Word: gardners
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...John W. Gardner, the founding chairman of Common Cause and formerly Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, sees danger in certain proposals that have come forth lately from various tax reformers to eliminate or reduce the charitable contributions that Americans can deduct from taxable income. He stated his case recently at a United Way conference in a speech on which this essay is based...
Throughout a long, immensely profitable career, Gardner had only one hardback publisher, Morrow, which also produced this maddening biography. Dorothy Hughes is modest enough to say in her introduction that she may have been picked for the task because she wrote long, favorable reviews of his books. It seems more likely that impenetrable discretion won her the job. Gardner was clearly a very eccentric man, an upstart as a boy in California, a brazen and unorthodox young lawyer in Ventura County, Calif. Many of Mason's more bizarre tactics resembled his creator's. In the most famous, Gardner...
...lead a flock of people deeply attached to him. His second wife was one of the Walter sisters, Jean, whom he married less than two years before his death at 80. She was the model for Delia Street. Sam Hicks, an all-round outdoorsman, also devoted his life to Gardner; he was transmogrified into Paul Drake. This nucleus was joined by a large assortment of pretty women and hunting pals. They sometimes camped out in the desert, especially in Gardner's beloved Baja California...
...group's seeming misfit was the moody indoorsman Raymond Chandler, who told his host that he had learned how to build suspense by constructing his own characters on the framework of an Erle Stanley Gardner story. The Master was pleased; he never read anything but the competition and found them all, including Agatha Christie, inferior plotters. Yet he could be generous in praise of others' use of character and atmosphere...
Hughes' book is interesting for the long quotations from Gardner about mystery writing. These are wise, and written with breathtaking authority. There is also an excellent 29-page bibliography. One suspects that Gardner would disapprove of the rest: the prim prose, the slapdash production (pages are numbered only fitfully; there is one flying leap from 186 to 204), the amateurish illustration. Gardner...