Edgar Wallace facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Edgar Wallace
Wallace in 1928
Born	Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace (1875-04-01)1 April 1875 Greenwich, Kent, England
Died	10 February 1932(1932-02-10) (aged 56) Beverly Hills, California, U.S.
Nationality	British
Occupation	Crime writer, war correspondent, journalist, novelist, screenwriter, and playwright
Known for	Creation of King Kong
Spouse(s)	Ivy Maude Caldecott ​ ​ (m. 1901; div. 1918)​ Ethel Violet King ​ (m. 1921)​

Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace (1 April 1875 – 10 February 1932) was a British writer.

Born into poverty as an illegitimate London child, Wallace left school at the age of 12. He joined the army at age 21 and was a war correspondent during the Second Boer War for Reuters and the Daily Mail. Struggling with debt, he left South Africa, returned to London and began writing thrillers to raise income, publishing books including The Four Just Men (1905). Drawing on his time as a reporter in the Congo, covering the Belgian atrocities, Wallace serialised short stories in magazines such as The Windsor Magazine and later published collections such as Sanders of the River (1911). He signed with Hodder and Stoughton in 1921 and became an internationally recognised author.

After an unsuccessful bid to stand as Liberal MP for Blackpool (as one of David Lloyd George's Independent Liberals) in the 1931 general election, Wallace moved to Hollywood, where he worked as a script writer for RKO. He died suddenly from undiagnosed diabetes, during the initial drafting of King Kong (1933).

Wallace was such a prolific writer that one of his publishers claimed that a quarter of all books in England were written by him. As well as journalism, Wallace wrote screen plays, poetry, historical non-fiction, 18 stage plays, 957 short stories and over 170 novels, 12 in 1929 alone. More than 160 films have been made of Wallace's work.

In addition to his work on King Kong, he is remembered as a writer of "the colonial imagination", for the J. G. Reeder detective stories, and for The Green Archer serial. He sold over 50 million copies of his combined works in various editions and The Economist in 1997 describes him as "one of the most prolific thriller writers of [the 20th] century", although the great majority of his books are out of print in the UK, but are still read in Germany. A 50-minute German TV documentary was made in 1963 called The Edgar Wallace Story, which featured his son Bryan Edgar Wallace.

Life and work

Ancestry and birth

Wallace's great-grandfather was entertainer James Henry Marriott, and his grandmother was actress Alice Marriott. Wallace was born at 7 Ashburnham Grove, Greenwich, to actors Richard Horatio Marriott Edgar (1847–1894) and Mary Jane "Polly" Richards, née Blair (born 1843).

Wallace's mother's family had been in show business, and she worked in the theatre as a stagehand, usherette, and bit-part actress until she married in 1867. Her husband, Captain Joseph Richards, was born in 1838; he was from Irish family. He and his father John Richards were both Merchant Navy captains, and his mother Catherine Richards came from a mariner family. Joseph died at sea in 1868, leaving his pregnant wife destitute. After the birth of Wallace's older sibling, his mother returned to the stage, assuming the stage name "Polly" Richards. In 1872, she met and joined the Marriott family theatre troupe, managed by Alice Marriott, her husband Richard Edgar, and her three adult children, Grace, Adeline and Richard Horatio Marriott Edgar.

Discovering she was pregnant, Wallace's mother invented a fictitious obligation in Greenwich that would last at least half a year and obtained a room in a boarding house where she lived until her son's birth, on 1 April 1875. She had asked her midwife to find a couple to foster the child. The midwife introduced Wallace's mother to her close friend, Mrs Freeman, a mother of ten children, whose husband George Freeman was a Billingsgate fishmonger. On 9 April 1875, his mother took Wallace to the semi-literate Freeman family, and made arrangements to visit often.

