The Human Zero. The Science Fiction Stories of Erle Stanley Gardner

Foreword

Erle Stanley Gardner, author, lawyer, humanitarian, adventurer, was born in 1889. He did not begin writing until he was thirty-one, but in the next fifty years until his death in 1970, he averaged approximately one book every four months, one article every two months, and one novelette or short story every month. This is a remarkable record by itself, but it seems nothing short of astonishing when one considers Mr. Gardner’s other activities: eleven years (1921 to 1931) of full-time law practice, twelve years (1943 to 1955) of attending to the Perry Mason radio show, nine years (1957 to 1966) of monitoring scripts for the Perry Mason TV series, fifteen years (1949 to 1964) of devoting most of his time to the functioning of the Court of Last Resort in an attempt to improve the criminal justice system in this country, and thirty-eight years (1933 to 1970) of almost constant travel.

As a person, Mr. Gardner was an interesting blend of New Englander and westerner. The first ten years of his life were spent in Massachusetts, and his parents’ roots extended back to the Mayflower on his mother’s side and to a long line of Yankee sea captains on his father’s side. This heritage shaped his conservative personal habits (drinking little and gambling less), his competitive ambition to excel, and his tenacious persistence. In 1899 his father, Charles Gardner, moved to the West Coast to further his career as a civil engineer, and the young Erle took to many of the western ways. For example, from the frontier atmosphere came his love of the outdoors and his informality, his confidence in his ability to teach himself things, and his nomadic tendencies. For the rest of his days, he would consider himself a Californian. His lively personal style was in some conflict with his New England upbringing and was a source of annoyance, for instance, to his very proper mother.

Erle was a clever, puckish youth whose habit of outsmarting authority kept getting him thrown out of schools. Fortunately, however, his great curiosity and enormous energy led him into the study of law. He gained admission to the bar by the age of twenty-one and shortly thereafter began establishing a reputation in Oxnard, California, as a brilliant criminal lawyer. His strengths were an ability to outmaneuver his opponents prior to trial, a genius for utilizing obscure statutes in innovative ways, and an ability to draw the truth out of opposition witnesses through dramatic cross-examinations. These are traits which later, of course, appeared in his most famous creation, Perry Mason.

By 1917, however, he realized that being a successful attorney was not exactly what he wanted because he disliked being tied down in one place. So for the next four years he was president of a sales company, which provided a life-style that satisfied his needs for action and travel. But a recession led to business reverses and a decision to return to law.

Still he remained restless, and after investigating a few alternatives he decided to become a writer. Such a profession would permit him to travel while working, and at first he could bring in some extra money while still practicing law. He began to teach himself how to write by banging away at his typewriter each evening until two o’clock in the morning. A major breakthrough occurred as a result of a devastating criticism of “The Shrieking Skeleton” which the editors of Black Mask magazine had inadvertently enclosed with the rejected manuscript. This provided Mr. Gardner with clues about what he was doing wrong. He tore the story apart, and after three days of furious revision he produced a version good enough to be accepted. Other markets opened to him, and, by carefully analyzing the suggestions of editors, he learned to break down plots into component parts which he put on separate cardboard wheels. Some, for example, represented situations, characters, the lowest common denominators of public interest, and unexpected complications. By spinning these wheels and noting points of contact among spokes, he was usually able to generate a plot within thirty minutes. And since he wrote very quickly, he was able to produce a ten-thousand-word novelette every three days. Not all sold, of course, but enough did so that his income from writing increased from $974 in 1921 to $6,627 in 1926 and to more than $20,000 in the early thirties.

During 1932 he began reducing his legal work, and probably William Morrow’s acceptance of his first two Perry Mason novels that year gave him the confidence to cease practicing law in 1933, except in a consulting capacity. For two years he had been promising his agent a novel, but other commitments had left no time. Then Mr. Gardner decided he could save time by using a dictating machine. He spent a half day thinking up a plot and dictated in three and a half days what was eventually to be called The Case of the Velvet Claws. Six weeks later he produced his second novel in the same fashion.

