The Untold Truth Of Perry Mason

The ace lawyer has been a part of the American cultural lexicon for the better part of a century, recently reemerging as a gritty HBO 1930s period piece that stayed faithful to the novels that inspired it. From the page to the screen, here's a look into the curious case of Perry Mason.

Despite dropping out of law school, Erle Stanley Gardner passed the California state bar exam and started working as an attorney in 1911. He specialized in representing underdogs, particularly immigrant laborers from Mexico and China, and spent hours in law libraries each night after arguing cases all day looking for obscure statutes that he could unleash in court at the perfect moment.

That would become a signature move of his literary creation, Perry Mason, when in the 1920s, Gardner adopted a side hustle of writing legal thrillers.

At first, Gardner planned to pen novels about a series of different attorneys, but on the advice of a publisher, he opted to focus solely on Mason's adventures.

The character debuted in the 1933 novel The Case of the Velvet Claws, a bestseller and the first of around 80 Perry Mason mysteries that Gardner would pen through 1969.

The public liked Gardner's entertaining, and purportedly accurate courtroom dramas, and he obliged. He referred to himself as "the fiction factory" and at one point employed six secretaries to type out the manuscripts he dictated into a tape recorder. After he passed away in 1970, the New York Times called Garner "the best-selling American author of the century," on account of how he'd moved 170 million copies of his Perry Mason books in the U.S. alone.

The Perry Mason franchise is most famous for its iterations as a television show — the intense courtroom series starring Raymond Burr from the 1950s and 1960s, and the moody, 1930s-set reimagining with Matthew Rhys that debuted on HBO in 2020. But long before Earle Stanley Gardner's popular books about Perry Mason were adapted for the small screen, they were successfully converted into other media formats. Keep watching the video to see the untold truth of Perry Mason!

#PerryMason #UntoldTruth

A blockbuster book series | 0:00
A media franchise | 1:30
The colorful case of the lost episode | 2:45
He never lost a case... almost | 3:56
The first revival flopped | 5:04
Small-screen movies | 6:04
New millennium revival | 7:19
"You can't remake Perry Mason" | 8:31
Unlimited series | 10:12

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