Childhood and early career

Wallace, then known as Richard Horatio Edgar Freeman, had a happy childhood and a close bond with 20-year-old Clara Freeman, who became a second mother to him. By 1878, his mother could no longer afford the small sum she had been paying the Freemans to care for her son and, instead of placing the boy in the workhouse, the Freemans adopted him. His mother never visited Wallace again as a child. His foster-father George Freeman was determined to ensure Richard received a good education, and for some time Wallace attended St. Alfege with St. Peter's, a boarding school in Peckham, but he played truant and then left full-time education at the age of 12.

By his early teens, Wallace had held down numerous jobs such as newspaper-seller at Ludgate Circus near Fleet Street, milk-delivery boy, rubber factory worker, shoe shop assistant, and ship's cook. A plaque at Ludgate Circus commemorates Wallace's first encounter with the newspaper business. He was dismissed from his job on the milk run for stealing money. In 1894, he became engaged to a local Deptford girl, Edith Anstree, but broke the engagement and enlisted in the infantry.

Wallace registered in the British Army under the name Edgar Wallace, after the author of Ben-Hur, Lew Wallace. At the time the medical records register him as having a 33-inch chest and being stunted from his childhood spent in the slums. He was posted to South Africa with the West Kent Regiment, in 1896. He disliked army life but managed to arrange a transfer to the Royal Army Medical Corps, which was less arduous but more unpleasant, and so transferred again to the Press Corps, which he found suited him better.

1898–1918

Edgar Wallace c. 1898–1902

Wallace began publishing songs and poetry, much inspired by Rudyard Kipling, whom he met in Cape Town in 1898. Wallace's first book of ballads, The Mission that Failed!, was published that same year. In 1899, he bought his way out of the forces and turned to writing full time. Remaining in Africa, he became a war correspondent, first for Reuters and then the Daily Mail (1900) and other periodicals during the Boer War.

In 1901, while in South Africa, Wallace married Ivy Maude Caldecott (1880?–1926), although her father Reverend William Shaw Caldecott, a Wesleyan missionary, was strongly opposed to the marriage. The couple's first child, Eleanor Clare Hellier Wallace, died suddenly from meningitis in 1903, and the couple returned to London soon afterwards, deeply in debt.

In London, Wallace worked for the Mail and began writing detective stories in a bid to earn quick money. A son, Bryan Edgar Wallace, was born in 1904 followed by a daughter, Patricia, in 1908. In 1903, Wallace met his birth mother Polly, whom he had never known. Terminally ill, 60 years old, and living in poverty, she came to him to ask for money and was turned away. Polly died in the Bradford Infirmary later that year.

Plaque in Fleet Street, London, commemorating Edgar Wallace who worked there for the Daily Mail before finding fame as an author.

Unable to find any backer for his first book, Wallace set up his own publishing company, Tallis Press, which issued the thriller The Four Just Men (1905). Despite promotion in the Mail and good sales, the project was financially mismanaged, and Wallace had to be bailed out by the Mail's proprietor Alfred Harmsworth, who was anxious that the farrago might reflect badly on his newspaper. Problems were compounded when inaccuracies in Wallace's reporting led to libel suits being brought against the Mail. Wallace was fired in 1907, the first reporter ever to be fired from the paper, and he found no other paper would employ him, given his reputation. The family lived continuously in a state of near-bankruptcy, Ivy having to sell her jewellery for food.

During 1907, Edgar travelled to the Congo Free State, to report on atrocities committed against the Congolese under King Leopold II of Belgium and the Belgian rubber companies. Isabel Thorne, of the Weekly Tale-Teller penny magazine, invited Wallace to serialise stories inspired by his experiences. These were published as his first collection Sanders of the River (1911), a best seller, and in 1935 it was adapted into an eponymous film, starring Paul Robeson. Wallace went on to publish 11 more similar collections (102 stories). They were tales of exotic adventure and local tribal rites, set on an African river, mostly without love interest as this held no appeal for Wallace. His first 28 books and their film rights he sold outright, with no royalties, for quick money. Critic David Pringle noted in 1987: "The Sanders Books are not frequently reprinted nowadays, perhaps because of their overt racism".

