When I was fourteen, I lived in Stockholm, Sweden. I worked as an office boy at SKANDINAVISKA BANKEN, at night I attended Estonian night school and after school I attended the movies. I don't know about you, but when I was fourteen, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out who I wanted to be.
I had given up the idea of becoming a pirate but all other careers seemed wide open to me. Most of all I wanted to be like my father. I wanted to be an actor and a director. But I also wanted to be a police detective, like Dana Andrews in LAURA, an airline pilot, like Alan Ladd in CALCUTTA, a cattle rancher, like John Wayne in RED RIVER and a trumpet player like Kirk Douglas in YOUNG MAN WITH A HORN. There used to be an arcade in the heart of Stockholm. In the arcade there was a small movie theatre where I saw ACROSS THE PACIFIC with Humphrey Bogart and THE STREET WITH NO NAME with Richard Widmark. There was also a used bookstore in the arcade where you could buy Erle Stanley Gardner books. The books were in English and they were pocket books that fit in your back pocket as you rode your bicycle all over town. The owner of the bookstore in the arcade was a Swede. he was a very big Erle Stanley Gardner fan and I soon became one. A lot of people were Erle Stanley Gardner fans in those days. In his day, his books sold more copies worldwide than any book except the Bible. And the books were not just about Perry Mason. Gardner also wrote a whole series of books about a District Attorney named Doug Selby and another series of books, under the name of A.A. Fair, about a little private detective named Donald Lam, who worked for a huge cigar-smoking woman named Bertha Cool. For me, and I suspect for most E.S. Gardner fans, the best thing about his books was the fact that Gardner gave you all the important clues before Perry Mason or Douglas Selby or Donald Lam solved the crime in the last chapter. Gardner was no Agatha Christie or Ellery Queen who, in their final chapters, would suddenly produce some withheld piece of information, such as a twin, who turns out to be the real killer. With Gardner's books you could close the book before reading the last chapter and figure out who the killer was and how the crime was committed. I also loved Erle Stanley Gardner's books because in real life he was a lawyer. In real life he helped to bring about the Supreme Court ruling that a man on trial, without funds for legal help, is entitled to a lawyer, paid for by the State. Gardner's first book, THE CASE OF THE VELVET CLAWS, wasn't published until he was forty-five years old. By that time he had spent twenty years as a lawyer, being a 'champion of the underdog'. That's for me, I thought. I, too, want to become a Champion of the Underdog. And so I started thinking about becoming a lawyer or maybe a private detective, like Paul Drake. I did not just think about it. I, and a friend of mine - an Estonian, not much older than I, who also worked at 'The Bank', who also attended Estonian night school and the movies and who was also a big Erle Stanley Gardner fan - we went out into the streets of Stockholm and practiced 'shadowing' each other. Tt turned out we had absolutely no talent for it. The hardest thing was pretending that we did not know each other as we passed each other on the street. We could not keep a straight face. We tried. We would approach each other and as we got closer and closer, we would clench our teeth to keep from smiling, but by the time we got within twenty feet of each other, we would collapse, 'blow our cover' and start laughing like a couple of lunatics. Now you know why I did not become a private detective. I did not become a lawyer because television came along and that was that. Why am I telling you all this? I guess I'm trying to champion Gardner's books. I know it's going to be a hard sell. In today's world, Gardner has become an underdog. Thinking is not as popular as it used to be. People still play chess in the Estonian House on Broadview, but most of them are, well, older men. The idea that 'Truth' and 'Justice' are important does not seem to be as important as it used to be when most Estonians read not only the Bible but all five volumes of a book called TRUTH AND JUSTICE - TôDE JA ôIGUS, by Anton Hansen Tammsaare. People not only used to read these books, they used to think about them. They used to wonder about 'proof' and 'facts' and 'verifiable evidence' and 'logic' - the kinds of things that Erle Stanley Gardner and serious writers and philosophers write about. And don't kid yourself. The world is run by people who know how to think. The less you think and the more you emote, the easier is for the likes of Osama Bin Laden to persuade you that terrorism makes sense. The reason Communism collapsed in Russia is because the dissidents, most of whom were scientists, started to apply logical and rigorous thought to the unverifiable of claims of Marxism. In today's anti-intellectual world, it is not easy to become an independent, logical thinker who is committed to the human rights of underdogs, usually the ordinary citizens of Big and Small Countries. But there are undergrounds you can join. No university has courses in thinking - THINKING.101, THINKING.201, etc - but there are courses in philosophy. And if you are not ready to tackle Plato and the Eighteenth Century philosophers, you might begin by taking a good look at shows like LAW AND ORDER and NYPD BLUES and WEST WING, because those programs are, in essence - and let me say this in a whisper - philosophical investigations. I'm pretty sure that if two famous fictional Estonians, Andres and Pearu were with us, they would occasionally stop playing chess and tune in to these shows because they deal with the problems those two guys used to fight about all the time. You may want to skip Erle Stanley Gardner because, like Hitchock, he is not as sophisticated as some of the people who are fighting crime today. But this is not to say that a spymaster like John LeCarre is fundamentally different from Gardner and Hitchcock. The good guys still believe that even in today's 'dark' and complicated world, the good guys are going to win in the end. Ain Söödor
The Rise and Fall and Rise of Thinking
Archived Articles | 31 Jan 2002 | EWR
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