As Freeman Lewis remarked about him in a letter to The New York Times:
Erle had a right to be proud of his skills as a writer. They were real and hard-earned. It often seemed to me that he operated as a professional in an area inhabited largely by amateurs. And it also often seemed to me that his books should have been reviewed by sports columnists rather than bookish people, for Erle had the kinds of learned and applied skills that sports fans understand and cherish but which book reviewers often are too pretentious to appreciate...
He was mostly given bad marks or simply overlooked by “literary” critics and he resented it, though he seldom said so. But once, in a drive from Palm Springs to Temecula, he gave the most lucid lecture on how to write readable stories, how to plot, how to select and depict believable characters, etc., that I have ever heard. He was a very serious student of the craft of writing fiction and many of those who dismissed his talents would benefit from a serious study of his practices.[3]
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.
3
Such a study has now been published: Francis L. and Roberta B. Fugate,
4
Charles G. Waugh and David Schroeder, “Here’s Looking at You Kids: A Profile of Science Fiction Fans,”