LATE EDGAR WALLACE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21601, 23 March 1932, Page 8

LATE EDGAR WALLACE

WORLD’S BEST SELLER A REMARKABLE CAREER EARLY LIFE AS NEWSBOY. (From Our Own Correspondent.) LONDON, February 11. When the messages came to London announcing the critical condition of Mr Edgar Wallace, “ The Green Pack,” a new Wallace play at the Wyndham Theatre, was about to begin. In the morning Mrs Wallace had had a telephone message from her husband’s secretary at Hollywood, telling her that Edgar Wallace had been ill for 24 hours, hut that his condition showed a slight improvement. Just before the performance started she received a cablegram saying: “Edgar’s condition critical, come at once.” Mrs Wallace sat through the play, and only informed the actors of the state of affairs when it was well advanced.

At the end of the performance Sir Gerald du Manner, who produced the play and took the principal role, said to the audience with obvious emotion: “ The evening has in part been spoilt for me, and for ray colleagues by the news of our dear Edgar’s illness, which we only received to-day. I do hope you will let me send out to him on your behalf a message of hope for his speedy recovery and to say that you have liked his play. Just half an hour before the news of his death was received Mrs Wallace had sailed from Southampton in the Majestic for New York, whence she planned to fly to Hollywood. Mrs Wallace decided to disembark at Cherbourg and return to London. CONTRACT AT HOLLYWOOD.

Mr Wallace went to Hollywood last December to fulfil a contract, said to amount to £BOO a week, to write film scenarios for the R.K.O. studios. He had completed six stories, three of which, “The Beast,” “The Table,” and “The Man Without a Face,” will be completed. Work on “ The Beast ” lias already been begun. He intended to return to England in March, but was said to be thinking of settling in Hollywood with his family later. America remembers Mr Wallace for his achievement in 1029, when he dashed off the Chicago crime play “On the Spot ” —one of his most successful plays —in two days, after a brief visit to Chicago. When this play was produced in New York it was reported that A 1 Capone, the Chicago gangster, made a special journey to sec it. The theatre in which it was played was later renamed the Wallace Theatre as a tribute to the author. NEWSPAPER BOY.

Edgar Wallace was born in 1875 at Deptford, to be adopted when he was nine days old by a fish porter. In this condition of life ho became early acquainted, not only with the Cockney idiom and humour, which always flowed easily from his pen, but with the reactions of the police and the recurring criminal.

The work of life began with journeys to Billingsgate at 3 in the morning every day, winter and summer. By the time he -was 11 he was selling newspapers in Lndgate Circus. Some more formal education was obtained in board schools, hut, though there can have been little of it in duration, it had so much effect that a policeman was shocked by hearing the newsboy in vehement recitation of the quarrel scene from “Julius Caesar,” thought he was light-headed, and advised him to “ push off.” The Shakespearian paperboy tried many trades before he became a private in the Royal West Kent Regiment. In that corps and in the R.A.M.C. he spent six years, and this spell in the ranks certainly made a journalist of him. The way in which Wallace found himself was in writing letters to the newspapers. This did not make his lot in the army smoother, and he abandoned arms for the pen.

IN SOUTH AFRICA. When in South Africa he was inspired by Kipling’s verse, and determined to write like him. Soon he was the bard of the barracks. He sent poems to the papers. Kipling went out to South Africa and asked to meet the lad. He went to a rather terrifying dinner of the City Club (says “One Who Knew Him” in the Evening News). He hardly knew what to do with all the knives and forks. He hardly had the nerve to talk to the great author, with his fierce moustache, and his keen, kindly eyes. Also, he drank everything that was offered to him, until the knives and forks .got a bit mixed. But he remembered, the next day, that the great man had asked him what else he had done, and had advised him to buy his discharge as soon as he could, and strike out as a free-lance writer.

He got out, and started work as a reporter on a little paper in South Africa. And from that day to this he has boasted that above everything else ho was a reporter. The Boer War came, and he reported it for Reuter’s. But by the time the conference about peace was going on he was reporting it for the Daily Mail. NEWS OF PEACE. Kitchener —and the censors —were stopping all telegrams about the conference. Wallace arranged to cable his messages to a firm in London as though there were merely business telegrams. He arranged with a soldier in the conference camp to signal the news to him as he passed by in the train every day. One day the soldier waved a white handkerchief. Wallace cabled to London “ Contract signed.” And that, the definite news of the peace, was his biggest scoop. A little more journalism in South Africa, and then he was a reporter on the Daily Mail in London. A dramatic life. Murder trials, royal processions, executions, riots, shipwrecks—the whole cavalcade passed in front of his alert eyes. A great life. He gloried in it. He was learning to write—and, more than that, to look on writing as a job-of-work which could be done in just as businesslike a way as any other job. That was the secret of his enormous industry in the days when he was famous. He could turn himself on like a piece of clockwork, shut himself down for meals, and go on afterwards as though there had been no interruption at all. If he wanted to write 5000 words he just pressed the button and his training did the rest. He thought it was very simple. He used to laugh when people hinted that he must have “ghosts” who wrote some of his novels for him. “Why,” he said, “any journalist writes as much as I do! ”

