Edgar Wallace - The Four Just Men; Career As Thriller Writer, 1903-1920

The Four Just Men; Career As Thriller Writer, 1903-1920

In 1903, Edgar experienced another profound event, when his mother Polly, whom he had never known, came to him. By now 60 years old and terminally ill, it cannot be doubted that Polly hoped for some financial assistance. Alice Marriott and Josephine were long deceased and Polly had been unable to work for some months. She had been aware of her son's illustrious career as a Colonial correspondent since the late 1890s - and like Ivy and everyone around Edgar, did not know that in fact he was impoverished. Still grieving for Eleanor and ignoring his financial situation, Edgar reacted with uncharacteristic harshness, giving Polly a few pounds and turning her away. Stoically accepting this rejection, Polly used the money to travel to Bradford, where she collapsed and died in the Bradford Infirmary.

She was only saved from the ignominy of a pauper's grave when her former son-in-law, William Henry Donovan, though long remarried since Josephine's death, learned of it and hastened to pay for her interment. When Ivy, out at the time, returned home and Edgar, already regretting his actions, related what had happened, Ivy chastised him for his harshness and emphasized that he had not given Polly any chance to explain. Usually a generous person, Edgar agreed he had been hasty and, unaware his mother was already dead, decided that as soon as he had some spare time he would find his mother again. But events would thwart him until 1908.

The first distracting event was Ivy's second pregnancy during 1904 - to which she reacted not with joy but with anxiety and stress. Edgar went to Europe as a correspondent during the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War. Whilst in the Balkans he met British and Russian spies and was inspired. Returning to England in 1905 he had in his head The Four Just Men, the prototype of modern thriller novels, about four young, handsome, immensely wealthy vigilantes (including a European Prince) who kill people in the name of Justice. Upon returning, he was able to meet briefly his healthy baby son, Bryan Edgar Wallace, before Ivy left with Bryan for South Africa, where her ill mother Marion Caldecott, mistakenly believing she was terminally ill, had expressed a wistful desire to see her grandson. This meant Ivy was not present to restrain Edgar's enthusiastic excess.

Writing the story of the Four Just Men (FJM) who would kill the Foreign Secretary if he tried to ratify an unjust law, Edgar had to create his own publishing company, Tallis Press, to publish it. Undeterred, he decided to manage a 'guess the murder method' competition in the Daily Mail with a prize of £1,000. Edgar intended to advertise the book on an unprecedented scale, not just in Britain itself but across the Empire. He approached Harmsworth for the loan of the £1,000 and was promptly refused. Edgar wasn't really suited to editorship as he preferred to spend his afternoons at the racecourse or poker table: Harmsworth in turn was irritated by the fact that Edgar was so difficult to find instead of being on the other end of a telephone like the other editors.

Unfazed, Edgar pressed ahead - his alarmed workmates at the Mail prevailed upon him to lower the prize money to £500: a £250 first prize, £200 second prize and £50 third prize, but were unable to restrain him in the privacy of his home. Edgar had advertisements placed on buses, hoardings, flyers, and so forth, running up an incredible bill of £2,000. Though he knew he needed the book to sell sufficient copies to make £2,500 before he saw any profit, Edgar was confidently aware this would be achieved in the first three months of the book going on sale, hopelessly underestimating the expenses.

Enthusiastic, but without any substantial managerial skill, Edgar had also made a far more serious error. He ran the FJM serial competition in the Daily Mail but failed to include any limitation clause in the competition rules restricting payment of the prize money to one winner only from each of the three categories. Only after the competition had closed and the correct solution printed as part of the final chapter denouement did Edgar learn that he was legally obligated to pay every person who answered correctly the full prize amount in that category; if 6 people got the 1st Prize answer right, he would have to pay not £250 but 6x£250, or £1500, if 3 people got the 2nd Prize it would be £600 and so on.

Additionally, though his advertising gimmick had worked as the FJM novel was a bestseller, Edgar discovered that instead of his woefully over-optimistic three months, FJM would have to continue selling consistently with no margin of error for two full years to recoup the £2,500 he had mistakenly believed he needed to break even. Horror was added to shock when the number of entrants correctly guessing the right answer continued to inexorably rise. Edgar's response was to simply ignore the situation, but circumstances were ominous. Newspaper companies were expected to be standards of truth and accountability: any that even mistakenly published articles that were found to be incorrect, inaccurate or misleading could lose money seriously.

As 1906 began and continued without any list of prize winners being printed, more and more suspicions were being voiced about the honesty of the competition. In addition, for a working-class Edwardian family, £250 was a fortune and since those who were winners knew it (courtesy of the published solution) they had been waiting impatiently for the prize cheque to hit the doormat. Friction already existed between the autocratic Harmsworth and his elusive editor, and Harmsworth, having refused the initial £1,000 loan was furious at having now to loan Edgar over £5,000 to protect the newspaper's reputation because Edgar couldn't pay.

Harmsworth's irritation simmered as instead of appropriate gratitude and contrition, Edgar recovered his ebullience and confidence, and also seemed not to be in any hurry to repay the loan. During 1907 Edgar travelled to the Congo Free State, to report on how the native Congolese were being horribly abused by representatives of King Leopold II of Belgium. In the same year Ivy was again pregnant, but Bryan was two - the age Eleanor had died - making her anxious and stressed again. Meanwhile, there were during 1906-1907 two libel suits in the courts against the Daily Mail, involving Edgar. The first and most serious concerned the Lever Brothers, against whom Harmsworth had led a crusade when he learned they intended to raise soap prices. But upon the brothers publicly apologising and abandoning the idea, Harmsworth continued to gloat and approve scurrilously libellous articles, provoking the brothers into a libel suit.