Now he could once again be free, and in the summer of 1933 he began the seminomadic existence he would follow for most of the rest of his life. When not traveling abroad, or staying at one of the several residences he eventually maintained, he could be found traveling around the desert with several secretaries, stopping wherever he pleased and dictating work that would be typed up on the spot.

As a writer, Erle Stanley Gardner is one of the most popular of all time. His books have been translated into 37 foreign languages. His paperback sales exceed every other author who has ever lived, and a current estimate of his total sales in all languages and editions would be well over 300 million copies. The Case of the Velvet Claws ultimately sold 4,000,000 copies, a stunning figure for any novel, not to speak of a first novel. Of the 151 mystery novels which appeared on the bestseller lists from 1895 to 1965, Mr. Gardner was responsible for ninety-one.

Like Shakespeare, Dumas, and Dickens, he was remarkably popular during his lifetime, but, of course, the truest test of literary merit is how well sales hold up over time. And in this regard, Mr. Gardner continues to do very well. In 1979, almost fifty years since the first, and nine years after the last, novel was written, he still averaged 2,400 sales a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year.

To those who know that he wrote rapidly and prolifically, that he thought of himself as a businessman/lawyer who wrote because of circumstances, and that he continually referred to himself as a fiction factory, such staying power in his readership may seem surprising. Study his career closely, however, and many reasons for his success become apparent. First, he had the ability to become an expert in any field of knowledge that interested him. Law and writing are just two examples from a large number which included astronomy, surveying, archery, salesmanship, forensic medicine, polygraph work, and criminal psychology. Second, he always had the drive and ambition to try to make himself the best in whatever field he went into.[1] Third, he possessed a mind which was both analytical and creative. As he did with the plot wheel, he was able to reduce complex matters to simple elements and then to utilize this information in innovative ways. He realized that to succeed in mass markets he had to appeal to the tired worker, the traveler looking to kill time, and the typical organization-bound individual. So he used rapid action, conflict, and drama to grip attention, and he sustained interest by appealing to his readers’ desire to see ordinary guys with some extraordinary qualities achieve justice by successfully fighting crime, chicanery, or red tape. Fourth, he was not the type of person to turn down good advice about how to improve his work. He realized that continued sales would depend on his books being well crafted. Therefore, criticisms from his secretaries and editors were listened to attentively. He often groused about both the comments and the commenter, especially on questions of time element or pace in a story. But he usually recognized good advice and took it when it was offered. Finally, although his books were written swiftly, they were often rewritten several times before they appeared in final form. Besides being responsive to the suggestions of others, he often initiated rewrites himself. He wanted each book in a series to be better than the ones before, and, until a novel got into print, he would keep turning it over and over in his mind to see if he could think of how rewriting might improve it.[2]

As Freeman Lewis remarked about him in a letter to The New York Times:

Particularly interesting are the nearly six hundred novelettes and short stories Mr. Gardner produced early in his career. They were not only his training ground; they also display immediately his storytelling gift. The majority are series stories, featuring protagonists such as Ed Jenkins (a phantom crook), Lester Leith (a philanthropic type who fleeces crooks), Senor Lobo (a professional soldier of fortune), Bob Zane (an old prospector), Speed Dash (a human fly with a photographic memory), Bob Larkin (a juggler), and El Paisano (who can see in the dark). Both the Jenkins and Leith series comprise approximately seventy stories, and fourteen other series range from five to twenty-seven stories each. Most of this work is of the same quality that readers have come to expect from Mr. Gardner, and it often reveals additional dimensions of his writing ability. For example, besides rapid pace and crime, the Whispering Sand series weaves in romance and hauntingly lyrical descriptions of our western deserts. Surprisingly, however, only about six percent of these shorter works have ever been reprinted. The Human Zero collection is the first of what we hope will be a number of collections that will once again make this important work of Erle Stanley Gardner available to his millions of fans.

