EDGAR WALLACE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21112, 20 February 1932, Page 1 (Supplement)

EDGAR WALLACE.

THE CRIME NOVEL.

BY KOTARE.

Whatever the final judgment of the literary critic may be, Edgar Wallace has this pre-eminence among writers of today—lie is moro widely read than any other author of his time. And as these is no compulsion in the matter of reading, and a book survives only by its power to give pleasure, he may be presumed to have given more pleasure to the reading public than any other contemporary novelist. That power of turning out an unceasing stream of, books that the public would eagerly look for and as eagerly buy brought many shekels to his treasury. In the world of books he stands for commercial success. It does no harm to realise that financial success does not attach itself only to bad art. That is the comforting delusion fostered by the painter or writer or actor who is forced to find a reason for the lack of public appreciation of his own work, and who naturally enough assumes that it his own superlative excellence that stands in the way of popularity. Ho refuses to give the public what the public wants. He will appeal to the few that understand. The public approval is always given to the author who knows how to play to his gallery. If a book is popular it must be a poor book. It is a difficult question. It certainly cannot be solved in this simple debonair fashion. Shakespeare made money out of his plays. Scott amassed a huge fortune from his novels. So did Dickens from his. The public judgment is not invariably wrong. My own opinion is that breadth of appeal must be a note of the highest art. Any theory of art that is based on the assumption that most men are fools I should reject without further consideration. Cliquism and snobbery have been the bane of art from the beginning. This calm assumption of superiority to the common herd is the sure mark of the fifth-rate mind. Popularity. It is surprising what a grip this intellectual and artistic snobbery has of certain circles of our self-constituted intelligentsia. If a man has a gift of clear exposition, if he can say what ho wants to say in simple compelling language, then he is labelled shallow, a skimmer of the surface who lacks sound scholarship. If a lecturer loses himself in a fog and neither his audience nor himself knows what on earth he is havering about, he is so profound, don't you know; his mind, the true scholar mind, is grappling with the ultimate things that language can so inadequately express. " Drumly's no deep," the Scots proverb has it. A stream is not necessarily shallow because it is clear, nor is it deep because it is muddy and you can't see the bottom. It is idle then to condemn a writer like Edgar Wallace because he knew exactly what he wanted to say and because what lie wanted to say was exactly what a vast public wanted him to say. There must be very few people in the Englishspeaking world to-day that have not devoured an Edgar Wallace book with sincere delight. That so many feel they ought to apologise for their lapse of taste when they have shamefacedly admitted they have found genuine pleasure in this book or that is not a pleasant commentary on our standards. No one suggests that Wallace was one of the great artists. I imagine he would have been the last man to make such a claim for himself. There are hundreds of writers to-day that can write better prose than he ever aspired to in his best moments. In his own field writers like P. Macdonald, H. C. Bailey, and especially G. K. Chesterton, left, him far behind in literary craftsmanship and general culture. Crofts and others can weave a better-knit story. Yet Wallace numbered his admirers by the tens of thousands where the better literary artists numbered theirs by hundreds. How are we to account for this stupendous success ? His Appeal. There is orie quality a novelist must possess—without it lie is a mere stray from some neighbouring paddock and had better get back to his own quarters again. He must have a story to tell and he must be able to tell it. Wallace always had a good yarn to unfold. It may have been often a ridiculous yarn when you analysed it; it may have often gaped at the seams when you considered it with your critical cap on. But it was always a story with movement and interest and excitement. The characters may have shown no profound psychological insight on the part of their creator, but they lived in their environment and for the purposes the author intended. In fact, Wallace's gifts were essentially dramatic. The stage cannot reproduce real life—real life is too slow, too uninteresting. There must be a heightening of emotion, a focussing of many events into a narrow space; the characters must be obvious and not 100 complex. Wallace got the pace and rush and clarity of his stories by transferring to the novel the mothods of the stage. In his West African stories he attempted more in the way of atmosphere and characterisation. They always seemed to me by far his best work, an indication of what he might have done if he had chosen the higher branches of fiction. Sanders is an unforgettable figure; he and the Wodehousean Lieutenant Tibbctts are about the only characters of his that remain with me in clear outline of the hundreds I have met in his pages. But, lie chose his own field, and probably he was the best judge. The Primitive Man. Wallace appealed to certain primitive but very strongly-rooted instincts in his readers. For some reason man is always interested in crime. Stanley Hall thinks we all come into the world with a criminal inheritance. Books like Wallace's give a satisfactory vicarious outlet for our criminality. We enter with him the world of crime and under the author's spell are rid of some perilous stuff that would otherwise seek expression in much more harmful fashion. To read about crime satisfies our criminality; seeing crime becomes a pleasant sublimation of an unpleasant urge. We loso our crime instincts by watching other people express them.' And then Wallace links this up with another primitive instinct. The manhunt of the villain. We can gratify Ihe always a hunter, but his choicest quarry is not the beast of the field but his fellowman. Wallace satisfies our moral instincts, too, by inviting us to join in the hunt of the villain. We can gratify the primitive instincts of early man and glow with conscious rectitude over the whole business. For the villain comes to his own place at last. In Wallace's hands we are always on the side of the angels. And that is much more than can be said of a considerable section of modern fiction. Like Trollope, he worked always to schedule. There was no question of writing when ho felt like it. His imagination, all his creative powers, had to do what they were told; they were never allowed off duty. The miracle was that with so stupendous an output he maintained so high a level of quality. The world may not have lost a great artist, but it has lost one of its greatest entertainers. And in these hard times we could have perhaps better spared a greater man.