Edgar Wallace

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Richard Horatio Wallace, born in 1875 (October 1875 to 1932), was an English writer. Wallace, who was born into poverty as an unlegitimate London child, left school at the age of 12.

For Reuters and the Daily Mail, he joined the army at the age of 21 and was a war correspondent during the Second Boer War.

He left South Africa, returned to London, and began writing thrillers to raise money, including The Four Just Men (1905).

Wallace, based on his time as a reporter in Congo and reporting the Belgian atrocities, wrote short stories in magazines such as The Windsor Magazine and later released collections including Sanders of the River (1911).

In 1921, he began working with Hodder and Stoughton and became an internationally recognised author. Wallace, who ran unsuccessfully for Blackpool (as one of David Lloyd George's Independent Liberals), in the 1931 general election, he voted in Hollywood, where he served as a script writer for RKO.

During the initial drafting of King Kong (1933), he died suddenly from undiagnosed diabetes. Wallace was such a prolific writer that one of his publishers announced that a quarter of all books in England were written by him.

Wallace also wrote screen plays, poetry, historical non-fiction, 18 stage plays, 957 short stories, and over 170 books, 12 in 1929 alone.

More than 160 films have been produced about Wallace's work.

He is remembered as a writer of 'the colonial imagination' for the J. G. Reeder detective novels and the The Green Archer serial, as well as the creation of King Kong.

He has sold more than 50 million copies of his combined books in various editions, and The Economist has dubbed him "one of the most prolific thriller writers of [the twentieth] century," although the bulk of his books are out of print in the United Kingdom, but they are still read in Germany.

Life and work

James Henry Marriott, Wallace's great-grandfather, and his grandmother, Alice Marriott, was born in Wallace. Wallace was born in Greenwich, England, to actor Richard Horatio Forbes Edgar (1847-1894) and Mary Jane "Polly" Richards (born 1843).

Wallace's mother was involved in show business, and she performed in the theatre as a stagehand, usherette, and bit-part actress until she married in 1867. Captain Joseph Richards, her husband, was born in 1838 and was from Ireland; she was from Ireland. John Richards, the Merchant Navy's captain, and Catherine Richards, a mariner's mother, were both born in a merchant navy battle. Joseph died at sea in 1868, leaving his pregnant mother destitute. Wallace's older sibling returned to the stage, assuming the stage name "Polly" Richards after his birth. Grace, Adeline, and Richard Horatio Marriott Edgar started performing with her three adult children, led by Alice Marriott, her husband Richard Edgar, and her three children in 1872.

During an after-show gathering, Wallace's parents had a "broom cupboard" type sexual encounter. On April 1, 1875, when she was pregnant, her mother discovered she was pregnant and found a fictitious obligation in Greenwich that would last at least a year and obtained a bed in a boarding house where she lived until her son's birth. She had begged her midwife to find a couple to care for the child during her confinement. Wallace's mother was introduced to her close friend, Mrs Freeman, a mother of ten children whose husband George Freeman was a Billingsgate fishmonger. Wallace's mother took him to the semi-literate Freeman family on April 9th and made plans to visit often.

Wallace, then known as Richard Horatio Edgar Freeman, had a happy childhood and a close friendship with 20-year-old Clara Freeman, who became his second mother to him. By 1878, his mother could no longer afford the little sum she had been paying the Freemans to care for her son, and the Freemans adopted him instead of placing him in the workhouse. Wallace's mother never returned to the area as a child. George Freeman, his foster, was determined to ensure Richard received a high education, and for a time, Wallace attended St. Alfege, a boarding school in Peckham, but he later stopped teaching full time at the age of 12.

Wallace had worked as a newspaper seller, rubber factory worker, shoe shop assistant, and ship's cook by his early teens. Wallace's first encounter with the newspaper industry is commemorated by a plaque at Ludgate Circus. He was kicked out of his job on the milk front for stealing money from the milk business. In 1894, he became engaged to Edith Anstree, a local Deptford girl, but he quit the engagement and enlisted in the infantry.

After Lew Wallace, the author of Ben-Hur, Wallace Wallace, Wallace, Wallace, Wallace, Wallace, registered in the British Army under the name Edgar Wallace. He has a 33-inch chest and was stunted from his childhood in the slums, according to the medical records. In 1896, he was sent by the West Kent Regiment to South Africa. He disliked army service but managed to obtain a transfer to the Royal Army Medical Corps, which was less strenuous but also more painful, and so transferred to the Press Corps, which was more convenient, but it was later found to be more suitable.

Wallace began recording songs and poetry, much inspired by Rudyard Kipling, who appeared in Cape Town in 1898. The Mission that Failed! Wallace's first book of ballads, The Mission That Failed! was published the same year. In 1899, he sold his way out of the services and turned to writing full time. He died in Africa, first for Reuters and later the Daily Mail (1900) and other periodicals during the Boer War.

Wallace married Ivy Maude Caldecott (1880-1996), but her father, Reverend William Shaw Caldecott, a Wesleyan missionary, was strongly opposed to the marriage. Eleanor Clare Hellier Wallace Wallace, the couple's first child, died of meningitis in 1903, and the couple returned to London soon after, deeply in debt.

Wallace, a London, journalist, started writing crime stories in an attempt to make quick money. In 1904, a son, Bryan Edgar Wallace, was born in 1904, and a daughter, Patricia, was born in 1908. Wallace's birth mother Polly, whom he had never heard about in 1903, was a mystery. She went to him to ask for money after being turned away because she was terminally ill and living in poverty. Polly died in the Bradford Infirmary later that year.