The period from 1908 to 1932 was the most prolific of Wallace's life. Initially, he wrote mainly in order to satisfy creditors in the UK and South Africa. However, his books' success began to rehabilitate his reputation as a journalist, and he began reporting from horse racing circles. He wrote for the Week-End and the Evening News, became an editor for Week-End Racing Supplement, started his own racing papers Bibury's and R. E. Walton's Weekly, and bought many racehorses of his own. He lost many thousands gambling, and despite his success, spent large sums on an extravagant lifestyle he could not afford.

During 1916, Ivy had her third and last child by Edgar, Michael Blair Wallace, and filed for divorce in 1918.

1918–1929

Ivy moved to Tunbridge Wells with the children, and Wallace drew closer to his secretary Ethel Violet King (1896–1933), daughter of banker Frederick King. They married in 1921; their daughter Margaret Penelope June (known as Penny Wallace) was born in 1923.

Wallace began to take his fiction writing career more seriously and signed with publishers Hodder and Stoughton in 1921, organising his contracts, instead of selling rights to his work piecemeal in order to raise funds. This allowed him advances, royalties, and full scale promotional campaigns for his books, which he had never before had. The publisher aggressively advertised him as a celebrity writer, "King of Thrillers", known for this trademark trilby, cigarette holder, and yellow Rolls-Royce. He was said to be able to write a 70,000 word novel in three days and plough through three novels at once, and the publishers agreed to publish everything he wrote as fast as he could write it. In 1928, it was estimated that one in four books being read in the UK had come from Wallace's pen. He wrote across many genres including science fiction, screen plays, and a non-fiction ten-volume history of the First World War. All told, he wrote over 170 novels, 18 stage plays, and 957 short stories, and his works were translated into 28 languages. The critic Wheeler Winston Dixon suggests that Wallace became somewhat of a public joke for this prodigious output.

Wallace served as chairman of the Press Club, which continues to present an annual Edgar Wallace Award for excellence in writing. Following the great success of his novel The Ringer, Wallace was appointed chairman of the British Lion Film Corporation in return for giving British Lion first option on all his output. Wallace's contract gave him an annual salary, a substantial block of stock in the company, a large stipend from everything British Lion produced based on his work, plus 10% of British Lion's overall annual profits. Additionally, British Lion employed his elder son, Bryan E. Wallace, as a film editor. By 1929, Wallace's earnings were almost £50,000 per annum (equivalent to about £2 million in current terms). He also invented at this time the Luncheon Club, bringing together his two greatest loves: journalism and horse-racing.

Firsts

Wallace was the first British crime novelist to use policemen as his protagonists, rather than amateur sleuths as most other writers of the time did. Most of his novels are independent stand-alone stories; he seldom used series heroes, and when he did he avoided a strict story order, so that continuity was not required from book to book.

On 6 June 1923, Edgar Wallace became the first British radio sports reporter, when he made a report on The Derby for the British Broadcasting Company, the newly founded predecessor of the BBC.

Ivy's death

Wallace's ex-wife Ivy was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1923, and though the tumour was successfully removed, it returned terminally by 1925, and she died in 1926.

Politics, emigration to the U.S., and screenwriting

Wallace became active in the Liberal Party and contested Blackpool in the 1931 general election as one of a handful of Independent Liberals, who rejected the National Government, and the official Liberal support for it, and strongly supported free trade. He also bought the Sunday News, edited it for six months, and wrote a theatre column, before it closed. In the event, he lost the election by over 33,000 votes. He went to America, burdened by debt, in November 1931. Around the same time, he wrote the screenplay for the first sound film adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles (1932), produced in England by Gainsborough Pictures.

He moved to Hollywood and began working as a "script doctor" for RKO. His later play, The Green Pack, opened to excellent reviews, boosting his status even further. Wallace wanted to get his own work on Hollywood celluloid, and so he adapted books such as The Four Just Men and Mr J G Reeder. In Hollywood, Wallace met Stanley Holloway's scriptwriter, Wallace's own half-brother Marriott Edgar. Wallace's play On the Spot, written about gangster Al Capone, would prove to be the writer's greatest theatrical success. It was described by Jack Adrian as "arguably, in construction, dialogue, action, plot and resolution, still one of the finest and purest of 20th-century melodramas". It launched the career of Charles Laughton, who played the lead Capone character Tony Perelli.

