Erle Stanley Gardner Quotes

I like what I like and not what I'm supposed to like because of mass rating. And I very much dislike the things I don't like.

It's a damn good story. If you have any comments, write them on the back of a check.

Now listen, Lam," he said, "you’re a nice egg but you’ve got yourself poured into the wrong pan.

Dear Editor: It's a damn good story. If you have any comments, write them on the back of a check.

Just because people are liars is no reason for us to be fools.

Courage is the antidote to danger.

To reach your goal, remember that courage is the only antidote for danger.

I have one weapon," Mason said. "It's a powerful weapon. But sometimes it's hard to wield it because you don't know just where to grab hold of it." "What weapon is that?" Della Street asked. "The truth," Mason said.

We’re a dramatic people,” Perry Mason said slowly. “We’re not like the English. The English want dignity and order. We want the dramatic and the spectacular. It’s a national craving. We’re geared to a rapid rate of thought. We want to have things move in a spectacular manner.

When a man starts running away from things in life he builds up a whole chain of complexes and fear.

Then I’ll have more fun searching in vain then marrying one of the wrong sort.

it takes a powerful motivation to lead to murder. That’s why people don’t usually murder comparative strangers.

Life is like that. We can only see from birth to death. The rest of it is cut from our vision." Drake

I told you just what she was—all velvet and claws!

A great believer in precedent,' Della Street said. 'I think if he were ever confronted with a really novel situation he'd faint. He runs to his law books, digs around like a mole and finally comes up with case that's what he calls on all fours and was decided seventy-five or a hundred years ago.

You might be interested in his economic philosophy, Mr. Mason. He believed men attached too much importance to money as such. He believed a dollar represented a token of work performed, that men were given these tokens to hold until they needed the product of work performed by some other man, that anyone who tried to get a token without giving his best work in return was an economic counterfeiter. He felt that most of our depression troubles had been caused by a universal desire to get as many tokens as possible in return for as little work as possibly - that too many men were trying to get lost of tokens without doing any work. He said men should cease to think in terms of tokens and think, instead, only in terms of work performed as conscientiously as possible.

I like loose clothes, loose company, and loose talk, and to hell with the people who don’t.

I take it," the lawyer remarked musingly, "patience isn't one of your virtues." "I didn't know," she said, "that patience WAS a virtue.

Objected to as incompetent, irrelevant, and immaterial,

will-have a tendency to

A nurse,” I said, “would be wearing a starched uniform, and she’d have a fever thermometer ready to jab into a patient’s mouth at the first sign of acute convalescence.

Events are like telephone poles, streaming back past the observation platform of a speeding train.

reason I am telling you all of this is that, according to Harrod, Fern Driscoll

There was that about her which indicated she was warily watchful.

overboard,

The best fighters don’t worry about what the other man may do. And if they keep things moving fast enough, the other man is too busy to do much thinking.

Don’t ever fool yourself that facts don’t fit, if you get the right explanation. They’re just like jigsaw puzzles—when you get them right, they’re all going to fit together.

I’m listening. I listen with my ears and look with my eyes. I can’t do two things at once and really concentrate on them. Right now, I’m listening to your voice.

The whole structure of the law has to be a dignified, imposing edifice and built on firm foundations, if it is going to stand. Whenever you violate the law, you are tearing down a part of that structure, regardless of what goal you may want to achieve.

This imperative demand for sustenance had probably been coming on during my Erle Stanley Gardnering, but I had been so intent on trying to keep tabs on the murder gun and the substitute gun and the gun which Perry Mason had buried in the shrubbery that I hadn’t noticed it. Only now had the pangs of hunger really started to throw their weight about, and more and more clearly as they did so there rose before my eyes the vision of that steak and kidney pie which was lurking in the kitchen, and it was as though I could hear a soft voice calling to me ‘Come and get it.

But don’t they have more sunshine here than they do in San Francisco? Don’t you have lots of fog?” “Fog!” the man exclaimed. “Why that’s the thing that makes San Francisco. When that fog comes rolling in from the ocean, it peps you up. It’s bracing, stimulating. There’s a lot of rush and bustle in connection with San Francisco. Down here, people seem to have the hookworm. You girls really don’t live here, do you?” “What makes you think we don’t?” Della said. “Too much class—too much pep.

accident.

