Gardner’s Mason was perfect for his time: tall, broad-shouldered, and masculine confident, competent, generous, chivalrous, and - above all - reassuring. Watching Perry Mason is a comforting experience today precisely because America in the Fifties was a comfortable place, and Americans were comfortable with themselves. Viewed from the perspective of 2021, it appears more like Athens in her Golden Age. My parents considered the United States of the period hopelessly and unspeakably vulgar, shallow, trivial, ugly and uncivilized.

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The result was a precise image of America in the 1950s that seems almost as distant from America in the 21st century as the antebellum era.įriends: The Reunion turned out to be a pointless nostalgia-fest Gardner invented the principal characters (Chandler considered Perry Mason a just-about-perfect creation) and the story lines, while the artistes of the Hollywood movie lots supplied the actors, the settings, the backgrounds and interiors, the décor, the clothes and the cars. Indeed, he was hardly more than a writer of screenplays, which explains in part why the translation of his novels from paper to celluloid was such a brilliant success. Gardner, unlike Chandler, was not a descriptive author, nor had he the ability to create mood and atmosphere. Having since read three of the Mason books, I understand what Waugh saw in them also why Chandler privately described Gardner as someone who could be called a writer ‘only by courtesy’. So did learning that Raymond Chandler - a good friend of the author’s - also appreciated the books for their tight structure and for ingenuity of their plots.

Several months ago, the discovery that Evelyn Waugh had been a great admirer of Erle Stanley Gardner’s novels, from which the series was adapted, further increased my appreciation and respect for the films. As with so many good things, I found that they had improved with age - not only theirs but my own as well. Over the past year and a half, I have been re-watching episodes of the original show starring Raymond Burr as Mason, Barbara Hale as Della Street, William Hopper as Paul Drake, Ray Collins as Lieutenant Tragg and William Talman as Hamilton Burger. The other was Perry Mason, which they occasionally joined us for: a small family grouping that was the closest thing the Williamsons ever came to resembling a painting by Norman Rockwell. Growing up in the Fifties and Sixties, my sister and I were permitted to watch two television shows while visiting with relatives. I was well into my thirties when my parents acquired a television set, for no good reason that I could discern after they’d gone so many years without one without obvious damage to their health or intellects.

The first perry mason book