HBO’s “Perry Mason” follows the story of a criminal defense attorney who is fortunate enough to make a career breakthrough when the child abduction case is brought to his office. Mason is the type of person who doesn’t hesitate to bend certain rules and make many exceptions when it comes to doing what’s best for his clients. He’s lively and dedicated, which makes him such a likeable character. How did the show create it? Is it based on a real person? What inspired “Perry Mason”? Let’s find out.

Is Perry Mason a true story?

No, ‘Perry Mason’ is not based on a true story. It is based on the series of books of the same name by Erle Stanley Gardner. It is adapted for HBO by Rolin Jones and Ron Fitzgerald.

To create the character, Gardner didn’t have to look far. Having passed the bar exam at the age of 21, the author had spent a significant amount of time in law. From the first years of his career, he developed a taste for helping underprivileged people, especially Chinese and Mexican immigrants, which he passed on to his creation. To help defend those wronged by the law, he created an organization called The Court of Last Resort in the 1940s.

While his daily job gave him a chance to do good in the world, it also became quite commonplace for him soon enough. When he discovered his penchant for writing fiction, he began to write in parallel for pulp fiction magazines. A few short stories and articles quickly took him on the path to creating Perry Mason’s world.

Gardner has used his intimate knowledge of the law to create a criminal defense lawyer who is never afraid to bend and break the rules if that’s what does his clients justice. He got the character name from a publication called The Perry Mason Company, which once published Youth’s Companion, something Gardner read a lot as a child. In the books, Mason has a complicated relationship with his secretary Della Street. Her character is a composite of Agnes Jean Bethell and her sisters. Agnes had served as secretary for Gardner and they later married. His sisters had also worked for him as secretaries.

Once his writing career took off, Gardner became a voracious writer. He has written over 80 books in the Perry Mason series and was known to write over 5,000 words each day. When Jones and Fitzgerald were able to adapt him for the screen, they delved into his work and unearthed all kinds of characters that appeared in the Mason series. They knew they would have to compete with Mason’s popularity and wanted to add a new twist to his story. So instead of just choosing one of the novels from Gardner’s collection, they decided to work on an origin story for the character, in which they employ some of the show’s most well-known characters while creating their own. own group.

Because books never get too deep into a character’s story, the show’s creators had to draw their own conclusions. In an interview with Variety, Fitzgerald explained how they were to retrieve every possible detail of the conversations from the books. “The character in the book will go into a bit of a rant or offer small, deep statements about what he thinks about justice or the law – things that were vital little clues for the character. We started using them as tent poles when we asked, “Okay, if this guy in five years is going to say something like that across the office at Hamilton Berger, how did he get there?” he declared. The idea was to use the first season as a backstory that will ultimately lead to Gardner’s works. The first season ends on a note that marks the start of Gardner’s first book in the series.

Read more: Perry Mason Filming Locations