Edgar Wallace-A Literary Phenomenon

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30739, 1 May 1965, Page 4

Edgar Wallace-A Literary Phenomenon

Edgar Wallace: the Biography of a Phenomenon. By Margaret Lane. Hamish Hamilton. 338 pp. The rise from rags to riches is a popular theme, many men of apparently great wealth have died with spectacular debts, and many books have earned more money after their authors' death than before: but Edgar Wallace was surely the man above all others whose life united all three features in the most conspicuous manner. The illegitimate son of an actress, fostered in the family of a Billingsgate fish-porter, he won through by his own prolific talent to remarkable popular fame as a writer, a theatre manager and a racehorse owner, but his sudden death in 1932 revealed debts of more than five times as great as the money available. His creditors agreed at last to settle for the immediate cash, yet with patience they could have recouped their losses in full, for so timeless is the appeal of thrillers by Edgar Wallace that the . yearly sale of his books : now in Britain alone is well i over a million, and a hundred films have been made of them for cinema and television. Polly Richards, widow of a merchant captain and mother of one daughter, took to repertory acting for a living, i and was fortunate enough to be befriended by Alice Mar- I riott, an actress of consider- ; able ability who ran her own i company. Mrs Richards left the company for a time in 1847, I returning the following April 1 less than two weeks after the i birth in Greenwich of her 1 second child. The boy was i named Richard Horatio Edgar, : which was the full name of I Alice Marriott’s son, and his I father was entered on the < certificate as William Wallace, < comedian, a man of whom no < trace exists. It seems fair to i suppose that the child was s Richard Edgar’s and that the i mother, a woman of consider- < able self-reliance and forti- s tude, preferred not to ‘ embarrass her benefactress by 1 disclosing the truth. (In any 1 case, a comparision of the 1 photographs in the book < shows a strong resemblance 1 between Alice Marriott and i Edgar Wallace.) < Mrs Richards did her best I for the child by boarding him i with a respectable local fam- < ily, the Freemans, who i insisted on adopting him 1 when his mother could no i longer afford to pay them for i his keep. He grew up as Dick Freeman, championed partic- I ularly by Mrs Freeman and i her eldest daughter Clara, <

who seem to have encouraged in him the unjust belief that his mother was a lady who had abandoned him unnecessarily. Champions the boy certainly needed, for when he left school he proved increasingly erratic in earning a living, until at the end of 1893 he signed on for seven years as a private in the regular army. Yet. by his force of character and faith in himself, he had already convinced some of his friends and acquaintances that he would be a great man some day. The army, oddly enough, was the making of him as a writer. In the first place it provided regular food and clothing, so that his health improved, and then once he had transferred to the staff medical corps he had leisure to read, and an encouraging audience for his verses. When his regiment was sent out to Simonstown in South Africa in 1896 the young soldier filled in the empty hours by working through Collins’ Pocket Dictionary, and began to develop a lively style in his letters to his friends and sweetheart. His verses, which were very much in the manner of Kipling's “Barrackroom Ballads,” were published in the Cape Town newspapers, and he was jubilant when invited to attend a dinner in Kipling’s honour. These triumphs, and the fact of being now in love with a new acquaintance, Ivy Caldecott the daughter of a local Wesleyan Minister, led him to buy his discharge in 1899 in the hope of earning enough money as a poet to marry. Fortunate timing. In October of that year war broke out and Edgar Wallace went to the front, not as a private but as a Reuter's correspondent with a pass and £IOO for expenses. This was the start of the change from verse to prose that was to lead to the scores of thrillers and plays in later years. Some of his descriptive pieces which were sent to London came to the “Daily News” and “Daily Mail,” and on the strength of this Wallace when on leave in London approached the editor of the latter paper and was taken on as their special correspondent. Since he had. during the same leave, the humiliation of seeing a book of his verses scathingly received by the London reviewers who had no patience with imitations, his aspirations as a poet receded quietly into oblivion. As a correspondent he was fluent, graphic and jingoistic in the spirit of the time—he appears to have accepted un-

reservedly the notion of gallant English and treacherous Boers. He fell foul of Lord Kitchener, who resented the very existence of war correspondents, but this merely increased his fame in London, and when the peace negotiations were under way the “Daily Mail" was the onlypaper to make definite announcements as to their progress, although Kitchener had rigidly barred all reporters from the camp where delegates met. In fact, as the "Daily Mail" triumphantly revealed at last, Edgar Wallace had got the news and sent it on by a trick worthy of one of his own future thrillers. He came out of the war with a high reputation and a wife, for he had married Ivy in 1901. After this his fortunes rose and fell erratically for nearly twenty years. He started well as editor of a Johannesburg newspaper, and extravagantly indulged his loves of the theatre and horse-racing, but after nine months he was sacked and returned to London leaving many debts be-

