My own image of Perry Mason wasn’t the Raymond Burr of the TV series: my Mason was more, er, youthful, and slimmer.

I came to feel sorry for Hamilton Burger. The ever-present characters: Perry Mason, the intrepid and skilful defence lawyer, who always unmasks the real villain in a courtroom climax, to the relief of his unjustly accused client Della Street, his loyal and efficient secretary Paul Drake, the private detective who has an apparently inexhaustible number of employees able to drop everything to help Perry, with hardly ever a mention of a bill being presented and Hamilton Burger, the hapless District Attorney who loses to Perry Mason almost every time. I can’t find him in first-run bookshops now – though I can still come across Perry Mason films late at night in the upper reaches of my cable channels. According to his obituary in the New York Times he liked being called “the fiction factory” and even “the Henry Ford of detective novelists.” ( ) Given the successful and repeated formulas of his books this might have caused confusion, but if it did I never noticed.

He wrote by dictating, and sometimes had more than one book on the go at a time. American editions of his books alone sold 170 million copies, and he was America’s best-selling novelist for a chunk of the 20 th century. Wikipedia lists over 150 of his novels, plus short stories. In the 1960s he was in the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s most prolific author, as I recall. I had quite a collection, now shrunk to the three pictured (following the domestic mishap mentioned in my post about John Creasey at ).

Another case of fame in a writer’s lifetime, but absence from the bookshop shelves today, is Erle Stanley Gardner (1889-1970).

Earl stanley gardner wiki