Edgar Wallace

• Born: April 1, 1875
• Birthplace: Greenwich, England
• Died: February 10, 1932
• Place of death: Beverly Hills, California

Types of Plot: Private investigator; police procedural; thriller

Principal Series: Four Just Men, 1905-1928; J. G. Reeder, 1925-1932

Contribution

Edgar Wallace’s publication of more than 170 books, an impressive list of short stories, comedies, plays, and screenplays—as well as his lifetime career as journalist, correspondent, and editor—marks him as the best-selling English author of his generation and one of the most prolific. Howard Haycraft declared that Wallace’s “vast audience gave him an influence, in popularizing the genre, out of all proportion to the actual merit of his writing.” He made the thriller popular in book form and on stage and screen, throughout the English-speaking world. Only John Creasey, with his more than five hundred novels, wrote more than Wallace, and perhaps Agatha Christie was the only mystery and detective writer whose novels attracted more readers.

The best of Wallace’s detective fiction recounts the cases of Mr. J. G. Reeder, a very British sleuth of valiant courage whose triumphs are won by both chance and deduction. Critics Stefan Benvenuti and Gianni Rizzoni observe that Wallace “concentrated on the extravagant, the exotic, and the freely fantastic, all interpreted in a style derived from the Gothic novel.” He steered clear of sex or controversy, but he often challenged the system of justice of his era and pointed to errors in police practices.

Biography

Edgar Wallace was born as Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace on April 1, 1875, in Greenwich, England, the son of Polly Richards and Richard Edgar, unwed members of an acting company. As an illegitimate child, Wallace was placed in the home of George and Millie Freeman in Norway Court, London, where he spent his boyhood as Dick Freeman until he ran away to join the army at the age of eighteen. Like his mother and grandmother, he loved the theater and, without much formal education, learned to read primarily from public library books. He soon was writing verses of his own.

Wallace joined the Royal West Kent Regiment as an enlisted private; in July, 1896, he sailed on a troopship to South Africa. After six years of military service as a hospital orderly, he bought his own discharge and became a celebrated war correspondent in the Boer Wars. Wallace was named to the staff of the London Daily Mail and covered the end of the war in South Africa. He married a minister’s daughter, Ivy Caldecott, in April, 1901, in Cape Town and at the end of the war returned to make his home in England. The couple had three children before they were divorced in 1919. Soon after, Wallace married his secretary of five years, Violet “Jim” King; in 1923, they had a daughter, Penelope.

Plagued by debts left unpaid in South Africa and new bills accumulating in London, Wallace began writing plays and short stories while serving as correspondent or editor for various newspapers. His lifelong love of gambling at horse racing led him to write and edit several racing sheets, but his losses at the tracks continually added to his debts. Blessed with an indomitable sense of optimism and self-confidence, he drove himself as a writer and established his name as an author. In 1905, Wallace wrote and published his first great novel, The Four Just Men. After a series of lawsuits forced the Daily Mail to drop him as a reporter, he was able to draw on his experience in the Boer Wars and his assignments in the Belgian Congo, Canada, Morocco, Spain, and London slums, which provided rich material for short stories and novels.

On the advice of Isabel Thorne, fiction editor for Shurey’s Publications, Wallace began a series for the Weekly Tale-Teller called “Sanders of the River,” based on his experiences in the Congo. He was editor of Town Topics, a sports weekly, when World War I broke out in 1914. From the second day of the war until the Armistice, for twelve guineas a week, he wrote six daily articles for the Birmingham Post, summarizing the war news, which were published in nine volumes under the title The War of the Nations: A History of the Great European Conflict (1914-1919). Using dictation, he increased his writing speed, producing a series of paperback war novels. He also wrote his first motion-picture script, on the life of Edith Cavell, the English nurse who, in 1915, was executed in German-occupied Belgium for aiding the escape of Allied soldiers.

The last ten years of Wallace’s life were the most rewarding. Success as a playwright came with the 1926 production of The Ringer in London. Numerous plays were produced, many more novels were published, and he continued to edit a Sunday newspaper and write a daily racing column. In 1931, he sailed to the United States to write for film studios in California; there, he collaborated with other writers on a horror film that later became King Kong (1933). Suddenly taken ill, he died on February 10, 1932, at the age of fifty-six.

Analysis

Edgar Wallace carved a permanent niche in the early twentieth century development of the mystery and detective novel. His books featured heroes and villains who were accessible to the reading public of his generation. Wallace patriotically upheld the British flag in his own life and in the fictional lives of his detectives. In his novels and stories, those who commit murder die for their crimes.