Part of the case concerned an article in which Edgar had grossly inflated the figures by quoting an "unnamed washerwoman" he'd invented, as he was hopeless with money and had no idea of fiscal prudence. To Harmsworth's dismay, the Lever Brothers were awarded damages of £50,000 (the equivalent of approximately £3.6 million today). At the same time, a Navy Lieutenant named St. George-Collard began another suit after Wallace repeated an incorrect claim that he had been disciplined for brutality towards enlisted seamen before, and won £5,000.

Though the £50,000 was entirely his own fault, Harmsworth was enraged to be £60,000 out of pocket for three incidents all involving Wallace, and so upon the latter's return from the Congo, dismissed him. Unlike in 1902, in 1908 there was no way to hide the calamity from Ivy, emotionally vulnerable from giving birth to the couple's third child Patricia Marion Caldecott Wallace, and soon they had to move to a virtual slum. Ivy and Edgar had never been truly compatible with each other in personality anyway, and 1908 marked the start of the slow disintegration of their marriage.

But again, Edgar found opportunity in the shape of Mrs Isabel Thorne, who edited a minor magazine; she initially approached him about "romance" serials but he admitted he was not good at such - his teenage handsomeness and early marriage to Ivy meant he had little experience of romance. Then he began to relate his adventures in Africa, and Mrs Thorne realised that his rather ingenious and imaginative tales were his metier. She hired him to write a serial for her magazine, and so began during 1909 the Sanders of the River stories which were serialized for years and which he eventually compiled into novels. The movie of the same name is remembered today mostly because it co-starred Paul Robeson as a tribal chief.

At the time there was nothing strange about a series of stories portraying as a positive and likeable protagonist the governor of an (unnamed) British colony in West Africa, who relies upon gun boats cruising along a major African river to enforce British rule and who - while not gratuitously cruel - does not shrink from using brute force on occasion. More recently these stories have been charged with exhibiting racist and pro-imperialist attitudes.David Pringle noted in 1987 "The Sanders Books are not frequently reprinted nowadays, perhaps because of their overt racism". Certainly, they take for granted the justness of colonialism and European rule in Africa - in which they but reflect the mindset of their era and are little different from attitudes of such contemporary writers as H. G. Wells, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne and numerous others.

As shown in the listing of Wallace's output featured below, the two ten year periods from 1908–1918 and 1922–1932 were the most prolific of his life, but for different reasons. In the first period, he wrote mainly in order to satisfy creditors. Edgar sold the rights to his novels very quickly - FJM for £75, its sequel for £80, and so forth - merely for an income and to provide token amounts to his creditors, many of which were from South Africa. Also in 1908, he recalled his determination to find his mother, not knowing of her death. Instead, he located his niece, A. Grace Donovan, who by then was in her 21st year of life and, after losing her mother at seven years of age, eager to meet maternal relatives.

Through Grace, Edgar learned of his father and mother, his maternal half-sister and the paternal semi-siblings of whom he would only ever meet one, Edgar Marriott. He also learned of Polly Richards' sacrifices to ensure the emotional well-being of the Marriott family. Edgar Wallace could not cope with emotional trauma, and his conscience excoriated him as he recalled his treatment of his mother, who had then left and promptly died. Though he and Grace Donovan remained lifelong friends, he never recovered from his guilt feeling. As his personal stress increased, his writing output also increased: he produced some of his most famous work during the 1908-1918 period.

Edgar was one of those people who did best with the least time to "think" and this was an asset for his writing, though it must be admitted that most of what he wrote was adequate rather than excellent. As time went on, he and Ivy became more and more separated: though too honourable to indulge in a physical betrayal of his wife, he began what today psychologists would term an "emotional" (very possibly non-sexual) affair with another woman. Edgar's meeting of minds and minor flirtation with Mrs Edith Cockle, née Anstree - his first fiancee - soon fizzled out. Spurred by guilt over his actions, Edgar was motivated to "woo" Ivy with sufficient success for her to become unexpectedly pregnant during 1915, though the marriage had been moribund for several years.

However, at this time Edgar hired a new secretary, a timid, quiet 15-year-old girl named Violet King. Whereas Ivy had tolerated Violet's predecessors with relief, she perceived that Violet would be her successor. Ivy knew that as Violet matured from girl to woman she would be more ideally suited to Edgar's temperament than Ivy herself had ever been. Ivy also knew that when Edgar inevitably became adulterous with Violet, he would condemn himself over his betrayal of Ivy.

During 1916, Ivy had her last child, named Michael Blair Wallace by Edgar in belated homage to his mother, Polly. Assuring herself that Violet liked and was liked by her children, and aware they would all be at school soon, Ivy showed kindness towards Edgar to the end, gently withdrawing from his life before filing for divorce in 1918 and telling him that he was not to blame. There was also her own personal discomfort as the inescapable reality was that Violet was the same age as Edgar and Ivy's eldest daughter Eleanor, and what she could have been had she lived - that constant reminder of dreams forever lost - upset Ivy more than anything.