fortunate enough to be picked as a Crime Club semimonthly selection may sell about 10,000 copies, while Gardner's trade-edition average over the past five years has been 24,000. But position with whodunit fans is only half the story. Author Gardner is not only the most popular practitioner, he is also...
...Author Gardner is a solid, energetic man to whom writing is a serious, dollars & cents business. As a boy, he followed his mining-engineer father from his home state of Massachusetts to the Klondike and finally to California, where the family decided to settle down. His school years were a running revolt against teachers and formal education, but he did get through high school. He tried boxing, took some thorough beatings, decided to read for the law after a deputy district attorney bawled him out for taking part in an unlicensed fight. One day when he was 21, he showed...
...Gardner lives on a 3,000-acre ranch about 100 miles from Los Angeles, with a staff of eight-including a business manager, secretaries and household help. His mail is peppered with requests for legal aid, and frequently he rides forth to aid the underdog. His conditions for taking on such cases are unvarying: the person must have been convicted of a major crime, he must have no money, he must have exhausted all other legal means...
...lawyer for last-resort cases, Gardner works without fees, has sprung two men out of the death cell and helped get two others out of the penitentiary. But Erie Stanley Gardner, counsel for the defense, is no sentimentalist. "There are a lot of guilty people in jail," says he. "You'd be surprised, but your chances of being murdered are pretty good...
...author, Gardner is devoted to whodunits, believes they have won a firm place in U.S. letters. "We talk of escape literature and look down our noses at it. But all literature is a form of escape. The readers demand it, I am interested in readers. To hell with editors. You can dig your own literary grave if you listen to editors. The detective story is a far more inspiring sermon than one from the pulpit. It reassures the reader about life, makes him believe that justice always triumphs. The western story and the detective story go hand in hand. They...