The Four Just Men

The protagonists of The Four Just Men (and others in that series) go above the law when justice is not properly meted out by the courts or when the criminal escapes unpunished. These just men are heroes who redress wrongs and often succeed after the authorities have failed. When Wallace capitalized on this theme, his characters were do-gooders of a romantic cut: Right and wrong were clearly distinguished in these works, the heroes of which persevered until good triumphed over evil.

Within the English-speaking world of the 1920’s, Wallace became a widely read author; even in postwar Germany, he was hailed for his enormous popularity. Most scholars of detective fiction agree that he was instrumental in popularizing the detective story and the thriller. Libraries had to stock dozens of copies of each of his best works for decades. Somehow, Wallace was closely in tune with his times and his readers, as Margaret Lane makes clear in her biography of the writer:

“Edgar Wallace,” wrote Arnold Bennett in 1928, “has a very grave defect, and I will not hide it. He is content with society as it is. He parades no subversive opinions. He is ’correct.’” This was a shrewd observation and was never more plainly demonstrated than by Edgar’s newspaper work during the war. It was not that he feared to cross swords with public opinion; he always, most fully and sincerely, shared it.

Wallace shifted from newspaper writing to writing short stories, novels, and plays after his war experiences in South Africa. His natural ability to describe graphically events for readers of daily papers led to longer feature articles that reflected popular opinion. Thrilled with the sight of his own words in print, driven by debt, and born with a sense of ambition and self-confidence, Wallace struggled to find his literary identity. Overly eager to cash in on his first great mystery thriller, The Four Just Men, he published and advertised it himself, offering a reward for the proper solution (which consumed all the income from the novel’s successful sales). By the time The Four Just Men appeared, Wallace had developed the technique that would become the hallmark of much of his mystery and detective fiction. His editor had honed his short stories into very salable copy, and his characters had become real people in the minds of British readers. His biographer Margaret Lane summarizes his maturity in style:

He realised, too, that these stories were the best work he had ever done, and that at last he was mastering the difficult technique of the short story. He evolved a favourite pattern and fitted the adventures of his characters to the neat design. He would outline a chain of incidents to a certain point, break off, and begin an apparently independent story; then another, and another; at the crucial point the several threads would meet and become one, and the tale would end swiftly, tied in a neat knot of either comedy or drama.

In 1910, while Wallace wrote and edited racing sheets, he observed legal and illegal activities by the best and the worst characters of the racetrack crowd, activities that eventually emerged in his mystery fiction. Grey Timothy (1913), a crime novel about racing, paralleled two of his mystery books, The Fourth Plague (1913) and The River of Stars (1913). His more famous Captain Tatham of Tatham Island (1909; revised as The Island of Galloping Gold, 1916; also known as Eve’s Island) also had a racing theme.

Wallace scoffed at critics who declared that his characters were paper-thin; others from more literary and academic circles denounced him for not writing more carefully, with greater depth to his plots and characters. In spite of these criticisms, before World War I Wallace had found his place as a mystery writer: “That is where I feel at home; I like actions, murderings, abductions, dark passages and secret trapdoors and the dull, slimy waters of the moat, pallid in the moonlight.”

On the Spot

Many editors and readers believed that Wallace had close ties with the criminal world and that his characters were taken from real life, but according to his daughter-in-law that was not so. Perhaps Al Capone of Chicago (whose home Wallace visited in 1929) came the closest to his vision of the supercriminal. He promptly wrote one of his best plays, On the Spot (pr. 1930), about the American gangster. Yet in People: A Short Autobiography (1926), Wallace devotes a chapter to his knowledge of criminals and the reasons for their lawbreaking. He declared:

To understand the criminal you must know him and have or affect a sympathy with him in his delinquencies. You have to reach a stage of confidence when he is not showing off or lying to impress you. In fact, it is necessary that he should believe you to be criminally minded.

Whether it was Detective Surefoot Smith, Educated Evans, Carl Rennett, Timothy Jordan, Superintendent Bliss, Inspector Bradley, or Mr. Reeder, Wallace spun his yarns with equal knowledge about the skills, habits, and frailties of both murderers and their detectors.

