Answer: Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of Perry Mason. A self-taught lawyer who passed the California bar in 1911, Gardner built a trial practice defending poor Chinese and Mexican clients with clever, dramatic courtroom tactics — and, bored by everything but the strategy, began writing pulp fiction on the side. His first Perry Mason novel, The Case of the Velvet Claws, appeared in 1933; he went on to write some 80 Mason books (and roughly 130 in all), making Mason — the crusading defense lawyer who always cracks the case and clears his client — a pop-culture fixture across novels, radio, film, and the long-running Raymond Burr TV series. By his death in 1970, Gardner was the best-selling American author of the century, with hundreds of millions of copies in print. In the late 1940s he also founded the Court of Last Resort, a real-life team of forensic and legal experts who reinvestigated cases of the likely wrongly convicted — work that predated DNA evidence and is now regarded as a forerunner of the Innocence Project. His 1952 book about it won an Edgar Award. Read more here.