Wallace, who was unable to find a backer for his first book, founded Tallis Press, which published the horror story The Four Just Men (1905). Despite increasing interest in the Mail and good sales, the venture was badly funded, and Wallace had to be bailed out by Mail's boss Alfred Harmsworth, who was concerned that the farrago would appear badly on his newspaper. When inaccuracies in Wallace's reporting resulted in litigation of libel against the Mail, the problem was compounded. Wallace was fired in 1907, becoming the first journalist to be fired from the newspaper, but he found that no other paper would use him given his fame. The family lived in a state of near-bankruptcy, with Ivy having to sell her jewelry for food.

Edgar went to the Congo Free State in 1907 to investigate atrocities committed against the Congolese under King Leopold II of Belgium and the Belgian rubber companies, which killed up to 15 million Congolese. Wallace was invited by Isabel Thorne of the Weekly Tale-Teller penny magazine to serialize 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 turned 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 a African river, mainly without love for Wallace because there was no reason for him to be interested. He sold outright and film rights for short money in his first 28 books and their film rights. "The Sanders Books are not widely reprinted today, perhaps due to their overt racism."

Wallace's life span from 1908 to 1932 was the most prolific of his life. He started writing mostly in the hopes of pleaseing creditors in the United Kingdom and South Africa. However, his books' success began to rehabilitate his reputation as a journalist, and he began reporting from horse racing circles. He served as an editor for Week-End Racing Supplement, started his own racing journals, including Bibury's and R. E. Walton's Weekly, and purchased several racehorses of his own. He lost thousands of dollars on an expensive lifestyle he could not afford, and after his popularity, he spent a large sum on an extravagant lifestyle he couldn't afford.

Ivy's third and last child was born in 1916 by Edgar, Michael Blair Wallace, who filed for divorce in 1918.

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

Wallace started to write fiction in 1921 and joined Hodder and Stoughton, arranging his employment rather than selling rights to his jobs piecemeal in order to raise funds. This enabled him to achieve his dreams, royalties, and full-fledged advertising for his books, which he never had before. "King of Thrillers," the publisher's most popular trilby, cigarette holder, and yellow Rolls Royce, he was aggressively promoted as a celebrity writer. He was supposed to write a 70,000 word book in three days and plough through three books at once, and the publishers agreed to publish everything he wrote as fast as he could write it. According to Wallace's pen, one out of every four books being read in the United Kingdom came from Wallace's pen. He wrote in a variety of genres, including science fiction, screen plays, and a non-fiction ten-volume history of the First World War. He wrote over 170 books, 18 stage plays, and 957 short stories, as well as 957 short stories, and his books were translated into 28 languages. Wallace, according to Wheeler Winston Dixon, became something of a public joke given to his flurry of output.

Wallace was chairman of the Press Club, which also gave an annual Edgar Wallace Award for excellence in writing. Wallace was elected chairman of the British Lion Film Corporation in return for giving British Lion the first option on all of his production following the success of his novel The Ringer. Wallace's deal gave him a year's pay and a substantial block of shares in the company, a substantial reduction from all British Lion-produced based on his work, plus 10% of British Lion's annual income. In addition, British Lion employed Bryan E. Wallace, his elder son, as a film editor. Wallace's earnings were almost £50,000 a year (roughly equivalent to around £2 million in modern terms). He also invented the Luncheon Club at this time, bringing together his two favorite hobbies: journalism and horse racing.

As many other writers of the time did, Wallace was the first British crime novelist to use policemen as his protagonists rather than amateur sleuths. The bulk of his books are stand-alone stories; he rarely used series characters, and if he did, he avoided a strict story line, so continuity was not needed from book to book.

Edgar Wallace made his first British radio sports reporter when he wrote about The Derby for the British Broadcasting Company, the BBC's recently founded predecessor to the BBC.

Ivy, Wallace's ex-wife, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1923, and although the tumor was successfully treated, the disease died terminally by 1925, and she died in 1926.

In 1926, Wallace wrote "The Canker In Our Midst," a controversial article about paedophilia and the show industry world. It compared paedophilia to homosexuality, angering several of his coworkers, publishing associates, and business associates of theatre mogul Gerald du Maurier, who unintentionally leave their children vulnerable to predators, according to the decribing. Even by the time, biographer Margaret Lane calls it a "intolerant, blustering, kick-the-stairs" kind of essay.

Wallace became involved in the Liberal Party and ran against Blackpool in the 1931 general election as one of a select group of Independent Liberals, who opposed the National Government and the official Liberal backing for it, and a fervent support for free trade. He also bought the Sunday News, edited it for six months, and wrote a theatre column before it was shutting down. He lost the election by over 33,000 votes in the case. In November 1931, he went to America, burdened by debt. He wrote the screenplay for the first sound film version of The Hound of the Baskervilles (1932), which was published in England by Gainsborough Pictures.

He went to Hollywood and began working as a "script doctor" for RKO. His new play, The Green Pack, attracted raves, boosting his reputation even more. Wallace wanted to get his own film on Hollywood celluloid, so he wrote The Four Just Men and Mr J G Reeder. Wallace met Stanley Holloway's scriptwriter, Wallace's own half-brother Marriott Edgar, in Hollywood. On the Spot, Wallace's book about gangster Al Capone, will be the writer's highest theatrical success. "Perhapsibly, in design, dialogue, action, plot, and resolution, it is still one of the finest and purest of twentieth-century melodramas," Jack Adrian described it as "arguably, in construction, debate, action, plan, and resolution." It began Charles Laughton, who played lead Capone character Tony Perelli, that appeared in the film.

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