The Case Of The Glamorous Ghost by Erle Stanley Gardner: An Analysis

Not so much a book review as a look at the pantser vs. plotter schools of writing.  

Most writers would give their eyeteeth to create a character as iconic and memorable as Perry Mason.  Nobody ever accused Erle Stanley Gardner of being a great littérateur but dang, the lad could write entertaining popular fiction and did he ever write a lot of it!

Skipping over Gardner’s own fascinating personal history, he’s known as one of the legendary “million words a year” writers of the pulp era (Walter B. Gibson a.k.a. Maxwell “The Shadow” Grant, Frederick Schiller Faust a.k.a. Max Brand, and Lester Dent a.k.a. Kenneth “Doc Savage” Robeson being other stalwarts in that class), cranking out a staggering four thousand words a day for most of his productive career.

He wrote, out of sheer necessity, as a pantser (i.e., one who writes by the seat of their pants, changing story and characters as it unfolds before them); there simply wasn’t enough time for intricate plotting or in-depth characterization.

Striking gold with Perry Mason, Gardner quickly left the pulps and focused almost entirely on books averaging three Perry Mason novels plus other mysteries and non-fiction books each year.  

The coronavirus lockdown gives me ample opportunity to catch up of my reading, and since a 1979 omnibus of Perry Mason novels sat unread on my shelf far too long, I’m using that for bedtime reading.

They are the ideal type of stories to end the day with:
Fast paced, melodramatic enough so the reader doesn’t need to invest heavily in plot or characters, featuring beloved series characters whom we enjoy seeing in action (of course, Raymond Burr, Barbara Hale as Della Street, and William Hopper as Paul Drake put their marks on those characters so thoroughly it’s now almost impossible to envision them any differently).

The Case Of The Glamourous Ghost is a 1955 book that Gardner wrote with one eye on possible serialization in The Saturday Evening Post (it wasn’t; that year’s SatEvPost serial was The Case Of The Sunbather’s Diary).

It bears all the earmarks of that particular market:
A puzzling and salacious hook (but not too salacious for white bread America), a batch of red herrings and possible suspects, a seemingly doomed defendant who can’t keep their story straight or tell the truth, and in the last chapter Perry kicks Hamilton Burger’s ass around the block during cross examination.

(Sidebar:  When I re-watched the old Perry Mason TV series a few months back, I realized I’d forgotten how sneaky, underhanded, and duplicitous Perry could be when it came to defending a client.  The later books, written with SatEvPost in mind as a possible market, show him acting even more duplicitously than that, and that version of Perry is toned down from the original early novels.  No wonder Burger and the cops hated him.)

But to quote what John Ormsby wrote about the original English translation of Don Quixote:  “It has all the freshness and vigour, but also a full measure of the faults, of a hasty production.”

Gardner never broke his penny-a-word pulps writing habits, and extensively padded the first third of The Case Of The Glamour Ghost.  Perry will tell Della to call Paul, Della will say she’ll call Paul, Della actually calls Paul and tells him Perry wants to speak to him, Della will then tell Perry that Paul is on the line, and finally Perry will actually talk to him. 

Gardner himself explained why:
"At three cents a word, every time I say 'Bang' in the story I get three cents. If you think I'm going to finish the gun battle while my hero still has fifteen cents worth of unexploded ammunition in his gun, you're nuts."  

The ”glamourous ghost” in question is Perry’s soon-to-be client, a young woman arrested by the police wearing nothing but a torn negligée and a raincoat.  Gardner actually stages this “off camera” in the form of a tongue-in-cheek newspaper article, thus allowing the reader to fill in as many details as they wish…or are comfortable with.  

Not a bad approach for scenes like this, but one that can (and in this case, does) prove problematic further along.

The glamourous ghost claims amnesia, and in a few short paragraphs her half-sister shows up to hire Perry.

Seems their dad is a well respected jeweler and the ghost is a bit of a free spirit as they would say back in the day, and the lady in Perry’s office thinks her younger semi-sibling might be in some kind of trouble and if she is the scandal would traumatize dear old dad…

Okay, you don’t need to be a die hard mystery fan to recognize this set-up comes straight out of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, and sure enough, only a few pages more and we’ve got a corpse on our hands, the amnesiac’s purported new husband.

Well, if you’re gonna steal, steal from the best, right?

Here’s where pantsing becomes problematic:
Chandler wrote his novel by mashing up  previously published short stories (primarily “Killer In The Rain” and “The Curtain” but bits and pieces of a few others as well), combining and recasting characters, and creating Philip Marlowe as his new iconic private eye narrator.  

Cannibalizing previous material gave Chandler a leg up on plotting and characterization, and he did smooth over a lot of loose ends to produce a mostly coherent novel.

Infamously, however, he left the murder of a minor character unexplained, and when Leigh Brackett and William Faulkner adapted The Big Sleep for the screen in 1946, finding themselves stymied by this crime they simply picked up the phone, called Chandler, and asked who killed the chauffeur.

