Today, it’s my great pleasure to have as a guest on this here blog author Jeffrey Marks. As you’ll see from this post, he’s been extremely busy. Puts me to shame.
And check out his bio — cowabunga!
Anyhow, this post is about the amazing Erle Stanley Gardner, who really puts me to shame for sure. So … take it away, Jeffrey!
What a month! I had originally just planned to talk about my biography of Erle Stanley Gardner in this column, but of course, the best laid plans and all that. Since setting up the tour, I’ve learned that I’ll be doing a biography of Ellery Queen after this as well as learning that a new edition of Intent to Sell: Marketing the Genre Novel will be out this winter too.
Where I need to find my inspiration is from Gardner himself, who often wrote 3000 words day in and day out for months. As someone who had only mastered two-digit typing, he frequently had cuts and callouses on his finger pads from the constant pecking on the keys. But that didn’t stop him from continuing.
He found one of the secretaries, Jean Bethell, at his law firm to help type for him. She would stay up with him every evening as he dictated the latest stories for the pulps. She was an apt typist and she could keep up with the constant flow of words. He didn’t bother with punctuation, making the secretary’s task all that much harder, putting in the proper commas and periods.
Gardner produced a pulp story every three days and kept all of them in the mail. Just the paperwork alone of keeping track of possibly 100 manuscripts would be daunting, but he managed with help from Jean. It’s no wonder that she was the model for Della Street (or the second Mrs. Gardner.) The files were donated to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, so it’s still possible to see his bookkeeping methods.
In a good month, he would produce 100,000 words, which resulted for a lifetime total of words nearly 50 million written words. Needless to say, now that he dictated, the finger pads healed but he struggled with voice problems. The constant speaking that came from hours of dictating took a toll on his voice, leaving him at times unable to speak.
The results: over 650 novellas and 140 books. And here I am stressing about 3 books at once. Sigh. Even working on that many books at once caused issues for him. He was forever doing edits with the copyeditor while writing something new. If a novel were to be serialized the entire production schedule might need to be altered to move that book’s release to a date after the serialization. Oh to have such problems.
Unfortunately, the type of books I write cannot be written quite so quickly. Biographies require the author to check each fact and look under every rock to discover the truth. But it’s still a goal that puts NANOWRIMO to shame! However, I have written over 450 pages for this book, and it continues to grow. So maybe Erle Stanley Gardner has been helping with this biography.
Jeffrey Marks is a long-time mystery fan and freelancer. After numerous mystery author profiles, he chose to chronicle the short but full life of mystery writer Craig Rice.
That biography (Who Was That Lady?) encouraged him to write mystery fiction. His works include Atomic Renaissance: Women Mystery Writers of the 1940s/1950s, and a biography of mystery author and critic Anthony Boucher entitled Anthony Boucher. It has been nominated for an Agatha and fittingly, won an Anthony. He is currently completing a biography of Erle Stanley Gardner.
He is the long-time moderator of MurderMustAdvertise, an on-line discussion group dedicated to book marketing and public relations. He is the author of Intent to Sell: Marketing the Genre Novel, the only how-to book for promoting genre fiction.
His work has won a number of awards including the Barnes and Noble Prize and he was nominated for a Maxwell award (DWAA), an Edgar (MWA), three Agathas (Malice Domestic), two Macavity awards, and three Anthony awards (Bouchercon).
