He began with The Bigger They Come by Erle Stanley Gardner, before moving on to Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep.

Loftus clenched his right fist, extended it in front of him, and gently lowered it to the desk. There was something more impressive in the gesture than would have been the case had he banged the top of the desk with explosive violence. “I don’t like criminal lawyers,” he said. “Neither do I,” Mason admitted, seating himself in what appeared to be the most comfortable chair in the office. “But you’re a criminal lawyer.” “It depends upon what you mean,” Mason observed. “I’m a lawyer. I’m not a criminal.” “You defend criminals.” “What is your definition of a criminal?” Mason asked. “A man who has committed a crime.” “And who decides that he has committed a crime?” “Why, a jury, I suppose.” “Exactly,” Mason said, with a smile. “So far, I have been very fortunate in having juries agree with me that the persons I represented were not criminals.” Loftus said, “That isn’t conclusive.” “Judges think it is,” Mason said, still smiling.

Ed McBain (as Evan Hunter and Richard Marsten), Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich, Andrew Vachss, Loren D. Estleman, Carroll John Daly, Brett Halliday, Raoul Whitfield, Mark Timlin, Richard Prather, Leigh Brackett, Erle Stanley Gardner (pre Perry Mason), James Ellroy, Clark Howard, Max Brand. In addition, rising paper costs prevented me from making this volume even heavier, as I had to withdraw material by Ed Gorman, James Reasoner, Ed Lacy, Frank Gruber, Loren D. Estleman, Derek Raymond, Robert Edmond Alter, Frederick C. Davis and Jonathan Craig – so look out for these names elsewhere. They are certainly worth a detour. But the

A lawyer,” said Perry Mason slowly, “who wouldn’t skate on thin ice for a client ain’t worth a damn.

She flowed across that office with the rippling, effortless progress of a cylinder of jelly sliding off a tilted plate.

You can’t have understanding without empathy, and you can’t have empathy without losing money.

I always use the word ‘houses of prostitution’ in talking to Edith, Mrs. Cool.” “I don’t. I call ’em whorehouses,” Bertha said acidly. “It’s easier to say. It’s more expressive, and it leaves no room for doubt.

Personally, I wouldn’t have a man who was true to me, not that I’d want him to flaunt his affairs in my face or to the neighborhood, but a man who doesn’t step out once in a while isn’t worth the powder and shot to blow him to hell.

There were young men trying to look important; important men trying to look young.

No, Donald, precious, people are sheep. They were made to be sheared. They love to worship public officials who play politics. Every eight years, the people swallow some politician hook, line, and sinker and make him president. They hold him on the political stomach for about six years. Then they commence to get indigestion because the politicians quit pouring the soda bicarbonate of publicity into their stomachs. At the end of eight years, they vomit him up in order to swallow someone else, and the process is repeated. “Why,

You know, Donald, that’s your big trouble. You fall in love every time you fall for a jane. You shouldn’t do that. If a girl looks good to you, go on the make. Love her where you find her, and leave her where you love her.

Believe me, Paul, when you’re in a jam the truth is the only thing solid enough and substantial enough to rely on.

And remember this, Frank: whenever you get to the trial of a case, never try to arouse one single emotion in the minds of a jury and bear down steadily on that emotion. “Pick some dominant emotion if you want, but touch on it only for a few moments. Then swing your argument to something else. Then come back to it. The human mind is like a pendulum: you can start it swinging a little at a time and gradually come back with added force, until finally you can close in a burst of dramatic oratory, with the jury inflamed to white rage against the other side. But if you try to talk to a jury for as much as fifteen minutes, and harp continually upon one line, you will find that the jurors have quit listening to you before you finish.

I knew that by the time the authorities got done with him, he’d make a positive identification. That’s a slick way they have of taking a witness over a period of time, and letting him become more and more positive. They showed him Bessie Forbes, on at least a dozen different occasions. They did it casually, so that he didn’t know he was being hypnotized. First, they showed him the woman, and told him that was the one who had been in his cab. Then they brought him in and confronted her with him, and told her that he had identified her. She didn’t say anything, but refused to answer questions.

And that," Mason observed, "is the secret of crime solution. You find the things that are unusual, the things which vary from the normal or average, and, using them as clues, you get away from generalities, and down to specific individual cases.

