MASTER THRILLER

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23275, 18 February 1939, Page 13 (Supplement)

MASTER THRILLER

I KNEW several of the men who went to make up Edgar Wallace. There was the great storyteller, who w'as my hero from the moment I discovered "Sanders of the River," as a boy. ' Here was a hero who alternately delighted and exasperated me by the unevenness of his tales, until, when the output was at its torrential height, during the 'twenties, and the quality jumped, about like a compass needle, I was forced to subscribe to the theory, now declared false, that he employed "ghosts" ("a rumour which teased him like a noisy bluebottle to the end of his life"). It was the only way I could keep my faith in him.

There was the dramatist-producer, by whose side I sat once in a darkened theatre watching the rehearsal of the latest melodrama that had dropped from that inexhaustible fountain-pen over a week-end. A formidable figure, with a profile like a Roman emperor, his hands folded over his stomach, his mouth clamped tightly on a fantastically long cigarette-holder. (He never seemed to smoke properly, but rather to blow the cigarette away, so that the blue smoke curled away from the lighted end like a cloud.) Furrowed Brow

Occasionally, he intervened, sometimes. 1 thought, without great point, but invariably with charm and humour. The actors plainly liked him. Now and then he would murmur something to me out of the corner of his mouth about the scene we were following, usually a. pungent but unmalicious comment on one of the cast up front.

There was the candidate for Parliament whom I followed round Blackpool one windy October, -a naive, flamboyant,, over-confident - creature,; jvho, caught in off moments, looked fleshy .and worn. He thought the very name of Wallace, the arch-showman, was enough, in that town of showfolk, to return him to Westminster.

At first, his meetings were tremendous. I really thought that, though he was on the unpopular...Lloyd George ticket, he would romp home. Then I Bat under, him' at meetings in dim-lit schoolrooms in those vast areas of villadom behind the Front, away from the Tower; and the piers, and the fishstalls, and the bright lights, and, with einking-heart, heard him make the most astonishing speeches..

They revealed a profound ignorance of all but the most elementary principles of Liberalism.- Now that he had exhausted his glamour, the professional* hecklers him like,terriers, and he would leave a meeting with his brow furrowed. He quite honestly'could not understand why people should be so nasty. The sudden scandals, and - jeers, t and.i rumours of an election campaign were a puzzle to him.

I think I have never seen a man so downcast a» Edgar Wallace when, on polling night, h£ found he was out by 33,000 votes. My last sight of him was as he drove away in his vast llollsRoyce, waving rather pathetically back to the few who still waved to him. He looked an old man. In ' three months he was dead, six thousand miles away from Blackpool. Dramatic Twist Author, dramatist, would-be politician, clubman, editor and racing man, these'are a few of the facets of Edgar .Wallace which, with many others, his daughter-in-law, Margaret Lane, has brought together to build up "the biography of a phenomenon," and she has written a fascinating book, "Edgar Wallace" (Heinemann.)

A great deal of painstaking research has enabled her to piece together the fragments of• a life which, though so much of it was spent in the public eye, was not easy -to follow consecutively through its spectacular vicissitudes. .(Edgar himself was more of a hindrance than a help to those who wanted to Jsnow the truth about him, because he was always tempted to introduce the same kind of dramatic twist into his own life that lie put into his fiction).

She writes,, as becomes a novelist "whose first book won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize, with distinction, and in her judgment of him, affection and criticism are nicely compounded. In one thing, of course, she was supremely fortunate: her subject. His life was astonishing enough, in barest, untrimnied detail, to put even his own romances into shade.

He was burn out of wedlock, to a small-part actress in a touring company. His father, who never knew him, Was the son of the remarkable Miss Alice Marriott,- whose Hamlet was said by Victorian critics to be the,equal of many a man's. !

His mother, within a fortnight of his birth, left him with a Billingsgate porter's wife, and rejoined her company. In the drab but respectable surroundings of a four-roomed cottage near the fiver, Edgar grew up, and, in spite of the occasional visits of a stout lady in bonnet and mantle who gave him sixpences and gallery tickets, it was of the fish-porter's wife he thought as mother.

She had a grpat many other children, a nd one of them, Clara, though eighteen years, older than he, becamo ■®i®-first constant companion.

He was an engaging, impudent boy, who, by the time he left school at twelve, had already sold papers unknown to his foster-parents, on a pitch at Ludgate Circus less than a dozen yards from the wall which now carries a bronze plaque to his memory. When he left school, he had a bewildering succession of jobs, as printer's devil, errand-boy, cobbler's apprentice, and worker in a mackintosh factory. Then he ran away to sea, and was signed on as ship's cook. Versifying Talent But he was a bad sailor, and an even worse cook, so he went back to help Clara's husband on his milk round. He joined the militia, fell in love with a blue-eyed nursemaid, passed from' the dairy business to building, and, finally, hating the long hours with lime and water in freezing weather, enlisted in the li.oyal West Kent Regiment. (Age: 18 years 8 months. Height: sft. 4|in. Weight, 1151b.) Array discipline irked him, so he got transferred to the Medical Corps, and found an outlet i for a talent for versifying in which he had been dabbling, at the Aldershot canteen concerts.

