1931 Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace was born in 1874 on April Fools’ Day, spectacularly illegitimate. He was the child of a touring actress: a second-line performer in a third-rate troupe, Mary Jane ‘Polly’ Richards. A young widow at the time of her son’s conception, she surrendered her virtue at a drunken party to the company’s romantic lead, Richard Horatio Edgar.
Edgar claimed not to remember the encounter. Polly sneaked away to bear her shameful offspring in secret in Greenwich. Barely hours after birth, the boy-child was farmed out to the family of an amenable Billingsgate fishmonger who brought him up as ‘Richard Freeman’.
Smart as paint, young Dick earned an honest penny as a printer’s devil, a newspaper vendor, and – as an early photograph indicates – a villainous-looking milk van boy. He was dismissed from the last position for lifting a few dishonest pennies from the coin bag. Cash was always his great weakness.
Aged eighteen, Edgar enrolled in the army under the name Wallace. Trained in the infantry, he was shipped to South Africa, in 1896, and wangled a transfer into the Medical Corps. It was a cushy berth. In 1899, as the war with the Boers broke out, Wallace (no fool) married a local girl and bought himself out.
By this point Wallace had cultivated contacts in the press. On his return to Britain he took up work with the Daily Mail. In 1905 he produced his first novel, The Four Just Men. The idea was ingenious. Four cosmopolitan vigilantes, of impeccable breeding, set out to overthrow Britain’s xenophobic ‘Aliens Act’ (Wallace was always a champion of the underdog). The narrative pivots on a locked room mystery. The home secretary is warned that unless he liberalises the legislation, he will die. The minister ensconces himself in his Portland Place office, surrounded by guards. He is assassinated. But how?
Wallace, still slaving as a hack and a racing tipster (his preferred occupation), picked a winner in 1911 with his next serious foray into fiction: ‘Sanders of the River’. Before being sacked by Daily Mail owner Lord Northcliffe (furious at the never-ending libel suits his star reporter incited) he had been dispatched to the Belgian Congo – the heart of darkness. He span out of this experience a series of adventure tales, chronicling Mr Commissioner Sanders’ mission to bring ‘civilisation’ to ‘half a million cannibal folk’ with his Maxim machine gun and Houssa storm-troopers.
Wallace came into his own as a mass producer of fiction in 1920. His agent, A.P. Watt, negotiated a sweet deal with the publisher Hodder and Stoughton for what was, effectively, a fiction assembly line. H&S would pay him £250 advance (around the national annual wage at the time for people born in Wallace’s station of life) for any and every title. Wallace rose to the challenge, with 150 novels over the next 25 years. All he needed was his Dictaphone (he hated the labour of actually writing), pyjamas, a freshly brewed pot of tea every half hour (heavily sugared), and his cigarette holder, nearly a foot long, to keep the smoke from his 80-odd cigarettes a day out of his eyes.
He boasted he never walked more than four miles a year (and then only between bookies at the track). He feared draughts and went to extreme measures to protect himself against them. He travelled habitually in a closed Rolls Royce; his windows were kept shut in all but the warmest weather, and he wore two sets of underwear.
In financial difficulty, despite his vast income, Wallace accepted Hollywood’s lucre in 1931 and arrived there on 12 December. RKO loved him. A new career, even more splendid, was in prospect. He set to work on a story about a giant ape he had devised, King Kong.
He was never to finish. On 10 February as he waited, impatiently, for the Hollywood starlet who would warm his bed that night, Wallace fell into a terminal diabetic coma (sweet tea did for him – he was teetotal). He left huge debts, and some grieving turf accountants. The bells tolled and flags in Fleet Street were lowered when his body returned. His personal verdict on his life’s achievement was blunt: ‘The good stuff may be all right for posterity. But I’m not writing for posterity.’ King Kong, nonetheless, has found considerable favour with later generations – miniscule as Edgar Wallace’s credits are on the various film versions.