Perry Mason’s Friend From Oxnard : Fame: Erle Stanley Gardner gave life to a sly defense lawyer and, though dead 20 years, is still the world’s second best-selling author. But no statue or plaque testifies to his success.

Erle Stanley Gardner, who wrote 82 Perry Mason mysteries, might have called this one “The Case of the Forgotten Author.”

Or better yet--since Gardner loved alliteration--”The Case of the Slighted Storyteller.”

Not that this is a Perry Mason case. There’s no murder, no hapless client, no suspects, no chance for courtroom theatrics or a confession from the witness stand.

But there’s certainly a mystery here. Some might call it a crime: Ventura County has no memorial to Erle Stanley Gardner, who lived here for more than 20 years.

Gardner invented Perry Mason in the study of his house on Foster Avenue in Ventura. As a lawyer in Oxnard, he perfected the courtroom razzle-dazzle that Mason later used to enrage his fictional adversary, Dist. Atty. Hamilton Burger.

And in Ventura County, Gardner met two of the women who worked as his secretaries and are considered models for Della Street, Mason’s able assistant.

Except that in real life, the lawyer married them, 56 years apart.

Although he died 20 years ago, Gardner is still among the best-selling authors in the world. The Guinness Book of World Records ranks him second only to Gothic novelist Barbara Cartland in volumes sold, with 319 million in 37 languages.

And Perry Mason still sells. In durable paperback books, black-and-white reruns and top-rated made-for-TV movies, millions still sympathize when a luckless client insists: “Honest, Mr. Mason, he was dead when I got there!”

Mason has a fan club, the National Assn. for the Advancement of Perry Mason, which publishes a quarterly newsletter. The University of Texas has built a re-creation of Gardner’s study and takes care of his manuscripts, plot outlines and memorabilia.

But in Ventura County, where Gardner got his start, the only memorial is a portrait at the law firm where he worked. According to a secretary there, “Nobody pays any attention to it.”

A few years ago, former Oxnard Councilman Mike Plisky proposed a Gardner exhibit at the Heritage Square historical park. “I thought how neat it would be to develop something downtown in honor of him,” Plisky said. But the idea languished behind other priorities.

If there’s no Erle Stanley Gardner Street, no park statue, no mention in the tourist brochures, perhaps it’s because Gardner left more than 50 years ago, when his success as an author allowed him to give up law and live on the road.

He may be forgotten now, but when he lived in the county Gardner was a local celebrity, recalls Vivian Bostwick of Ventura.

“I can remember whenever he had a story coming out in Black Mask or one of those magazines . . . everybody bought it,” said Bostwick, 78, who remains a close friend of Gardner’s daughter.

“I suppose there are still old-timers who remember him. . . . Ventura has grown so much.”

Gardner, a Massachusetts native, arrived in Oxnard in 1911 at age 21. The town had a sugar beet mill, a bustling port, about 3,000 residents, and a reputation for brothels and gambling dens.

Though he had passed the bar without a degree in law or anything else, Gardner quickly made a name for himself with legal tactics right out of a Perry Mason story.

For example, there was the case of 21 Chinese residents accused of gambling with undercover detectives. Gardner felt certain that the detectives would not be able to distinguish the faces of the Chinese. Before they were picked up for trial, Gardner had the Chinese switch homes among themselves.

Officers picked up the first suspect at the home of a Chinese named Wong Duck. The man insisted he was not Wong Duck but was hauled off anyway. By the time a deputy familiar with the Chinese community realized they had the wrong man, it was too late. The Oxnard paper had the story, headlined “Wong Duck May Be Wrong Duck, Says Deputy Sheriff.”

Humiliated, the district attorney dismissed charges against all the Chinese.

In another gambling case, Gardner got a Chinese suspect freed by showing the Oxnard city ordinance to be unconstitutional. But Gardner was certain that the city attorney would simply arrest his client again and try him under state gambling laws.

So the crafty Gardner hustled his client over to Ventura and told a judge that he felt awful about getting a guilty man off on a technicality. Gardner swore out a citizen’s complaint against his own client and had him quietly plead guilty to violating the state gambling law. The sympathetic judge fined the man $10.