When Arthur Roberts, his music-hall idol, accepted a song with the title: "A Sort of a Kind of a 1" his delight knew no bounds, and even the 96 hours' imprisonment, with hard labour, which rewarded his five-day desertion to London to hear the prince of comedians sing his Song, scarcely seemed too high a price to pay. ' * • Soon afterwards iie was drafted to South Africa, which was a brilliant and strange place, and just before the South African War, an exciting one. At Simonstown he fell under the influence first, of Mrs. Caldecott, a missionary's wife, and a wogaan of magnetic personality, and, very ; \shortly, of her daughter, Ivy, vague aijd shy and round-eyed.- f *>p§ The nursemaid was forgotten, and, stimulated by contact with a family of culture, Edgar began to take what lie called his "Muse" more seriously. Several of the Cape papers published his Work, but new triumph came when a poem of his in the Cape Times, celebrating ihe arrival of Kipling (it was an unblushing > imitation of , Kipling's stylo),[ so. favourably impressed the; great man' that ' Private -.Wallace wasi invited to an official'banquet tb -meet; him." '! ■ ' - ' : Dizzy Heights ' It. was a critical moment in Wallace's life, for it decided him to free himself from the Army, and take up writing as a profession...JJpi;' even, the growth of his love affair with Ivy, upon which her father looked with stern disapproval, could distract from his purpose, and he got into civilian clothes just in time.to be appointed' Reuter's second correspondent" in the Boer War. The story of his success, first with Renter's, and later with the Daily Mail, and, iin particular, of his great scoop over the signing of peace at Vereenig-; ingi aire well known. ■ j Of the middle period in Wallace's! career, between the time of his emergence as a first-rate reporter and his arrival at dizzy heights of wealth and fame as the most popular story-teller in the world, Miss Lane writes in great detail, but at no point does she allow the interest to slacken. X The Many Edgars We see Edgdir "as a man 1 of consequence in Jo'burg, with high-buttoned, sporting suits, gold-headed canes—and mounting debts. Edgar in Fleet Street, still wearing South African hats, but with button boots and spats. Edgar in Canada. Edgar as the proud father of a son (Ivy married him in spite of her father's wrath), persuading that curious figure in American politics, William Jennings Bryan, to be the infant's

Newsboy Who Became A World-famo Novelist Playwright

The story of Edgar Wallace, milkboy, newsboy, soldier, poet, dramatist and novelist, who became the great writer that he Was, and Was said at one period of his career to have made £40,000 a year, is as exciting as one of his own thrillers. . > • This story is admirably told by his daughter-in-law, Margaret ; Lane/ in her "Biography of a Phenomenon," reviewed here by Kenneth Adam.

godfather (Bryan's christening gift was a volume "of Tolstoy!). Edgar in Morocco, sending home a letter from If ais till, the colourful . brigand, which may, or may not have been merely a product of the special correspondent's lively imagination. Edgar in Madrid, and almost an eyewitness of tho attempt on tlfe life of the King and Queen. Edgar the flirt, whose vanity needed more stimulating companionship than tho retiring ivy could provide. Edgar the author of "The Four Just Men," which he advertised so expensively that Harmsworth had to come to his rescue. Edgar in the Congo investigating atrocities. Edgar unfortunately "so prominent in libel actions that the Daily Mail decided his services, though valuable, were too expensive. And Edgar, the Micawber of Tressilian Crescent, London, whom neither bailiffs in the house, nor second-hand clothes dealers at the back door, nor importunate book-keepers on the telephone could shake in his belief that Fortune was just around the corner. New Reputation So, indeed, it was. A Mrs. Thorne, editor of the Weekly Tale-Teller, persuaded him that in his Congo adventures he had the raw material for a great series of short stories. Cornmis-

sioner Sanders and, a little later, Lieutenant Tibbetts, were born, and in a very short time, Edgar had a new reputation as a popular short-story writer: He re-entered Fleet Street as star reporter of the Evening Times, and, though that died, found it increasingly easy both to write and to sell stories. Dictaphones and chain-smoking now became an essential part of his routine. It was during the war that the break with Ivy came. Neglected more and more for the gay and worldly Daisy, and for the cool, efficient secretary, Violet King, Ivy got a divorce, and prepared to marry a Belgian refugee, who went homo to Belgium, however, at the end of the war, without her. She was a tragic figure, a sacrifice to Edgar's great energy and overpowering vitality. Excellent "Jim"

''AMiss Lane pilots the reader skilfully through these emotional scenes, and makes it quite plain that Violet, afterwards known as "Jim," who became Edgar's second wife, was an excellent choice in every way for a man of such mercurial temperament.

It was Sir Ernest Hodder-Williams who finally "set Edgar firmly on the path Jie had sought so long." The joke about "the mid-day Wallace" flattered him' and was, at the same time, good publicity. For a man Who was ''fundamentally lazy," was always to be seen at race-meetings, in the card-room of the Press Club and at theatres, his output was amazing . 157 separate works in 27 years. The New World

So Miss Lane leads us, through an excellent analysis of the various types of his work, to the later days, successes and failures in the theatre and on the screen, habits of. spectacular spending and dramatic generosity, "which became almost an obsession, growing financial troubles, outbursts of temper and hysteria, and to the last, pathetic scene in Hollywood, where, separated from his beloved family, but, as he hoped, on the threshold of a new world made for him to conquer, the machine that Edgar Wallace had become, broke down and would run no longer. On his death in February, 1932, the total claims of his creditors were £140,000, his liquid assets virtually nil. Legal steps and other action having reduced the claims to £64,000, all the creditors, by March, 1934, were satisfied, and the estate was settled. A new company of Edgar Wallace, Limited, was formed in which his four children were sole shareholders. At

the e,nd of its second year, the new company was free of all liabilities, and paying dividends. Its sole assets are the Edgar Wallace copyrights. If proof be needed of the man's talent, or a tribute he sought for him, they may perhaps -best be found in that single fact.