Mr. Gardner possessed many of the characteristics of the typical science-fiction fan: a feeling of not fitting in as an adolescent, an avid curiosity, a high intelligence, a great propensity for and enjoyment of arguing with people, and a tendency to alternate periods of solitude with periods of multiple companionship.[4] Who knows, had he been born fifteen years later, he might have encountered Astounding’s editorial genius, John W. Campbell, Jr., and ended up a science-fiction writer. But at the time Mr. Gardner began writing, no science-fiction magazines existed, and because of his background in law he quite naturally moved into producing detective fiction.

However, between the years of 1928 and 1932 he did produce seven science-fiction and fantasy stories for Argosy, and these provide us with a fascinating glimpse of the writer he might have chosen to be had circumstances been different.

The title story of this collection, “The Human Zero,” is both a who-done-it and a locked-room mystery. A man is killed in a locked room, and both his body and his murderer disappear. So Sid Rodney, star detective, tries to avoid his own murder as he figures out who the criminal is and how the chilling crime was committed. The story exemplifies Mr. Gardner’s philosophy of having “characters who start from scratch and sprint the whole darned way to a goal line.”

“Rain Magic,” the first to be published, is somewhat reminiscent of Edgar Rice Burroughs. It recounts the African adventures of a young shanghaied sailor who jumps ship. Told in very vivid first-person style, it involves love, intelligent ants, a monkey man, and a ledge of solid gold. The story is a strange one, but a prefatory note said that the essentials had been told to the author by an old desert prospector. Initially, Mr. Gardner thought “it was one gosh-awful lie,” but upon subsequent checking on the locale, he found every fact given to him by the old man that could be verified was accurate.

“Monkey Eyes” is similar in flavor to some of Richard Harding Davis’s work. Set in India, it centers around kidnapping, revenge, and a grotesque scientific experiment. An aerial dogfight, ceremonies at a lost temple, and an interestingly shaded villain are still other highlights of this story.

“The Sky’s the Limit” is an interplanetary tale of a trip to Venus. Using the idea of an antigravity drive which H. G. Wells had popularized in The First Men in the Moon, Mr. Gardner mixes crime and adventure with a delightful narration of the spaceship’s test run and an accurate description of what scientists thought Venus was like in the late 1920’s.

“A Year in a Day” takes the idea of invisibility through acceleration that H. G. Wells popularized in “The New Accelerator” and applies it to the framework of the crime story. The vivid descriptions of the invisibility effect compare favorably with similar attempts by Wells and by John D. MacDonald in The Girl, The Gold Watch, and Everything.

“The Man with Pin-Point Eyes” is a powerful adventure story of reincarnation and lost gold. As fresh as if it had just been ripped from the typewriter, its western setting is very similar to the Whispering Sand series which will be reprinted in a collection to follow soon after the present science-fiction volume.

“New Worlds” is an epic disaster story of a worldwide flood caused by a five-degree shift in the earth’s poles. There is a marvelously descriptive scene of New York City being inundated by the rising waters. However, as Sam Moskowitz perceptively points out, yams of this type are popular because catastrophes “vicariously release the individual from the responsibilities of family, law and conscience. They mark the demise of everything that binds, inhibits or restrains.” And in this work, Moskowitz continues, Mr. Gardner uses the “cataclysm as a device for releasing a small group of individuals to unusual adventure.”

By 1932, when “New Worlds” was published, Mr. Gardner had written his first two Perry Mason novels and was beginning to direct his major efforts into producing book-length manuscripts. As a businessman, he may have decided that the amount of time he had to put into researching a science-fiction story exceeded the amount he needed for a mystery or western. He was also concerned with the sale of reprintings of his works in the future and the need to avoid material which would date his stories. Now, science fiction, unless it is set far away in time, has a tendency to age rapidly as it is overtaken by scientific knowledge, and Mr. Gardner must have known that mysteries and westerns would age less. Faced with all these reasons, then, it is quite possible that he simply decided he could put his efforts to use more efficiently elsewhere.

In any case, those of us who love science fiction still have the following marvelous tales by which to remember him.

Charles G. Waugh and

Martin H. Greenberg