Various efforts to classify Wallace’s works of mystery and detective fiction have failed, but certain series and types of plot do emerge. The Four Just Men series was published between 1905 and 1928. There are the police novels—including his famous The Ringer (1926), The Terror (1929), and The Clue of the Silver Key (1930)—and the thrillers, such as The Green Archer (1923), The India-Rubber Men (1929), and the classic The Man from Morocco (1926; also known as The Black). The J. G. Reeder series, begun in 1925 with The Mind of Mr. J. G. Reeder (also known as The Murder Book of J. G. Reeder), was brought to its height with the popular Red Aces (1929). Yet many of Wallace’s detective stories were short stories that overlapped such categories or were not collected until after his death.

Many of Wallace’s works reflect his generation’s reluctance to accept the authority of “science.” Although other authors after 1910 were incorporating scientific equipment such as lie detectors into their detective works, his London crime fighters used old-fashioned wits instead of newfangled widgets. Although many authors turned to more modern, psychological solutions for murder mysteries, Wallace believed that his readers would be lost in such heavy character analysis; he did not let such new devices spoil the fun. Mr. Reeder relies on his own phenomenal memory (buttressed by musty scrapbooks of murder cases), his incriminating evidence often coming from unsuspecting sources. When he astonishes his superiors of Scotland Yard, his conclusions are based on information found outside the criminal labs. Wallace’s haste to write his stories led him to depend on his own fertile mind; seldom did he leave his study to search for more documentary detail.

His readers loved his fantastic and scary secret passages, hiding places, trapdoors, and mechanical death-dealing devices. (He let his imagination roam like that of a science-fiction writer.) The setting for many of his novels was London, which provided a wide variety of suburbs, railroads, and steamship docks through which the underworld characters prowled and detectives searched. Although his work is sometimes marred by sloppy writing, the fast pace of Wallace’s stories thrilled his readers to their sudden conclusions—the culprit revealed, arrested, or killed all within the last few pages.

Principal Series Characters:

• Leon Gonzalez ,
• Raymond Poiccart ,
• George Manfred , and
• Miquel Thery constitute the group in the original 1905 work The Four Just Men, and three of them reappear in later Four Just Men books. These characters are determined, like the Three Musketeers, to take justice into their own hands.
• J. G. Reeder is a more traditional English detective. With his square derby, muttonchop whiskers, tightly furled umbrella, spectacles, large old-fashioned cravat, and square-toed shoes, this elderly gentleman carries a Browning automatic and fears no one, despite a feigned apologetic habit. Claiming that he has a criminal mind and using his power of recollection (and a great collection of newspaper clippings), Reeder has the goods on everyone involved in his specialty—financial-related murder.

Bibliography

Bergfelder, Tim. “Extraterritorial Fantasies: Edgar Wallace and the German Crime Film.” In The German Cinema Book, edited by Tim Bergfelder, Erica Carter, and Deniz Gokturk. London: British Film Institute, 2002. Study of the adaptations of Wallace’s stories to the German screen and their effects on the evolution of German cinema.

Croydon, John. “A Gaggle of Wallaces: On the Set with Edgar Wallace.” The Armchair Detective 18, no. 1 (Winter, 1985): 64-68. Brief discussion of Wallace’s role in the adaptation of his stories to the screen.

Dixon, Wheeler Winston. “The Colonial Vision of Edgar Wallace.” Journal of Popular Culture 32, no. 1 (Summer, 1998): 121-139. Discusses the role of imperialist and colonial ideology in Wallace’s novels.

Gardner, Martin. “Edgar Wallace and The Green Archer.” In Are Universes Thicker than Blackberries? Discourses on Gödel, Magic Hexagrams, Little Red Riding Hood, and Other Mathematical and Pseudoscientific Topics. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003. Discussion of Wallace’s representation of mathematics and science in The Green Archer and its relation to the solution of the mystery.

Kestner, Joseph A. The Edwardian Detective, 1901-1915. Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 2000. This narrowly focused reading of British detective fiction compares Wallace to his fellow Edwardians.

Lane, Margaret. Edgar Wallace: The Biography of a Phenomenon. New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1939. Detailed biography of Wallace emphasizing the popularity of his work and the factors contributing to and consequences arising from that popularity.

Wallace, Ethel, and Haydon Talbot. Edgar Wallace by His Wife. London: Hutchinson, 1932. This biography of the author includes details of his life that only a wife could know.

Watson, Colin. “King Edgar, and How He Got His Crown.” In Snobbery with Violence: Crime Stories and Their Audience. New York: Mysterious, 1990. Attempts to account for Wallace’s popularity among Edwardian and later audiences as part of a general study of the appeal of crime fiction.