 
Choose another writer in this calendar: by name: by birthday from the calendar.
TimeSearch |
|
Edgar Wallace (1875-1932) - in full Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace |
|
British novelist, playwright, and journalist who produced popular detective and suspense stories and was in his time "the king" of the modern thriller. Edgar Wallace's huge literary output has undermined his reputation as a fresh and original writer. In England in the 1920s he was said to be the second biggest seller after the Bible. Wallace was a wholehearted supporter of Victorian and early Edwardian values and mores. "No one—the theologians and the psychologists agree—is responsible for his own character: he can make only small modifications for good or ill. Chaplin chose the route of the artist and assimilated the hard childhood which Wallace rejected. And Wallace? instead of the artist, we have a phenomenon which might have been invented by Balzac—the human book-factory. We cannot help wondering, reading of the hundred and fifty novels he wrote in twenty-seven years (twenty-eight of them written at seventy pounds a time), whether he could not have found an easier road to—what? not exactly financial success, for at his death he left £140,000 of debts, but at least to that state of life where there was money to burn." (from 'Introduction' by Graham Greene, in Edgar Wallace: The Biography of a Phenomenon by Margaret Lane, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1964, p. xii) Edgar Wallace was born in Greenwich in 1875 – in the same year
as
the creator of the Tarzan novels, Edgar Rice Burroughs. He was brought
up as an adopted child in the family of Clara and George Freeman, a
London fish
porter. His parents were actors, Polly Richards, born Mary Jane Blair,
and Richard Horatio
Edgar Marriott, who used the false name of Walter Wallace on the birth
records. It is possible that Polly invented the name to give her child
a (fictitious) father. The Freemans, who received a payment of 5
shillings a week for the child's upkeep, had already brought up ten
children of their own. Eventually they adopted their foster child when
it turned out, that Polly could no longer afford to pay his keep. At the age of 12, the young Wallace left school and took menial jobs before enlisting at the age of 18 in the Army. From 1893 to 1896 he served in the Royal West Kent Regiment. Later he wrote in Double Dan (1924; US title: Diana of Kara-Kara): "He was strictly brought up by parents who compelled him to read books on Sunday that were entirely devoted to orphans and good organ-grinders and little girls who quoted extensively from precious books, and died surrounded by weeping negroes. In such literature the villains of the piece were young scoundrels who surreptitiously threw away their crusts and only ate crumb part of bread; desperadoes who kicked dogs, and threw large flies into spiders' webs, and watched the spider at his fell work with glee." (Diana of Kara-Kara by Edgar Wallace, Boston: Small, Maynard and Company, 1924, p. 2) In 1896 Wallace was sent to South Africa, where he was in the Medical Staff Corps. During this period he met the Reverend William Shaw Caldecott and Mrs. Marion Caldecott, who was a writer and willing to help Wallace in his literary aspirations. Wallace began to contribute to various journals, and wrote war poems, later collected in The Mission That Failed (1898) and other volumes. After his discharge in 1899, Wallace became a correspondent
for Reuters and the London Daily Mail.
His reports about Horatio Herbert Kitchener infuriated the influential
British fieldmarshal and Wallace was banned as a war correspondent
until World War I. In 1901 he married Ivy Caldecott; they divorced in
1918. She died of breast cancer in 1926. Before returning to London with his family, Wallace served in 1902 as the editor of the Rand Daily Mail in Johannesburg. During the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05) Wallace was sent by the Daily Mail to Vigo to examine a conflict in which the Russians opened fire on a British fishing fleet in the belief that it was the Japanese Navy. On his journeys he learned about the activities of Russian and English spies operating around the coasts of Spain and Portugal. Later Wallace returned to world of secret agents in his stories, although he mostly concentrated on crime and detective books. His most famous spy story, 'Code No. 2' first appeared in the Stand Magazine of April 1916, then in various collections and anthologies. Wallace's first novel, The Four Just Men(1905), was printed by his own Tallis Press. It told a story about a group of rich, intelligent and ruthless conspirators who take the law into their own hands. Although the book was a huge success, Wallace lost money on it because of an unlucky publicity gimmick. To pay the bills, Ivy even had to sell the greater part of her husband's wardrobe. The Council of Justice (1908), The Just Men of Cordova (1917) and The Three Just Men (1925) were sequels to The Four Just Men. It was not until the publication of Sanders of the River (1911), about an African representative of Great Britain Foreign Office, when his fame as a writer was established. Wallace then wrote several additional stories using his African experiences as background. His attitudes reflect uncritically popular opinions of the time, which could be simply characterized under the titles "Imperialist ideology" and "Colonial racism." In the stories about Bosambo, a devious tribal king, Mr. Commissioner Sanders loses often the battle of wits, although Bosambo in one scene tells that he has always wanted to be a chief under the British rule. However, he manages to steal Sanders's binoculars. Sanders's method to keep up peace is straightforward: he uses whip and he has a reputation for hanging rebellious chiefs. The Sanders of the River stories ran from 1909 until well into the 1920s. Wallace worked in the 1900s and 1910s in several journals,
among them Daily Mail (1903-1907), Standard (1910), The
Week-End Racing Supplment (1910-12), Evening News
(1910-1912), The Story Journal (1913), Town Topics (1913-16).