Take politics, for instance. We can look back at past events, and the deadly significance of those events seems so plain that we don’t see how people could possibly have overlooked them. Yet millions of voters, at the time, saw those facts and warped their significance

Take politics, for instance. We can look back at past events, and the deadly significance of those events seems so plain that we don’t see how people could possibly have overlooked them. Yet millions of voters, at the time, saw those facts and warped their significance so that they supported erroneous political beliefs.

Perry Mason’s hand dropped to her shoulder, patted it reassuringly. It was the impersonal gesture of the protective male.

And let me give you a tip, Paul—don’t ever underestimate a hunch on a lame canary.

Happen’ is not the word to describe the manner in which I attain my knowledge,” Drake said, twisting his fish-mouth into a droll grin. “It takes elbow-grease, concentration, perspicacity, and perspiration, a rare combination of intuitive—” “Yes, I know,” Mason interrupted, matching his grin. “I’ll find all that in the expense account when I get it. But, please tell me, Mr. Worldly-Wise Man, what time she intends to move the baggage.

I’m not a lawyer,” Mason grinned, “except as a sideline. I’m an adventurer.

Yes, I will,” Mason said. “It’s not generally known, but under the law a private citizen can make an arrest when a felony has in fact been committed and he has reasonable grounds to believe the person he’s arrested has committed the felony.

He was despondent,” Eves said, “so low he could walk under a snake’s belly on stilts.

Perry Mason turned his back to the morning sunlight which streaked in through the windows of his private office and regarded the pile of unanswered mail with a frown. 'I hate this office routine,' he said. Della Street, his secretary, glanced up at him with eyes that contained a glint of amusement in their cool, steady depths. Her smile was tolerant. 'I presume,' she said, 'having just emerged from one murder case, you'd like another.' 'Not necessarily a murder case,' he told her, 'but a good fight in front of a jury. I like dramatic murder trials, where the prosecution explodes an unexpected bomb under me, and, while I'm whirling through the air, I try to figure how I'm going to light on my feet when I come down... What about this chap with the glass eye?' 'Mr. Peter Brunold,' she said. 'He's waiting for you in the outer office. I told him you'd probably delegate his case to an assistant. He said he'd either see you or no one.' 'What does he look like?' 'He's about forty, with lots of black, curly hair. He has an air of distinction about him and he looks as though he'd suffered. He's the type of man you'd pick for a poet. There's something peculiar in his expression, a soulful, sensitive something. You'll like him, but he's the type that would make business for you, if you ask me-a romantic dreamer who would commit an emotional murder if he felt circumstances required him to do it.' 'You can readily detect the glass eye?' Mason inquired. 'I can't detect it at all,' she said, shaking her head. 'I always thought I could tell an artificial eye as far as I could see one, but I'd never know there was anything wrong with Mr. Brunold's eye.' 'Just what was it he told you about his eye?' 'He said he had a complete set of eyes-one for morning-one for evening-one slightly bloodshot-one...' Perry Mason smacked his fist against his palm. His eyes glinted. 'Take away that bunch of mail, Della,' he commanded, 'and send in the man with the glass eye. I've fought will contests, tried suits for slander, libel, alienation of affections, and personal injuries, but I'm darned if I've ever had a case involving a glass eye, and this is going to be where I begin. Send him in.

Las rociadas de lluvia corrían por su rostro y burbujeaban en sus cabellos. Abombó el pecho, inhaló la impetuosa frescura de la galerna, escuchó el estruendo de las olas, el aullido del viento... y se sintió feliz.

His face didn’t change expression, but his eyes glinted. “That’s one of the chances I have to take,” he told her. “I can’t expect my clients to be loyal to me. They pay me money. That’s all.” She stared at him with a speculative look that held something of a wistful tenderness. “But you insist on being loyal to your clients, no matter how rotten they are.” “Of course,” he told her. “That’s my duty.” “To your profession?” “No,” he said slowly, “to myself. I’m a paid gladiator. I fight for my clients. Most clients aren’t square shooters. That’s why they’re clients. They’ve got themselves into trouble. It’s up to me to get them out. I have to shoot square with them. I can’t always expect them to shoot square with me.

