PERRY MASON (1933) As a youngster, author Erle Stanley Gardner subscribed to a boy’s fiction magazine, The Youth’s Companion, and learned a lot about writing from the stories he read. The Youth’s Companion was published by Perry Mason and Company. SPENSER: FOR HIRE (1973) Robert B. Parker first introduced his streetwise, Chaucer-quoting, beer-drinking, gourmet-cooking, Bostonian, ex-boxer private investigator in The Godwulf Manuscript. Parker saw Spenser as a tough guy but also as a knight in shining armor and named him after the English poet (and Shakespeare contemporary) Edmund Spenser. MIKE HAMMER (1947) Writer Mickey Spillane had been in and out of the comic book business for years when he tried to sell a new detective strip to some New York publishers in 1946. The character’s name was Mike Danger. When no one would buy, he decided to turn it into a novel and changed the name to Mike Hammer, after one of his favorite haunts, Hammer’s Bar and Grill. SHERLOCK HOLMES AND DR.
