Edgar Wallace:

The secret of his books		    
the Biography
 
His method of writing a thriller was nearly always the same. Before beginning to dictate, he would have worked out a bare skeleton of the story in his mind, the selection of characters, and, most important of all, the dramatic end. The basic idea of the story would be thus clearly established, the chief mystery and its solution decided on, and certain blood-curdling situations thought out which he intended to reach; but beyond this the development of the plot would be as great a puzzle to him as it would be to the reader. He made no notes, beyond a list of the characters' names, and he spun the complicated thread of his plot as he went along. Sometimes the events of the story would take an unexpected turn, diverting him, for the sake of some incidental excitement, from his original plan; but these deviations never disturbed him, and he made no attempt to avoid them. Instead, the new situation would be made to yield the fullest possible advantage, and the plot would move briskly along a fresh track to its prearranged destination. Thus, the progress of his serials was more or less hand-to-mouth; he rarely knew, from one instalment to the next, what was likely to happen, and unblushingly extricated his characters from fatal predicaments in every other chapter.

There is a pleasing story, told of a serial writer for boys' magazines, which is scarcely an exaggeration of Edgar's methods. The writer, according to the story, had gone away for a week's holiday, leaving his hero, Jack Strangeways, bound and gagged at the bottom of a pit, of which the red-hot walls were slowly closing in; and promised to deliver the solution with the next instalment. Days went by, however, and no instalment appeared, and frantic enquiries failed to locate the writer. In despair the magazine staff, from the editor down, set to work to supply the missing chapter, but try as they might they could hit on no way of getting Jack Strangeways out of his horrible predicament. At the last moment, the missing writer returned, sat down to an office typewriter, rolled up his sleeves, and prepared to supply the answer. Fascinated, the others gathered round, anxious to see how he would deal with a situation, which had beaten all of them. Without a moment's misgiving, he attacked the typewriter. "With one bound," they read over his shoulder, "Jack Strangeways was free".

Despite the apparent variety of Wallace's thrillers, the plan of construction and the dramatis personae are nearly always the same. Unlike most writers of mystery stories, who have to devote the last couple of chapters to sorting out the tangle, he set and then solved new problems all the way through the hook, keeping only his basic mystery unexplained until the end. Inside the frame of the principal mystery, minor mysteries, slightly overlapping, are started like hares and pursued for a short distance, each new problem being set immediately before the solution of its predecessor. A simple diagram perhaps most easily explains this construction:

This means that the end of the story is left unencumbered by tedious explanations, and the author is free to concentrate on one big dénouement, or, which is more usual in the Wallace books, a thrilling pursuit sequence.

The characters in a typical Wallace thriller run invariably to type. The cast is nearly always the same, and may be simplified as follows:
The hero: Usually a detective, occasionally a newspaper reporter. If a detective, he is no ordinary one, but an expert sleuth employed by Scotland Yard (Larry Holt in The Dark Eyes of London), the Foreign Office (Selby Lowe in A King By Night), the Public Prosecutor's Office (Mr. J. G. Reeder), the river police (John Wade in The India Rubber Men), or some other special branch.
A beautiful girl: Sometimes of independent means, more usually a secretary, who always in the course of the story turns out to be deeply though innocently involved in a financial plot, and therefore the object of the villain's machinations. She is always partly responsible for the solving of the mystery, and rarely escapes being locked in an attic or a dungeon with a homicidal monster.
1st villain: The master mind of a criminal gang; his identity is rarely revealed until just before the end of the book, when the plot is narrowed down to a pursuit sequence which ends in his capture or death. Until this point, he usually appears to be a sympathetic and blameless character, and often pretends to assist the police.
2nd villain: His identity is generally revealed early in the book, and the reader's suspicions are deliberately con­centrated on him. He is, however, only the figurehead of the gang, and the tool of No. I, whom he sometimes betrays.
3rd villain: A monster of some kind, possessed of superhuman strength and savage cunning, employed by villains 1 and 2 in the accomplishment of their crimes. He is usually murdered by them before the end, and commands at least a vestige of the reader's sympathy. He is a frequent though not an invariable member of the cast.
Minor characters, who are always numerous, usually include a comic petty thief or other criminal, unless, as in the case of Mr. Reeder, the humour is supplied by the hero himself.
The main scene of the stories is usually London, sometimes with subsidiary mysteries staged abroad, and the Thames often plays an important part.
The police, though continuously baffled (the mystery would soon collapse if they were not), are never held up to ridicule.
The love interest is perfunctory, and the sexual morality of the characters above reproach. The female associates of even the worst villains turn out to be their wives or daughters, and the heroine, for all her deplorable experiences, is never called upon to endure anything, which might bring a blush to the most sensitive cheek. (Something that cannot be said about the movies based on his books, that were made in the late sixties and early seventies).
"There is so much nastiness in modern literature which makes me feel physically sick," Edgar once told the Worshipful Company of Stationers "that I like to write stories which contain nothing more than a little innocent murdering."

  updated:   11-07-2002