Background
Gardner was born in Malden, Massachusetts on July 17, 1889. He spent much of his childhood traveling with his mining-engineer father through the remote regions of California, Oregon, and the Klondike. In his teens he not only boxed for money, but also promoted a number of unlicensed matches.
He died on March 11, 1970, in Temecula, California. His ashes were scattered over the Baja California Peninsula.
Education
Gardner attended high school in California and graduated from Palo Alto High School 1909.
He enrolled at Valparaiso University in Indiana that same year but was soon expelled for striking a professor. Spoke fluent Chinese.
Career
In the practice of law Gardner found the form of combat he seemed born to master. He was admitted to the California bar in 1911 and opened an office in Oxnard, where he practiced law until 1918. As a lawyer he represented the Chinese community and gained a reputation for flamboyant trial tactics. In one case, for instance, he had dozens of Chinese merchants exchange identities so that he could discredit a policeman's identification of a client. Gardner worked as a salesman for the Consolidated Sales Company from 1918 until 1921. He then resumed his legal career in Ventura, California from 1921 until 1933.
Early Writings
In the early 1920s Gardner began to write western and mystery stories for magazines, often under the pseudonyms of A.A. Fair, Carleton Kendrake, and Charles J. Kenny. Eventually he was turning out and selling the equivalent of a short novel every three nights while still practicing law during the business day. With the sale of his first novel in 1933 he
gave up the practice of law and devoted himself to full-time writing, or more precisely to dictating. Thanks to the popularity of his series characters - lawyer-detective Perry Mason, his loyal secretary Della Street, his private detective Paul Drake, and the foxy trio of Sergeant Holcomb, Lieutenant Tragg, and District Attorney Hamilton Burger - Gardner became one of the wealthiest mystery writers of all time.
The 82 Mason adventures from The Case of the Velvet Claws (1933) to the posthumously published The Case of the Postponed Murder (1973) contain few of the literary graces. Characterization and description are perfunctory and often reduced to a few lines that are repeated in similar situations book after book. Indeed virtually every word not within
quotation marks could be deleted and little would be lost. For what vivifies these novels is the sheer readability, the breakneck pacing, the convoluted plots, the fireworks displays of courtroom tactics (many based on gimmicks Gardner used in his own law practice), and the dialogue, where each line is a jab in a complex form of oral combat.
Eventually Perry Mason became a long-running TV series with Raymond Burr as the title character. Gardner himself made an uncredited appearance as a judge in the final episode of the original series titled "The Case of the Final Fade-Out." In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Mason was revived for a series of made-for-TV movies featuring surviving members of the original cast, including Burr.