He was later a racing columnist for The Star (1927-32) and Daily
Mail
(1930-32). During World War I Wallace was a special interrogator for
the War Office. In 1921 he married his secretary and second wife,
Violet King, who was nearly twenty-three years younger than himself, and with
whom he had one daughter. Violet was a skilled shorthad typist. The Green Archer (1923) is one of the most famous novels of Wallace. It is a story about a man who is found murdered after a quarrel with the owner of a ghost-haunted castle. It was filmed at least three times. Mr Reeder works for the office of the Public Prosecutor, he was "something over fifty, a long-faced gentleman with sandy-grey hair and a slither of side whiskers that mercifully distracted attention from his large outstanding ears. He wore half-way down his nose a pair of steel-rimmed pince-nez, through which nobody had ever seen him look—they were invariably removed when he was reading. A high and flat-crowned bowler hat matched and yet did not match a frock-coat tightly buttoned his sparse chest. His boots were square-toed, his cravat—of the broad chest-protector pattern—was ready-made and buckled into place behind a Gladstonian collar." (The Mind of Mr. J. G. Reeder, introduction by Julian Symons, London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1983, p. 4) Reeder has worked at various times for Scotland Yard, Banker's Trust, and the public prosecutor's office. The critic and awarded mystery writer H.R.F. Keating listed The Mind of Mr. J.G. Reeder (1925) among the best 100 books of crime and mystery: "There is the economy of the writing. We get a good picture, both physically and mentally, of out her in some three lines. There is an easy vividness in that 'slither of side-whisker'. . . . And there is a nice touch of humous in that reference to out hero's ears. Wallace has been compared, perhaps a trifle ambitiously, to his friend P. G. Wodehouse." (Crime & Mystery: The 100 Best Books, foreword by Patricia Highsmith, New York: Carroll &Graf, 1996, p. 31) Four British films of the 1920s were based
on the novels and short stories about Reeder. The first, Red Aces, was written and directed by Edgar Wallace, the following were Mr. Reeder in Room 13 (1938, directed by Norman Lee), The Mind of Mr. Reeder (1938, directed by Jack Raymond), and The Missing People
(1939, directed by Jack Raymond). Leslie Halliwell wrote of The Mind of
Mr Reader: "Entertaining crime comedy-drama which never quite realizes
its potential." (Leslie Halliwell's Film Guide, sixth edition, London: Paladin, 1988, p. 683) TV series The Mind of Mr. J.G. Reeder, featuring Hugh Burden in the title role, was produced in 1969-1971. - J.G. Reeder books: Room 13 (1924); The Mind of J.G. Reeder (1925); Terror Keep (1927); Red Aces (1929); The Guv'nor and Other Stories (1932). Supernatural themes do not appear very often in Wallace's works. Spiritualism and ghosts are dealt in such short stories as 'Death Watch,' filmed in 1933 with Warner Oland, 'The Ghost of John Holling,' filmed in 1934, and 'The Ghost of Down Hill,' later adapted in the sixties for the Edgar Wallace Mystery Theatre series. Wallace wrote his works at a prodigious pace, among others one of his most popular plays, On the Spot (1931), was finished in four days. The 75,000 word novel The Coat of Arms (1931) was penned in a weekend. At the highest peak of Wallace's career in the 1920s, one of his numerous publishers claimed that a quarter of all books read in England was written by him. Most of Wallace's novels were spoken into a dictaphone, typed up by his wife or a secretary, and then corrected. His skill in creating lively dialogue was noted by movie makers. Wallace also wrote screenplays – among others some of the dialogue of The Hound of Baskervilles (1931), directed by V. Gareth Gundrey. Although Wallace earned extremely well from his writings, he lost
fortunes because of his extravagant lifestyle and obsessive betting on