Do you know anything at all about how they hang people?” Perry Mason asked abruptly. “What do you mean?” she demanded. “For murder,” he went on. “It usually happens along in the morning. They come down to the death cell and read the death warrant. Then they strap your hands behind your back, and strap a board along your back, so that you can’t cave in. They start a march down the corridor to the scaffold. There are thirteen steps that you have to climb, and then you walk over and stand on a trap. There are prison officials standing by the side of the trap, who look things over, and, in a little cubby-hole back of the trap, are three convicts with sharp knives. There are three strings that run across a board. The hangman puts a noose over your head, and a black bag, and then puts straps around your legs …

You can't have understanding without having empathy, and you can't have empathy without losing money.

Married men get so they make a routine even of keeping a mistress

as incompetent, irrelevant, and immaterial.

The secretary was a good-looking girl—or would have been if she’d given herself a chance. Some discouraging experience in her background had made her feel that she couldn’t be bothered with sex appeal, and so she slicked her hair back, used no make-up, and hated men.

If you ask me, this younger generation is altogether too careless about their morals.

of the murder and whether he could possibly have been out there at the country club at the time the murder was committed. “There’s not a chance. At the time the murder must have been committed, Hedley was in a drugstore having

The rule was: everything in its place. To this day I paint in one part of my house, write in another, read in another; read in fact, in two others: frivolous and delicious reading such as Simenon and Erle Stanley Gardner in one room, scholarship in another. And when I am away from home, I am somebody else. This may seem suspicious to the simple mind of a psychiatrist, but it seems natural enough. My cat does not know me when we meet a block away from home, and I gather from his expression that I'm not supposed to know him, either.

And then what happens to the reformer, lover? He either has to build up a political machine or else he’s defeated at the next election. If he builds up a political machine, he has to do it by distributing gravy to the boys who are on the inside.—Hell, Donald, politicians always have cake. The people pass it to them on silver platters, and when the politicians cut it, they have to cut a piece for each of their friends. Otherwise, the friend becomes an enemy.—

We have graft today. A hundred years ago we had graft. We probably have more today than we had a hundred years ago. For three generations now people have been following reformers, fighting all sort of graft.—And what has it brought them, sweetheart? Not a damn thing, except more graft than when they started

Every eight years, the people swallow some politician hook, line, and sinker and make him president. They hold him on the political stomach for about six years. Then they commence to get indigestion because the politicians quit pouring the soda bicarbonate of publicity into their stomachs. At the end of eight years, they vomit him up in order to swallow someone else,

did you ever hear of a politician who wasn’t elected on a platform of economy in office?” “That isn’t it,” I said. “Oh yes it is, lover. I can remember way back. Even then all politicians were promising economy, and still it wasn’t new. They’d always hold up the extravagances of the past administration before the horrified eyes of the voters. They’d pledge greater economy and get elected.—And there’s never a case on record, lover, where a politician hasn’t spent more than his predecessor in office.

Della Street, Perry Mason’s confidential secretary, said, “A couple of lovebirds have strayed into the office without an appointment. They insist it’s a matter of life and death.” “Everything is,” Mason said. “If you start with the idea of perpetuating life, you must accept the inevitable corollary of death—but I presume these people aren’t interested in my philosophical ideas.” “These people,” Della Street announced, “are interested in each other, in the singing of the birds, the blue of the sky, the moonlight on water, the sound of the night wind in the trees.” Mason laughed. “It’s infectious. You are getting positively romantic, poetic, and show evidence of having been exposed to a highly contagious disease . . . . Now, what the devil would two lovebirds want with the services of a lawyer who specializes in murder cases?

He called the police and told them I was trying to blackmail him.” “Were you?” “Not exactly. Bertha was trying to cut herself a piece of cake, and—” “And what?” I asked. “And the knife slipped,” she said.

appraisal was evident in his glance. “Well, then,” he said, “let’s hear about

Clinton Foley is living?” “Of course he’s living. He’s living next door

You Can Die Laughing (1957) Some

Angeles in the plain-clothes division,

Mason.” Mauvis

PHOTOGRAPH

Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Erle Stanley Gardner, Raymond Chandler. Pretty much any detective on the job loves a good puzzle.

You took him up to the Snug-Rest Auto Court, didn’t you?

The only thing we’re supposed to do is get Mrs. Allred off.

