The Truth Will Set You Free: Erle Stanley Gardner and the Innocence Plot

Abstract: This essay examines how literature shaped popular ideas about the criminal justice system over the course of the twentieth century by considering Erle Stanley Gardner's bestselling Perry Mason series, published between 1933 and 1973. Despite their formulaic nature, the novels offer valuable insight about the inconsistencies of the courts in three distinct historical eras: public skepticism regarding the legal profession in the 1930s, the championing of the justice system as key to a democratic society in the 1940s and 50s, and the concerns over due process in the 1960s. Across these periods, Gardner's fiction advocated to a mass market readership for faith in justice, despite the series's fundamental premise that an unjust state was a constant threat to innocent civilians.