hind. Work was quickly found as a reporter for the "Daily Mail,” and he also wrote articles and sketches for various magazines, but he was more enthusiastic than accurate. When Harmsworth found that in one year he had to help Wallace out of financial trouble caused by overlavish advertisement of “The Four Just Men,” and pay out over a quarter of a million pounds in two libel actions caused partly by Wallace’s carelessness, he sacked the fluent liability forthwith. The years from 1907 to 1909 were a hard struggle for the Wallaces, but then matters began to improve again as Edgar struck gold in the stories of “Sanders of the River.” The outbreak of war in 1914 provoked a new torrent of remarkably crude patriotism, but he was not able to be a war correspondent again as Kitchener had banned him after his 1901 Peace treaty coup. Over the years his marriage quietly disintegrated, as shy, reserved Ivy found herself increasingly unable to share her volatile husband's interests and activities, and later the real cause for jealousy. Their first child died in South Africa, but there were three more, the last born in 1916. A divorce petition was filed in 1918 and Ivy was released, hoping to be married again to a Belgian friend but he went home after the war and her romance petered out. She lived alone, except for her youngest child, until her death in 1926. It was in 1921 that the Edgar Wallace of legend really came into being, the man of phenomenal output who could write a thriller in a weekend. In that year he married Violet King, known as “Jim," who had been his secretary for the last six years and who became for the rest of his life a devoted wife, efficient organiser, hostess and support. In that year also he at last took the obvious step of consulting a

literary agent, who arranged a contract for him with Hodder and Stoughton. The head of the firm. Sir Ernest HodderWilliams, was evidently a shrewd judge of character, for he decided that the way to make the most of Wallace was to keep him working at pressure. The stream of books, serials and articles grew to a flood: in a meeting with Gerald du Maurier in 1926. under the most inauspicious circumstances. Edgar Wallace found the expert he needed to bring him at last the success he craved for as a playwright; and now it was all his—social success, fame and admiration and enough credit, even if not ready money, for a box at Ascot, a string of racehorses (all failures), and Rolls Royce cars.

Edgar Wallace had risen so far he could afford to regard his past indulgently, to express a surprising admiration for the poor and a noble purity strongly at variance with his early yearning to write "an improper love story” and even to embroider the legend a little with his usual dramatic inventiveness Of course there were several more failures, notably in his plays, but nothing seriously affected his colossal selfconfidence. It was this cheerful belief in his own powers that led him to take the astonishing step of standing for Parliament. He first played with the Idea in 1930 and in 1931 stood as Libera! candidate for Blackpool. In both years his speeches to the startled constituents were flamboyant to the point of comedy. One reason he gave for wishing to enter the House of Commons was that “a writer of crook stories ought never to stop seeking new material." The outcome was inevitable, and it was partly depression after defeat as well as the urgent need for money that drove him to Hollywood to repair his fortunes with a contract for filmscripts. There, suddenly, he died of pneumonia and diabetes.

The life of Edgar Wallace was obviously full of incident and interest, yet as a biography this book is peculiarly exasperating. It was first published in 1938, when presumably the author did not wish to offend or hurt any of Wallace’s friends and relatives who still had vivid and affectionate memories of him. However, a revised edition might reasonably be expected to give an impartial view and fuller illustration of the subject’s character, and this treatment is certainly lacking here. For information on the early years, Miss Lane had the benefit of his adoptive sister Clara’s reminiscences, including a tale of young “Dick Freeman" stealing the savings of Clara and her husband. This is described as a “piece of incredible folly”: there would have been a more coherent picture of a powerful force in Wallace’s life if Miss Lane had boldly linked the matter with certain later incidents, culminating in the repudiation of his mother, which show that he was quite simply ashamed of his past and urgent to get away. In middle age, successful and popular, he could write sentimentally of the virtues of the poor, while drawing attention to the ambition and ability by which he had risen; in early years as a reporter he wrote in a letter "... I hate the British working man: I have no sympathy with him. . . .”

The reviewer has no wish to be denigratory to Edgar Wallace, but in glossing over his weaknesses with a coat of mellifluous prose the author has reduced him to the two-dimensional quality of his own characters. To get the real feeling of this man of remarkable vitality, driving power, arrogance and charm, we need a portrait with “warts and all.”