Paul Drake is a fictional private detective in the Perry Mason series of murder mystery novels by Erle Stanley Gardner.

He is friend and right-hand man to Mason, a highly successful criminal defense lawyer in Los Angeles.

In 1957, the CBS television network launched a Perry Mason series based on Gardner's characters, which ran until 1966.

"[3] "Just as Raymond Burr will always be Perry Mason, Bill Hopper will always be Paul Drake," wrote Brian Kelleher and Diana Merrill in their chronicle of the TV series.

[5] In HBO's 2020 Perry Mason reimagining, Paul Drake is African-American, starting the series as an LAPD uniformed police officer.