It’s the birthday of author Erle Stanley Gardner (1889-1970), who created the character Perry Mason and wrote more than 140 mystery and detective novels, selling millions of copies to become the best-selling American author of the 20th century up to the time of his death in 1970. He also used to type so furiously that his fingers would bleed. (He finally switched to dictation.)

Gardner was born in Malden, Massachusetts, and traveled a great deal during his childhood due to his father’s work as a mining engineer. Gardener studied for a short time at Valparaiso University in Indiana but was kicked out, he said, “for slugging a professor.” When he got in trouble with the law (promoting an illegal boxing match, like you do), he got interested in law and took a job typing at a law firm in Oxnard, California. After three years of this, he was admitted to the California bar (1911) and began practicing law. He was 21 at the time. His clients were poor Mexicans and Chinese, and Gardner developed a deep sympathy for and interest in poor, disadvantaged defendants.

In 1918 Gardner took a short break from law to sell tires, which evidently paid better, but returned to practice in 1921 and also began writing for pulp magazines. After long days in the courtroom and law library, he would begin writing at 11:30 p.m. and quit around 3:00 a.m., having met his self-imposed daily minimum of 4,000 words. His first book, the Perry Mason novel The Case of the Velvet Claws, came out in 1933 and was a bestseller. After several books, he gave up his law practice to write full time.

Gardner’s heart for the underdog caused him to write a column between 1948 and 1958 called “The Court of Last Resort” for the magazine Argosy. In it, he took on cases of poor convicts serving life sentences for crimes they said they didn’t commit. With the help of a team of experts, Gardner examined cases and often got convictions overturned, as in the case of an African American man on death row for supposedly killing a cop after a car chase—even though the man couldn’t drive.

Gardner wrote at a 1,000-acre ranch at Temecula, California. His incredible output (at one point he could write a book in six weeks) earned him the nickname “the fiction factory,” which he thoroughly enjoyed. He never pretended to have literary aspirations, claiming that providing readers with the enjoyable diversion of a good detective story was satisfying enough. Upon his death, he was cremated and his ashes scattered over the Baja California peninsula.

Have a fine Tuesday (is it Tuesday?) and stay scrupulously honest to the data.