Erle Stanley Gardner letters

Expelled from high school for lampooning his principal, Perry Mason’s creator lived an unconventional life even before he became a well-known defense attorney and famous mystery author.

Expelled from high school for lampooning his principal, Perry Mason’s creator lived an unconventional life even before he became a well-known defense attorney and famous mystery author. Learn more about his life, his first love, his law practice and his books when The Real Perry Mason: Investigating Erle Stanley Gardner goes on display at the Ventura County Museum of History & Art. The lobby exhibit runs from September 21 through 24, as part of Ventura’s Erle Stanley Gardner Mystery Festival.The exhibit will include first-edition Perry Mason novels with “noir” illustrated covers, vintage photographs, personal correspondence, and the desk telephone and clock from Gardner’s law office in Ventura. A recent donation to the museum by John Orr, whose grandfather was a law partner with Gardner, includes letters from Cara Mea Keech, Gardner’s first love. Her affectionate letters and the night band she gave him, which once held back her hair, were found among Gardner’s belongings nearly a century after he received them. The relationship did not end in marriage, as Erle married his future wife Natalie the year after the last letter from Keech.Visitors will receive a bibliography of Gardner’s fiction and nonfiction works, which also indicates which ones are available in the museum’s Research Library.