ELDER DUMAS OF OUR DAY. Edgar Wallace’s inexhaustible invention and wide knowledge of human nature, especially in the underworld, made him one of the most popular and prolific novelists of his period (says a writer in the Morning Post). He was once asked by a publisher to suggest a new plot with as little delay as possible; whereupon he retired into a guest room with a typist and emerged in 20 minutes with a complete scenario of a first-rate thriller. Some of his constant readers felt sure he was not a single-handed writer, but a syndicate, and a bookstall humorist is alleged to have inquired, when asked for a new Wallace, if it was the “noon edition ” that was wanted. He was the Elder Dumas of our day. He had a genius for high-speed story-

telling, and, like the immortal author of “The Three Musketeers,” never worried about the quest of the mot juste. He did not take himself or his novels seriously, having an unfaltering sense of humour. He imitated nobody' except himself in his novels; there may have been a falling-off in freshness and originality in some of the later ones. A century hence, it may well be, when the disgrace of being a popular “ best seller ” forgiven, he will be rediscovered as the Elder Dumas was in the nineties and failed as a Nature (there is no exact English equivalent for the French term as used by biographers) who is worthy of critical study. TWO SECRETS. Wallace had two secrets (says a Daily Telegraph writer). One was the amazing, almost mechanical, precision of his mind. Ho never seemed to be at a loss in the steady flow of words; he had the chess player’s faculty of seeing a dozen moves ahead; and he could work in incident after incident, tin-ill after thrill, that would all link up in the end, with the ease of a Capablanca opening a gambit. His other secret was the ease of his style. He never tortured his brain for a startling adjective or a far-fetched simile. He wrote just as he talked, and he was one of the best talkers in London, whether in private or on a platform — crisp, broad and humorous. Much of his work was spoken into a dictaphone. In this way he could get through a play in two or three days. His fastest time, I think, was one act in three hours; and thanks to his clarity of thought and gift for natural dialogue, even this needed little revision. He used also to dictate to a very fast typist.

In his early days publishers and editors gave him endless amusement. One magazine editor commissioned 12 stories, and wanted the first in a month. Ten days later Wallace dropped in and gossiped, with a parcel under his arm. “ Don’t forget that first story,” said the editor as he rose. “ Oh, I nearly forgot,” said Wallace, and ho threw down all 12. LOVE OP HORSE RACING. The racing correspondent of The Times says that if Edgar Wallace had been asked at any time whether he would rather have written a successful play or a successful thriller, or a successful racing article, I have not the least doubt that he would have answered that he would rather have written a successful racing article in which were included several winning selections. He loved racing and all connected with it. In recent years ho had no horses in training, but he took a very close interest in the horses owned by Mrs Wallace. lam afraid that they did not win so often ns he would have liked, but he still thought that they would win, one day. He was a great “ battler ” —racing people will know what I mean by that —and was never beaten. He will be sadly missed on many a members’ lawn. He and I continually differed on many things connected with racing, but that made no difference to a friendship which only death has ended. Apart from his enthusiasm for horses as horses and his delight in backing their chances. Wallace did one great thing for the Turf of this country. It was through him that the rule of racing relating to void nominations was altered. He caused a friendly action to be taken against him by the Jockey Club in 1928 to test whether or not the engagement to pay forfeiture fees when a horse has been entered for a certain race could be enforced by law or was a gaming and wagering contract. Mr Wallace won the case that he wanted to lose, but in the Court of Appeal the decision was reversed. The result of the appeal meant that a forfeit incurred by the owner of a racehorse was a debt recoverable at law. This decision led to an alteration in the Rules of Racing in regard to nominations being void if an owner should die before the decision of the races for which his horse had been entered. Until this decision was made in the courts a horse entered for the Derby could not run in that race if his owner and nominator died before the race was run. WORLD’S BEST SELLER. Edgar Wallace was, “ without any shadow of a doubt, the world’s best seller.” said Mr H. R. Hale, a director of John Long, the publishers. “At a conservative estimate, his sales must aggregate 25,000,000 copies. Book after book has been resurrected and published in cheap form, and it is no extraordinary thing for a title to reach a sale of half a million copies. Several small firms, by leasing a title or two, have lived and flourished on Edgar Wallace exclusively. ' ‘ On the Spot,’ I think, was his biggest success within the last few years.” Mr Wallace is reputed to have written over 150 novels and many plays, apart from numberless short stories and newspaper and magazine articles.