Thousands Follow Edgar Wallace’s Racing Tips.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 18623, 27 November 1928, Page 8

Thousands Follow Edgar Wallace’s Racing Tips.

HENRY FORD OF ENGLISH FICTION IS BUSIEST MAN IN LONDON.

(Special to the “Star.''). LONDON, October 10. Edgar Wallace, whose plays and books are as popular in New Zealand as in London, has applied mass production methods to fiction. He churns out novels and dramas with almost unbelievable rapidity, and this 3 r ear modestly hopes to beat his 1927 record of twenty-six books and six plays. Galloping madly down the departure platform of the Paddington (London) station came a messenger boy. Panting, he struggled up to a man who was about to board the train, and delivered a package, which, it developed, contained a three-act plaj'. Twenty Plays in Three Years. All London to-day is talking about Edgar Wallace. His income, his habits, his hours of work, are subjects of heated debate. Perhaps the general public, that part of the general public that does not read his stories or go to his plays, first began to take notice when he gave a banquet in the Savoy Hotel some time ago to the people he was then employing in his various plays on view in four London theatres. Five hundred and ninety sat down at table. Edgar Wallace jokes are getting as common as Ford jokes used to be. Here is one of the best: Wallace’s butler, in his mansion in Portland Place, is answering the ’phone. “I’m sorry, sir, I can’t put you through. Mr Wallace is finishing a new play and left word that he must not be disturbed. What’s that, sir? You’ll hold the wire ?”

not square with his confession to an interviewer who asked him which of his novels took him the shortest time to write and which the longest. “A firm of publishers asked me on Thursday for a novel of 70,000 words by noon on Monday. Working eighteen hours a day, dictating it all to a typist, with my wife doing the corrections, I delivered ‘ The Strange Countess ’ on Monday morning. If anyone wants to give me a present he inight send me a copy. I should like to read it.” “And your most dilatory effort?” “That was ‘The Gunner.’ It took me several weeks. But this apparent lethargy was due to the fact that during the same period I had to write a novel called “The Flying Squad,” a play of the same name, and a play called, I think, “The Man Who Changed His Name.’ ” Does He Make £50,000 a Year? Wallace has cut out the middleman in order to increase his profits on the stage. He says he made only £6OOO out of a shocker called “The Ringer,* while Frank Curzon, the theatrical manager who put it on, cleared £20,000. Accordingly, Wallace is now his own impressario. After he has written his plays, he casts them himself, pays all the expenses, hires the theatres, and takes the profits or stands the losses. This leads to the query, “How much money does Edgar Wallace make?” He won’t say. Three nights running at dinner the conversation turned first to plays and then to Mr Wallace; and almost immediately came the inevitable questions: “Does he really write a play in a week?” and “Does he really make £50,000 a year?” People even ask Mr Wallace himself. “And what do you reply.?” asked an interviewer. “I say, ‘How much do you make?’*

But creative literature does not absorb all of Wallace’s time, although his speed of output in the last three y r ears has increased in geometrical ratio, so that in 1925 he wrote twice as many novels and stories as in 1924, and so on, until in 1927 he produced twenty-six novels and at least six play's. This year he modestly hopes to do better.

Wallace is a dramatic critic—a job that cuts into his evenings. He writes about plays for the “ Morning Post.” He is also a racing expert. His attendance at race meetings and his' expert articles on the turf, which appear in evening and Sunday organs, cut into his afternoons. The bulk of his purely literary output, he told an interviewer, is, perforce, produced in his mornings. He is perhaps more proud of his racing articles than his other work, and thousands follow his tips, although his reputation suffered somewhat when he assured millions that the favourite “cannot possibly lose” the Derby this year, and the favourite finished twelfth. Dictates Everything. It is said that he dictates his novels and plays into a dictaphone, and that his wife and his corps of secretaries attend to the rest, without troubling him to read over what he has uttered. This is probably exaggerated. It does