the wrong horses. He enjoyed his success, spent much time in Carlton,
London's most expensive hotel, and was magnificently generous. However,
when Wallace's mother had visited him in 1903, he had rejected her. She
died alone in the city hospital. Later Wallace felt deep remorse for
what he had done. Wallace's literary estate was not profitable until
1934. Hundreds of films have been made from his novels and short
stories, and many plays and television series. In Germany the series of Wallace adaptations became the nation's most popular screen entertainment. Rialto studios and Artur Brauner's Central Cinema Company (CCC) produced for German audience approximately forty Krimis from 1959 to 1972 from the works of Wallace and his son, Bryan Edgar Wallace. The boom began with Der Froshch mit der Maske (1959, Face of the Frog) and Der Rote Kreis (1959, The Crimson Circle), and continued with Die Bande des Schreckens (1960, The Terrible People) and Der Grüne Bogenschütze (1960, The Green Archer). The regular actors included Klaus Kinski and Karin Dor. The dark, beautiful Finnish born actress Anneli Sauli appeared under the name Ann Savo. She played in Die Toten Augen von London (1961) and in Der Hexer (1964), both directed by Alfred Vohrer. Joachim Kramp has written in Hallo!: Hier spricht Edgar Wallace: Die Geschichte der deutschen Kriminalserie von 1959-72 (2001) about Wallace Krimis, and Nicholas G. Schlegel in German Popular Cinema and the Rialto Krimi Phenomenon: Dark Yeyes of London (2022). In 1960 Jack Greenwood produced in England a series of short screen adaptations for British and American television use under the title Edgar Wallace Mystery Theater. Towards the end of his life, Wallace estimated that his work as a playwright was more important than his work as a writer of stories. It was largely the success of the plays – The Calendar (1929), On the Spot, and The Case of the Frighntened Lady (1931) – which led to his being invited to Hollywood to work as a scriptwriter. Just before departing for the United States, he stood as an unsuccessful Liberal candidate in Blackpool. Wallace died on February 10, 1932, en route to Hollywood to work on the script for King Kong. "I went down to the studio this morning rather early to see Cooper. Apparently they are not going to accept "Kong" as a title: they think it has a Chinese sound and that it is too much like "Chang", and I can see their points of view." (Tuesday, 12th January, 1932, My Hollywood Diary by Edgar Wallace, London: Hutchinson & Co., 1932, p. 183) Although Wallace received a screen credit, he did no actual work on the film. The director and producer Merian C. Cooper played down Wallace's contribution, claiming that "Not one single scene, nor line of dialogue in King Kong was contributed by him." (Stranger Than Fiction: The Life of Edgar Wallace, the Man Who Created King Kong by Neil Clark, 2014, p. 244) Actually, most of the second part and the finale was taken from Wallace's 110-page scenario. King Kong has been filmed three times. John Guillermin's remake from 1976, starring Jeff Bridges and Jessica Lange, had a campy approach. The third version (2005), directed by Peter Jackson, was more faithful to the original story. For further reading: Edgar Wallace: The Biography of a Phenomenon by Margaret Lane (1964); Edgar Wallace by Jack Adrian (1984); 'Wallace, (Richard Horatio) Edgar' by Jack Adrian, in Twentieth-century Crime and Mystery Writers, edited by John M. Reilly (1985); Edgar Wallace: A Filmography by Richard Williams (1990); The Edgar Wallace Index by Richard Williams (1996); Tracking King Kong by Erb Cyntihia, Cyntihia Marie Erb (1998); Stranger Than Fiction: The Life of Edgar Wallace, the Man Who Created King Kong by Neil Clark (2015); German Popular Cinema and the Rialto Krimi Phenomenon: Dark Yeyes of London by Nicholas G. Schlegel (2022). Edgar Wallace Society was founded in 1969. It promotes interest in the life and work of the author through the Crimson Circle magazine. Selected works:
|