Unaware of the Ventura proceeding, the Oxnard city attorney rearrested the man under the state law and confidently asked for the maximum six-month sentence. Gardner triumphantly produced the Ventura court record and argued that his client could not be tried twice for the same offense.

The incidents, recounted in a 1978 biography of Gardner by Dorothy B. Hughes, were among many that earned Gardner the enmity of Oxnard’s police and the devotion of its Chinese residents.

“I am terribly busy,” Gardner wrote to his father. “I have clients of all classes except the upper and middle classes.”

While in Oxnard, Gardner eloped with a secretary in his law office, Natalie Talbert, and lived in a house that still stands at the southeast corner of First and C streets.

In 1915, H. Frank Orr, the second of four generations of Orrs to practice law in the county, invited Gardner to join his prestigious firm in Ventura. (That partnership, now known as Benton, Orr, Duval and Buckingham, has the portrait of Gardner in its conference room.)

The Gardners and their only child, Natalie Grace, moved into a house at Fir and Main streets in Ventura. A Japanese restaurant occupies the site now, but the Gardners’ daughter--now Natalie Grace Naso, 77, of Bishop--remembers her old neighborhood.

“When I moved there at age 4, Main Street wasn’t paved, it was dirt,” she said. “Vivian Bostwick and I made mud pies in the street. The town wasn’t very big, a few blocks long.”

The Gardners eventually moved up to the house on Foster Avenue, now occupied by Robert and Barbara Garrison.

Naso visited the Foster Avenue home a few months ago when she returned for the 60th reunion of her class at Ventura High School. “He dictated his first book out loud in the study upstairs,” she recalled. “It took him three days. My mother and I thought we’d go deaf.”

She also recalls how much her father hated being cooped up indoors. Gardner loved archery, riding horses in the Ojai Valley and camping on the beach, Naso said. Law interfered with such pursuits.

“The more successful I became as an attorney,” Gardner wrote, “the more I was called on to be in one place, to answer telephones, to draw up contracts and conveyances, which I detested.”

Gardner had tried other sidelines and had some success in sales. In 1921, he started writing fiction, which he saw as a way to achieve independence and to work outdoors.

Gardner had a drawerful of rejection slips before he finally sold a short story called “The Shrieking Skeleton” to Black Mask Magazine. It was the first of dozens of short stories Gardner peddled to the so-called pulp magazines, named for the cheap paper they were printed on.

“He was always typing away,” said Bostwick, who recalls hearing the author at work when she visited her friend.

In 1932, Gardner wrote to the William Morrow & Co. publishing house and proposed a series of mystery novels. Ever the salesman, he had surveyed the mystery market and come up with a new product. Instead of the tough-guy detectives made popular by Dashiell Hammett and others, Gardner’s protagonist would be a patient crime-solving lawyer.

“I want to make my hero a fighter, not by having him be ruthless with women and underlings, but by having him wade into the opposition and battle his way through to victory,” Gardner wrote.

“I am calling him Perry Mason, and the character I am trying to create for him is that of a fighter who is possessed of infinite patience. He tries to jockey his enemies into a position where he can deliver one good knockout punch.”

Above all, Gardner told his publisher, “I want to establish a style of swift motion. I want to have characters who . . . sprint the whole darned way to the goal line.”

Naso says her father believed the rapid pacing of his stories was the key to their success. “He once told me that anybody who wanted to figure out his plots could do it,” Naso said, “but the pacing was so fast they never wanted to put it down long enough to think.”

Lawrence Hughes, a former Morrow chief executive and still the agent for Gardner’s books, agrees.

“There’s never a moment when you don’t want to read on to the next page,” Hughes said. “It’s like riding on roller skates. You just keep moving.”

In addition, Hughes said, “His readers thought they were learning something about how the law works, how courtrooms work. And he was pretty accurate on that.”

Finally, Hughes said, Gardner’s books were predictably satisfying. “You knew what you were buying when you bought one of his books.”