Death and aftermath

Death

In December 1931, Wallace was assigned work on the RKO "gorilla picture" (King Kong, 1933) for producer Merian C. Cooper. By late January, however, he was beginning to suffer sudden, severe headaches and was diagnosed with diabetes. His condition deteriorated within days. Violet booked passage to California on a liner out of Southampton, but received word that Edgar had slipped into a coma and died of the condition, combined with double pneumonia, on 10 February 1932 in North Maple Drive, Beverly Hills. The flags on Fleet Street's newspaper offices flew at half-mast, and the bell of St. Bride's tolled in mourning. His body was returned to England and he was buried at Little Marlow Cemetery, Fern Lane, Buckinghamshire, not far from his UK country home, Chalklands, in Bourne End.

Aftermath

Despite his later success, Wallace had amassed massive debts, some still remaining from his years in South Africa, many to racing bookies. The large royalties from his greatly popular works allowed the estate to be settled within two years.

Violet Wallace outlived her husband by only 14 months. She died suddenly in April 1933, aged 33, while the estate was still deep in debt.

Legacy

The Edgar Wallace pub, Essex Street, off Strand, London

Violet Wallace's own will left her share of the Wallace estate to her daughter Penelope (1923–1997), herself an author of mystery and crime novels, who became the chief benefactor and shareholder. Penelope married George Halcrow in 1955. The couple ran the Wallace estate, managing her father's literary legacy and starting the Edgar Wallace Society in 1969. The work is continued by Penelope's daughter, also named Penelope. The Society has members in 20 countries. The literary body is currently managed by the London agency A.P. Watt.

Wallace's eldest son Bryan Edgar Wallace (1904–1971) was also an author of mystery and crime novels. In 1934, Bryan married Margaret Lane (1907–94), also a writer. Lane's biography of Edgar Wallace was published in 1938

The Edgar Wallace Mystery Magazine was a monthly digest-size fiction magazine specializing in crime and detective fiction. It published 35 issues from 1964 to 1967. Each issue contained original works of short crime or mystery fiction as well as reprints by authors like Wallace, Chekhov, Steinbeck, and Agatha Christie.

More than 160 films and several radio adaptations have been made based on Wallace's work. Wallace also has a pub named after him in Essex Street, off Strand in London.

Writing

Method

Wallace narrated his words onto wax cylinders (the dictaphones of the day) and his secretaries typed up the text. This may be why he was able to work at such high speed and why his stories have narrative drive. Many of Wallace's successful books were dictated like this over two or three days, locked away with cartons of cigarettes and endless pots of sweet tea, often working pretty much uninterrupted in 72 hours. Most of his novels were serialised in segments but written in this way. The serialised stories that were instead written piecemeal have a distinctly different narrative energy, not sweeping up the reader on the story wave.

Wallace rarely edited his own work after it was dictated and typed up, but sent it straight to the publishers, intensely disliking the revision of his work with other editors. The company would do only cursory checks for factual errors before printing.

Wallace faced widespread accusations that he used ghost writers to churn out books, though there is no evidence of this, and his prolificness became something of a joke, the subject of cartoons and sketches. His "three day books", reeled off to keep the loan sharks from the door, were unlikely to garner great critical praise and Wallace claimed not to find literary value in his own works.

