Books
The Casebook of Sidney Zoom

by Erie Stanley Gardner
Crippen & Landru, November 2006, $

The name suggests someone who belongs in graphic novels, and this particular soldier in the small army of Gardner's pulp protagonists, with his gaunt face and hawk eyes, his love of risk and hatred for law, his conviction that he's an agent of God's justice and his habit of prowling the post-midnight streets with his savage police dog, may well be the literary granddaddy of all the dark knight figures in comic books. Between 1930 and 1934 Detective Fiction Weekly published sixteen Zoom exploits, most of them the length of novelettes, and pulp connoisseur Bill Pronzini has chosen the ten finest for this collection.

Decades after he broke into hardcover fame and fortune with his Perry Mason novels, Gardner described his years as a pulp writer, pounding out stories on the typewriter every third day, while simultaneously practicing law and trying cases in front of juries. Like all of Gardner's pulp work, the Zoom tales betray signs of having been paid for by the word and written at white heat. A reader may tire of the same descriptive taglines repeated ad infinitum, but the stories are amazingly clever and involuted. Like the vast majority of Gardner characters (Perry Mason included), Zoom is essentially a scam artist. In his middle period he morphs into a sort of Philo Vance figure whom the police graciously accept as a deductive genius and allow to investigate murders as if he were one of their own. The last stories return to his scamster roots, but with telling details of the struggle to survive during the country's worst depression, they hint that Zoom is evolving into the kind of character Anthony Boucher once called "faintly Saintly." Legal gimmicks of course abound throughout the cycle, one of them the same ploy which in Gardner's The Case of the Curious Bride (1934), famously assisted a real-life prosecutor in securing a well-deserved conviction. If this second collection in a projected series of Gardner's pulp tales indicates the quality of the volumes to come, we have many happy hours of reading to look forward to.

Francis M. Nevins

The name suggests someone who belongs in graphic novels, and this particular soldier in the small army of Gardner's pulp protagonists, with his gaunt face and hawk eyes, his love of risk and hatred for law, his conviction that he's an agent of God's justice and his habit of prowling the post-midnight streets with his savage police dog, may well be the literary granddaddy of all the dark knight figures in comic books. Between 1930 and 1934 Detective Fiction Weekly published sixteen Zoom exploits, most of them the length of novelettes, and pulp connoisseur Bill Pronzini has chosen the ten finest for this collection.

Decades after he broke into hardcover fame and fortune with his Perry Mason novels, Gardner described his years as a pulp writer, pounding out stories on the typewriter every third day, while simultaneously practicing law and trying cases in front of juries. Like all of Gardner's pulp work, the Zoom tales betray signs of having been paid for by the word and written at white heat. A reader may tire of the same descriptive taglines repeated ad infinitum, but the stories are amazingly clever and involuted. Like the vast majority of Gardner characters (Perry Mason included), Zoom is essentially a scam artist. In his middle period he morphs into a sort of Philo Vance figure whom the police graciously accept as a deductive genius and allow to investigate murders as if he were one of their own. The last stories return to his scamster roots, but with telling details of the struggle to survive during the country's worst depression, they hint that Zoom is evolving into the kind of character Anthony Boucher once called "faintly Saintly." Legal gimmicks of course abound throughout the cycle, one of them the same ploy which in Gardner's The Case of the Curious Bride (1934), famously assisted a real-life prosecutor in securing a well-deserved conviction. If this second collection in a projected series of Gardner's pulp tales indicates the quality of the volumes to come, we have many happy hours of reading to look forward to.

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by Erie Stanley Gardner
Crippen & Landru, November 2006, $

Gardner
November 2006
the-casebook-of-sidney-zoom
Crippen & Landru