Indeed, from “The Case of the Velvet Claws,” which appeared in 1933, to “The Case of the Postponed Murder,” published posthumously in 1973, Mason’s exploits have followed a familiar formula:

A client, often an attractive young woman, seeks Mason’s help in some petty but intriguing legal matter and quickly finds herself accused of murder. The circumstantial evidence is overwhelming, and the client usually makes matters worse by lying to Mason. But with the investigative savvy of private detective Paul Drake and moral support from Della Street, Mason invariably trips up the prosecution’s witnesses and exposes the real killer.

“I want it understood that I have no natural aptitude as a writer,” Gardner once said. “In fact, I don’t consider myself a very good writer. I do consider myself a good plotter. And I consider myself one hell of a good salesman as far as manufacturing merchandise that will sell is concerned.”

And Gardner is still “a gold mine,” Hughes said. Ballantine Books reissues six Perry Mason titles a year in paperback. Perry Mason is “very big in Japan,” said Hughes. And he just signed contracts with publishers who will bring “The Case of the Stuttering Bishop” to Hungary and “The Case of the Velvet Claws” to Czechoslovakia. Poland will be printing “The D.A. Draws a Circle,” one of dozens of books Gardner wrote in addition to the Perry Mason series.

Gardner’s success with the Mason books allowed him to give up his law practice in favor of long trips to the desert, accompanied by three sisters who made up his secretarial pool: Jeanne, Peggy and Honey Walter. Gardner had met Jeanne when she was a clerk at Ventura’s Pierpont Inn, and he enlisted her and her sisters to work in the law office and later as his personal secretaries.

“He got into traveling by trailers,” Bostwick said. “He and his secretaries would go out into the desert and stay for long periods.”

Like other friends and relatives, publisher Hughes remembers Gardner as “a very strong character.”

“He was a no-nonsense guy . . . and demanded a good job of the people who worked for him,” said Hughes, who first met Gardner in the 1950s. “We all called him Uncle Erle. But he was a demanding uncle.”

Naso recalls that her mother went along on her father’s desert trips, but “it was rough to live with him and three secretaries. There was nothing for her to do while they were writing.”

Natalie Gardner stopped going with her husband, and sometimes took trips herself to Europe and the South. Gardner gradually stopped coming to Ventura. She moved to the Bay Area, he bought a ranch in Temecula and the Foster Avenue home was sold.

“They were always very amicable,” granddaughter Valerie Naso said, and they never divorced. “They just drifted apart.”

A few months after his wife died in 1968, Gardner, at age 79, married longtime secretary Jeanne Walter Bethell. Bethell’s own marriage had broken up during her long sessions on the road with Gardner, and she had spent most of her life looking after his affairs.

Was Jeanne the model for Della Street?

Possibly, said Jeanne Bethell Gardner, who lives in Fallbrook, although she thinks the character is an amalgam of herself, her sisters and other secretaries who worked for Gardner.

“I think it was a combination of several girls,” the author’s widow said. “Probably me principally.”

Gardner’s daughter doesn’t dismiss the possibility. “A lot of people say so,” she said. “It could very well be.”

But Valerie Naso--who says her grandfather refused to discuss the subject--believes Gardner’s first wife, Natalie, inspired the character. “She probably influenced him a great deal, being his first secretary and first wife.”

Della Street--and her relationship with Mason--is the subject of an article that Jim Davidson is writing for the newsletter of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Perry Mason, a Berkeley-based group that Davidson heads.

“Part of the appeal is the ambiguity of the relationship,” Davidson said.

Gardner apparently reveled in that ambiguity, and he replied with scorn when his publisher said readers wanted a more normal relationship.

“How little you know of human nature,” Gardner wrote. “Those who want Della to sleep with her boss are those who are afraid she isn’t, and those who think she shouldn’t are the ones who are certain she is.”

Davidson noted that in three different novels Mason proposed to Della, and each time she turned him down. Perhaps the best explanation--one that has parallels in Gardner’s own life--was in the 1937 whodunit, “The Case of the Lame Canary.”

“We’re getting along swell the way it is,” Della tells Mason. “You’d establish me in a home somewhere as your wife. Then you’d get a secretary to help you with your work. The first thing you knew, you’d be sharing excitement and experiences with the secretary and I’d be entirely out of your life.

“No, Mr. Perry Mason, you aren’t the marrying kind. You live at too high speed. You’re too wrapped up in mysteries.”