Edgar Wallace

Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace, born on 1 April 1875 and dead by 10 February 1932, was a British author known for crime and adventure stories. He came into the world as an illegitimate child in London, raised in poverty, and left school when he was twelve. At twenty-one he enlisted in the army, later serving as a war correspondent for Reuters and the Daily Mail during the Second Boer War. Deep in debt, he quit South Africa, went back to London, and started writing thrillers to make money, putting out The Four Just Men in 1905.

His time as a reporter in the Congo, where he covered Belgian atrocities, fed into short stories he serialised in magazines like The Windsor Magazine; these were later gathered into collections, among them Sanders of the River (1911). By 1921 he had signed with Hodder & Stoughton, which boosted him to international fame. In 1931 he ran unsuccessfully for Parliament as a Liberal candidate for Blackpool, backing David Lloyd George’s Independent Liberals, then moved to Hollywood to write scripts for RKO. He died suddenly from diabetes that had gone undiagnosed, while he was still working on the first draft of King Kong (1933).

1918–1929

Wallace wrote so much that one of his publishers claimed a quarter of all books in England came from his pen. Besides journalism, he produced screenplays, poetry, historical nonfiction, eighteen stage plays, 957 short stories, and more than 170 novels—twelve of those in 1929 alone. Over 160 films have been adapted from his work. He is remembered not only for his contribution to King Kong but also as a writer of “the colonial imagination,” for the J. G. Reeder detective stories, and for the Green Archer serial.

West Germany

Combined sales of his works passed 50 million copies across various editions. In 1997, The Economist called him “one of the most prolific thriller writers of [the 20th] century.” Though most of his books are out of print in the UK, they remain popular in Germany, where roughly fifty titles are still available. A 50-minute German TV documentary, The Edgar Wallace Story, aired in 1963 and featured his son Bryan Edgar Wallace.

Ancestry and birth

Wallace’s great-grandfather was entertainer James Henry Marriott, and his grandmother was actress Alice Marriott. He was born at 7 Ashburnham Grove, Greenwich, to actors Richard Horatio Marriott Edgar (1847–1894) and Mary Jane “Polly” Richards, née Blair (born 1843). His mother’s family had worked in show business; she herself laboured as a stagehand, usherette, and bit-part actress until she married in 1867. Her husband, Captain Joseph Richards, born in 1838, came from an Irish family.

Both he and his father John Richards were Merchant Navy captains; his mother Catherine Richards came from a mariner family. Joseph died at sea in 1868, leaving his pregnant wife destitute. After giving birth to Wallace’s older sibling, his mother returned to the stage under the name “Polly” Richards. In 1872 she met and joined the Marriott family theatre troupe, run by Alice Marriott, her husband Richard Edgar, and her three adult children from earlier relationships: Grace, Adeline, and Richard Horatio Marriott Edgar.

Wallace’s parents had a brief sexual encounter—described as a “broom cupboard” affair—during an after-show party. When his mother discovered she was pregnant, she invented a fake obligation in Greenwich that would keep her away for at least six months, rented a room in a boarding house, and stayed there until her son’s birth on 1 April 1875.

During her confinement she asked her midwife to find a couple to foster the child. The midwife introduced her to a close friend, Mrs Freeman, a mother of ten whose husband George Freeman was a Billingsgate fishmonger. On 9 April 1875, Wallace’s mother took him to the semi-literate Freeman family and arranged to visit often.

Childhood and early career

As a child, Wallace—then called Richard Horatio Edgar Freeman—had a happy upbringing and grew close to twenty-year-old Clara Freeman, who became like a second mother. By 1878 his mother could no longer afford the small payments she had been making to the Freemans for his care, so instead of sending him to the workhouse, the Freemans adopted him. His mother never visited him again during his childhood. His foster father George Freeman was determined to give him a good education, and for a time Wallace attended St. Alfege with St. Peter’s, a boarding school in Peckham, but he played truant and left full-time schooling at twelve.

By his early teens he had held many jobs: selling newspapers at Ludgate Circus near Fleet Street, delivering milk, working in a rubber factory, assisting in a shoe shop, and cooking on a ship. A plaque at Ludgate Circus marks his first brush with the newspaper trade. He was fired from the milk run for stealing money. In 1894 he got engaged to a local Deptford girl, Edith Anstree, but broke it off and enlisted in the infantry.

Wallace registered in the British Army under the name Edgar Wallace, after Lew Wallace, author of Ben-Hur. Medical records at the time note he had a 33-inch chest and was stunted from his slum childhood. He was posted to South Africa with the West Kent Regiment in 1896. He hated army life but managed to transfer to the Royal Army Medical Corps, which was less strenuous but more unpleasant, so he transferred again to the Press Corps, which suited him better.

In 1898 he began publishing songs and poetry, heavily influenced by Rudyard Kipling, whom he met in Cape Town that year. His first book of ballads, The Mission that Failed!, came out in 1898. In 1899 he bought his way out of the military and became a full-time writer. Staying in Africa, he worked as a war correspondent, first for Reuters and then for the Daily Mail (1900) and other papers during the Boer War.