Case Closed

A good mystery story is like apple pie, said Erie Stanley Gardner. "I could give you all the ingredients, tell you how hot your oven must be and how long to leave the pie in. It might come out good; it might taste lousy. But if you get a good piece of pie and eat it after a good meal, you'll like apple pie."

Gardner, who died last week at the age of 80, was the Mrs. Wagner of the genre. Since The Case of the Velvet Claws, the first of his Perry Mason mysteries, was published in 1933, his books have been bestsellers all over the world. Millions have come to know the portly defense counselor from the television serial. As far off as Saudi Arabia, Perry Mason reruns have the population wondering about the advantages of the jury system over King Feisal's rigid religious courts.

By the mid-1960s, Gardner's books were selling in 30 languages and dialects, sometimes at a rate of 20,000 copies a day. In addition to 80 Perry Mason titles and 15 works of nonfiction, Gardner produced 29 Lam-Cool books under the pseudonym A. A. Fair. All Grass Isn't Green--to be published next week --will be the last in the series, which features the exploits of Donald Lam, a small, smart legman for Bertha Cool, a plump, fortyish female private eye.

Canny in Court. By the end of last year, Gardner's 140 books had sold a total of 170 million copies in the U.S. Among fellow mystery writers, only Georges Simenon, the Belgian creator of the Inspector Maigret stories, surpassed Gardner in output or ranks with him in sales.

Unlike most modern mystery writers, Gardner avoided sexy scenes. His neat, complex plots were based on careful research and much personal experience. Perry Mason's canny courtroom performances are rooted in Gardner's own career as a trial lawyer in California from 1911 until the '30s. At the bar, he relied on quick wits, a disarming manner and special knowledge rather than browbeating tactics to win cases. He once had a gambling charge against a group of Chinese dropped by bringing dozens of other Chinese into the courtroom and challenging the prosecutor to match faces with the names on the indictments. Of his lawyer days, Gardner liked to recall that he defended "vagrants, peeping Toms and chicken thieves as if they were great statesmen."

Despite his skill, legal fees were scarce in the early Depression. To augment them, he turned to pulp writing, finally giving up the law when money began to roll in from Perry Mason. Gardner's concern for the underdog endured long after he achieved literary success. In 1948, he founded the Court of Last Resort, a private organization to aid prisoners whom he believed had been unjustly confined. He gave frequent testimony against capital punishment and often championed conservation projects against powerful interests. He was an enthusiastic sportsman who stopped hunting with a gun in favor of bow and arrow because he felt that no animal stands a chance against telescopic sights and high-powered bullets. In addition, he was a highly competent photographer, explorer and amateur archaeologist.

Fiction Factory. To enjoy so many activities and still turn out as many as 7,000 words a day, Gardner exercised cast-iron discipline. As part of what he called his "fiction factory," on a 1,000-acre ranch at Temecula, Calif., he kept up to seven full-time secretaries busy transcribing the novels he dictated into a battery of tape recorders. For privacy, he worked in strategically located trailers and houseboats. When his first wife died in 1968, one of his secretaries, Agnes Jean Bethell, became Mrs. Gardner. She had come to work for him in 1930 and was a model for Delia Street, Perry Mason's girl Friday.

In his prime, Gardner could finish a novel in six weeks. He was so prolific that a newspaper reviewer once intimated that the author had a ghost writer or two stashed away at the ranch. Gardner's publisher immediately offered $100,000 to anyone who could substantiate the story. "It would be worth $100,000," he said, "just to find someone who can write like Gardner."

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