Science fiction

Edgar Wallace enjoyed writing science fiction but found little financial success in the genre despite several efforts. His constant need for income always brought him back to the more mundane styles of fiction that sold more easily. Planetoid 127, first published in 1924 but reprinted as late as 2011, is a short story about an Earth scientist who communicates via wireless with his counterpart on a duplicate Earth orbiting unseen because it is on the opposite side of the Sun. The idea of a "mirror Earth" or "mirror Universe" later became a standard subgenre within science fiction. The story also bears similarities to Rudyard Kipling's hard science fiction story "Wireless". Wallace's other science fiction works include The Green Rust, a story of bio-terrorists who threaten to release an agent that will destroy the world's corn crops, 1925, which accurately predicted that a short peace would be followed by a German attack on England, and The Black Grippe, about a disease that renders everyone in the world blind. His last work of science fiction and the only one widely remembered today is the screenplay for King Kong.

King Kong

The cover of the original 1932 screenplay for the film King Kong by Edgar Wallace entitled "Kong".

Out of the many scripts he penned for RKO, Merian C. Cooper's "gorilla picture" had the most lasting influence, becoming the classic King Kong (1933).

Wallace wrote the initial 110-page first draft for "The Beast" (the film's original title) over five weeks, from late December 1931 to January 1932. In all, there were three draft versions, another titled "Kong". Kong was rejected as the film's title because it was too similar to another Cooper film, Chang, released in 1927, and because it sounded Chinese. Wallace suggested the title King Ape.

However, his 110-page script was merely the first rough draft, not a final and completed shooting script.

After Wallace's death, Ruth Rose was brought in to work on the document he had started. She was able to translate the expectations of the producers into the final script. Rose also added the opening scenes of the movie in which the main characters and plot are introduced. James Ashmore Creelman, who worked on the screenplay for The Most Dangerous Game, a film that Wallace was in discussions to write for at the time of his death, was also brought in to tidy up the script. The job of Rose and Creelman was to rework Wallace's original screenplay and replace scenes that failed to translate as expected.

West Germany

In 1959 Danish production company Rialto Film on behalf of West German distributor Constantin Film made "The Fellowship of the Frog" into a movie. The initial success prompted Rialto Film to establish a German subsidiary, securing the rights to most of Wallace's novels, and producing an additional 38 movies until 1972. During the time Wallace's eldest son Bryan as well had 10 of his novels adapted into movies by West Berlin-based production company CCC-Filmkunst. Both series were set in contemporary UK but filmed entirely in Western Germany and West Berlin. Although panned by critics the movies garnered a following with occasional reruns on German TV.

In 2004, Oliver Kalkofe produced the movie Der Wixxer, an homage to the popular black and white Wallace movies. It featured many well known comedians. In 2007, Kalkofe produced a sequel Neues vom Wixxer.

There are more of Wallace's books still in print in Germany than elsewhere and his work has consistently remained popular there.

Literary works

African novels (Sanders of the River series)

• Sanders of the River (1911) - short stories serialised in The Weekly Tale-Teller, filmed in 1935
• The People of the River (1911) - short stories serialised in The Weekly Tale-Teller
• The River of Stars (1913) - full-length novel featuring a cameo appearance by Sanders.
• Bosambo of the River (1914) - short stories serialised in The Weekly Tale-Teller
• Bones (1915) - short stories serialised in The Weekly Tale-Teller
• The Keepers of the King's Peace (1917) - short stories serialised in The Windsor Magazine
• Lieutenant Bones (1918) - short stories serialised in The Windsor Magazine
• Bones in London (1921) - short stories serialised in The Windsor Magazine
• Sandi the Kingmaker (1922) - full-length novel serialised in The Windsor Magazine
• Bones of the River (1923) - short stories serialised in The 20-Story Magazine
• Sanders (1926) - short stories
• Again Sanders (1928) - short stories

The series was posthumously continued by Francis Gérard -

• The Return of Sanders of the River - short stories (1938)
• The Law of the River - short stories (1940)
• The Justice of Sanders - short stories (1951)

Four Just Men series

Mr. J. G. Reeder series

Detective Sgt. (Insp.) Elk series

Educated Evans series

Smithy series

Other novels

Poetry collections

Non-fiction

Plays

Screenplays

Short story collections

Other

• King Kong, with Draycott M. Dell, (1933 posthumously), 28 October 1933 Cinema Monthly

See also

In Spanish: Edgar Wallace para niños