Oct 21, 2026 · 40 min · 19 segments
Today, we're joined by author Jack El-Hai to talk about his new book, The Case of the Autographed Corpse. It's all about Erle Stanley Gardner, inventor of the beloved fictional criminal defense…
Jack El-HaiGuest
Gavin WhiteheadHost
In the mid-1940s, Gardner won a reputation as a champion of wrongfully convicted people, especially low-income Americans.
Prison inmates started writing letters to him, imploring him to help them overturn their convictions, and in Gardner's words, quote, "Just about every hopeless case in the United States was dumped in my lap in a deluge of fan mail," unquote.
This happened as a result of a series of, um, profiles, uh, uh, uh, a three-part profile that was written of Gardner by a writer named Alva Johnson, and those three parts ran in the Saturday Evening Post, which was, if not the highest circulation magazine in America at the time, it was certainly in the top three.
And, and Johnson in that profile mentioned that Gardner loved the underdog and also went into his earlier, uh, career as an attorney.
And, uh, after those articles were published, Johnson compiled them into a book that sold very well, and this was just, this is in the '40s, just when Gardner was reaching his stride as a prolific and very successful mystery writer.
So a lot of people read those profiles and the book, and have, having heard that he, uh, favors underdogs, they started writing to him.
Let's take a quick break, and when we come back, we'll talk about how Gardner took action to help a wrongly incarcerated man.
In the mid-1940s, Gardner won a reputation as a champion of wrongfully convicted people, especially low-income Americans.
Prison inmates started writing letters to him, imploring him to help them overturn their convictions, and in Gardner's words, quote, "Just about every hopeless case in the United States was dumped in my lap in a deluge of fan mail," unquote.
This happened as a result of a series of, um, profiles, uh, uh, uh, a three-part profile that was written of Gardner by a writer named Alva Johnson, and those three parts ran in the Saturday Evening Post, which was, if not the highest circulation magazine in America at the time, it was certainly in the top three.
And, and Johnson in that profile mentioned that Gardner loved the underdog and also went into his earlier, uh, career as an attorney.
And, uh, after those articles were published, Johnson compiled them into a book that sold very well, and this was just, this is in the '40s, just when Gardner was reaching his stride as a prolific and very successful mystery writer.
So a lot of people read those profiles and the book, and have, having heard that he, uh, favors underdogs, they started writing to him.
Let's take a quick break, and when we come back, we'll talk about how Gardner took action to help a wrongly incarcerated man.
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