There came a long pause on the other end of the line followed by:  “…damn…”

Gardner, savvy enough not to follow Chandler’s footsteps too closely, spins his story in a different direction, but not before following them far enough to keep the murdered supposed husband permanently off stage, never seen in the flesh but described by people who knew or interacted with him.

That worked for Chandler because all Marlowe need do is figure out who dunnit, he’s not obliged to act on that information.

Perry can’t do that, not without losing his law license and being charged as an accessory after the fact.

So Gardner starts spitballin’ ideas and comes up with an explanation that, while not the least bit plausible, will serve for a fast paced Perry Mason novel.

The middle third of the novel presents various red herrings in the form of clues and characters, and proves the most entertaining portion because Perry actually does talk about the legal limits a lawyer faces, and how to circumvent them in true lawyerly fashion.  Here’s where the bulk of the actual detectin’ goes on, and dear old dad and older half-sister pop up a few times.

At some point, Gardner realizes big sis’ motivation makes absolutely no sense.

If her stated objective is to protect dear old dad by sweeping things under the rug, she makes a piss poor job of it by hiring the most famous lawyer in town and turning it into a media circus.

So Gardner shows Perry already thought of that angle, and assumes big sis’ really wants to case to blow wide open publicly, and it does, and…and…

…and Gardner just forgets about it.

Indeed, by the last third of the story big sis and dear old dad virtually disappear from the narrative, popping up among the spectators in court and that’s it.

There’s a host of other characters who flow in and out of the story, far too many of them too similar in appearance and function.

That’s partially due to one character’s motives as they target a certain kind of person in the story, hence so many of that type appearing.

It’s also a function of not adequately revising a story once written, not necessarily drastically rewriting it, but making sure every character is distinctive, every action is clear.

One certainly can’t blame Gardner for writing fast. His 1935 pulp era income would be well over $375,000 today, and at the time of his death he held the best selling career total for an American writer (some upstart named Stephen King has since overtaken him).

But it does demonstrate both the bane and boon of the pantsing method.

As a staff writer, many a time I would pitch a detailed outline to a studio, get the okay to proceed, then during the actual writing discover characters and scenes originally envisioned didn’t work as well as planned, that new ideas and opportunities presented themselves as the story unfolded.

As a story editor, I needed to separate the wheat from the chaff, to see when a writer could go off in a new direction, and when they needed guidance back to the original workable premise.

Gardner then, like King today, proved just too successful for anyone to corral, and as a result individual works suffer at the expense of career success.

The last third of the book proves the densest in terms of writing and plot.  It’s only two chapters long but they’re both several times longer than any of the earlier chapters.

They represent two days of courtroom testimony with a little detectin’ going on in between.

Gardner finally gets around to explaining -- or rather, trying to explain -- why Perry’s client went prancing around virtually naked on the night in question and holy %#@& does it not make a lick of sense.  It’s not just an example of idiot plotting, it’s perverse idiot plotting, behaving in a manner that only guarantees to make things worse for you.

Seriously, one phone call to the police followed by “I want a lawyer” and this story would be wrapped up in twenty pages.

Twelve if that lawyer is Perry Mason.

There are clever bits (no spoilers, but the resolution hinges on two seemingly identical things not being identical at all, and Gardner drops that clue expertly so no complaints there) but there are also flaws.

A Perry Mason story is the kind of mystery where the culprit needs to be someone with an active involvement in his client’s life, there needs to be a direct motive to frame or involve the client.

It’s not like Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle’s “The Red-Headed League” in which the client himself is a red herring and the true mystery lays elsewhere, or a police procedural like Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct stories where it’s just a matter of relentlessly following each thread until one of them leads somewhere.

Of course, the real appeal of a Perry Mason novel lays not in solving the mystery but rather watching Perry and Della and Paul do the solving.  If the actual mystery and solution proves farfetched (and The Case Of The Glamourous Ghost stands arguably among the most farfetched of the series), it’s at least entertaining and a pleasant afternoon or evening filler.

But it does demonstrate for serious writers, there needs to be a happy medium where pantsing and plotting co-exist.

In my short stories and fictoids I’m typically a pantser.  I know where I’m starting from, I know where I’d like to wind up, and I set off.

Should I discover a more interesting route or destination along the way, I’m fully capable of going there.

But longer forms require more deliberate aforethought.

Not necessarily plotting out each and every beat (that can squeeze the life and soul out of a story) but enough structure to provide for growth.

To mix in a gardening metaphor, it’s like raising a tomato plant.

Left to themselves most will grow out wildly in all directions and fail to produce a useable crop.

Give them a framework to climb up, watch them carefully, encourage the best tendrils to flourish and trim them as needed (i.e., “kill your darlings”), and you wind up with a big, bountiful crop.

Gardner never tried for high literature and that’s okay; every chef needn’t specialize in fillet mignon. 

He certainly cranked out enough Big Macs to make himself -- and more importantly, his readers -- happy.

Decide what you want to dish out…

…and plan accordingly.

© Buzz Dixon