Could I look at the car?” Mason asked. “Got anything for me to look at?

Okay,” Drake said, “I’ll get my man on the job and have him up there. Anything else?” “That’s all for now,” Mason said. “Well, wait a minute! This rancher, Overbrook, looks like a big, good-natured, rugged individual, but I’d like to find out something about him.

out,

Within reasonable limits, we gals all look alike nowadays, except for details.

You see, amnesia is usually the result of mental unbalance. It’s an attempt on the part of the mind to escape from something that the mind either can’t cope with or doesn’t want to cope with. It’s a refuge. It’s the means a man uses to close the door of his mind on something that may lead to insanity.

a man who was tall in a gangling, loose-jointed way, with a static, vacuous grin seeming to betoken a continuous attempt to placate and mollify a world which somehow kept him on the defensive.

The checkerboarded fields of the Imperial Valley were refreshingly green with irrigated crops. Then the highline canal stretched like a huge snake below the plane and immediately the desert took over. It was as abrupt as that. Below the highline canal irrigation had turned the desert into a rich, fertile area. On the other side of the canal there was nothing but sand and a long straight ribbon of paved highway.

Virtually every man has enemies. Sometimes they’re business enemies. More often they’re personal enemies, people who hate him, people who will look down their noses and say it’s too bad when they hear he’s bumped off, but who will be tickled to death just the same; but it takes a peculiar psychological build-up to perpetrate a murder. A man must have a certain innate ferocity, a certain lack of consideration, and, usually, a lack of imagination.” “Why a lack of imagination?” “I don’t know,” he said, “except that it’s nearly always true. I think imaginative people sympathize with the sufferings of others because they’re able to visualize those sufferings more keenly in their own minds. An unimaginative person, on the other hand, can’t visualize himself in the shoes of another. Therefore, he sees life only from his own selfish angle. Killers are frequently cunning, but they’re rarely original. They’re selfish, and usually determined. Of course, I’m not talking now about a murder which is the result of some sudden overpowering emotion.

You hear a lot about people who are afraid to die. Well, they’re nothing compared to the ones who are afraid to live—people who go through life just making motions—and conventional motions at that.

You on duty at ten this morning?” he asked the attendant. The man hesitated before answering. Mason said, “You’re eligible for a five dollar reward, if you were.

Lots of lawyers don't like circumstantial evidence. I do. I've never had any quarrel with the evidence of circumstances. My quarrel is with the habit of giving events the obvious, careless interpretation. I dislike sloppy thinking.

I'm not naturally tough. I've learned to be tough through rubbing elbows with the police.

The deuce, it is!” Mason ejaculated.

I’m satisfied now,” Mason said.

He’s a guy with a one-track mind. When he starts for one objective he can’t think of anything else.

fuzzy hair that bristled out on each side above the ears,

The voice was suave, pleasant, well modulated and expressive. The restless eyes were so black that it was hard to detect expression in them, but his voice more than made up for it. Here was no man who talked in a conversational monotone, but one whose every word seemed alive with expression. His motions as he moved about straightening up the room were graceful, well-timed and effective.

Marriage is a working relationship. It has its moments of genuine, downright boredom. That’s the trouble with Daphne. She can’t stand being bored. She has to be in love—madly in love, and it’s difficult to be madly in love with a husband three hundred and sixty-five days of the year.

The passing of years had made him indifferent to feminine beauty, and long association with the police had utterly calloused him to human misery. His manner indicated that he had detached himself from the scene of which he was a part. His body hulked between the prisoners and the door, which constituted a discharge of his duty. His mind was far away, occupied with the mathematical percentages of his prospects for winning on the races the next afternoon; daydreaming what he would do when he became eligible for pension; and rehashing in his mind an argument he had had with his wife that morning, thinking somewhat ruefully of her natural aptitude for delivering an extemporaneous tongue lashing, whereas he hadn’t thought of his best retorts until long afterward. His wife had a gift that way. No, damn it, she’d inherited it from her mother—that must be it. He remembered some of the scenes with his mother-in-law before she’d died some ten years ago. At that time, Mabel had been all worked up over the way the old lady used to have tantrums. That was before Mabel had got fat. She certainly had a good figure in those days. Well, come to think of it, he’d put on a little weight himself.