Edgar Wallace died an untimely death on this date in 1932. Edgar Who? I can hear it from the Homestead. Edgar Wallace would be fairly interesting just from the life he led, the lives his ancestors led and the lives his children led. However, I have two words for you: King Kong.*

My time is short tonight. Come tomorrow evening, I'll be Gone to Texas. Pray for me.

Thus and so, I'll be quoting big chunks of Edgar's bio from other sources. Here we go, from the Britannica website:

Wallace was the illegitimate son of an actress and was adopted as an infant by a Billingsgate fish porter named George Freeman. He left school at the age of 12 and held a variety of odd jobs until he joined the army at 18; he served in the South African War until 1899, when he became a reporter. He returned to England and produced his first success, The Four Just Men (1905), which he sold outright for a small amount.

Wallace practically invented the modern “thriller”; his works in this genre have complex but clearly developed plots and are known for their exciting climaxes. His literary output—175 books, 15 plays, and countless articles and review sketches—was prodigious, and his rate of production so great as to be the subject of humour.

Digest that: one hundred seventy-five books and fifteen plays in twenty-seven years. Edgar Wallace knew how to get things done at pulp speed. He wasn't just selling to penny-ante markets, either.

This, from Infogalactic:

Edgar Wallace was born at 7 Ashburnham Grove, Greenwich, to actors Richard Horatio Edgar and Mary Jane "Polly" Richards, née Blair. Wallace's mother was born in 1843, in Liverpool, to an Irish Catholic family. Mary's family had been in show business, and she worked in the theatre as a stagehand, usherette, and bit-part actress until she married in 1867. Wallace's father, Captain Joseph Richards, was also born in Liverpool, though in 1838; he was also from an Irish Catholic family. He and his father John Richards were both Merchant Navy captains, and his mother Catherine Richards came from a mariner family.

When Mary was eight months pregnant, in January 1868, her husband died at sea. After the birth, she was destitute. Mary took to the stage, assuming the stage name "Polly" Richards. In 1872, Polly met and joined the Marriott family theatre troupe, managed by Mrs. Alice Edgar, her husband Richard Edgar, and their three adult children, Grace Edgar, Adeline Edgar, and Richard Horatio Edgar. Richard Horatio Edgar and Polly had a "broom cupboard" style sexual encounter during an after-show party. Discovering she was pregnant, Polly invented a fictitious obligation in Greenwich that would last at least half a year and obtained a room in a boarding house where she lived until her son's birth, on 1 April 1875.[5] During her confinement she had asked her midwife to find a couple to foster the child. The midwife introduced Polly to her close friend, Mrs Freeman, a mother of ten children, whose husband George Freeman was a Billingsgate fishmonger. On 9 April 1875, Polly took Edgar to the semi-literate Freeman family and made arrangements to visit often.

Polly's young son Wallace, then known as Richard Horatio Edgar Freeman, had a happy childhood and a close bond with 20-year-old Clara Freeman, who became a second mother to him. By 1878, Polly could no longer afford the small sum she had been paying the Freemans to care for her son and, instead of placing the boy in the workhouse, the Freemans adopted him. Polly never visited Wallace again as a child. His foster-father George Freeman was determined to ensure Richard received a good education, and for some time Wallace attended St. Alfege with St. Peter’s, a boarding school in Peckham, but he played truant and then left full-time education at the age of 12.

The Guardian has this to say in a decent article about the man:

Wallace’s life is as rattling a yarn as any of the 170 or so novels he knocked out at breakneck speed. Born out of wedlock in 1875 to Polly Richards, and with both of his parents actors, he was adopted by a kindly Billingsgate fish porter and his wife. Asked by a journalist years later to contribute to a celebrity feature entitled “What I Owe My Parents”, Wallace replied on a postcard: “sorry, cock, I’m a bastard.”

Wallace was on Ludgate Circus by the age of 11, selling The Echo to pay for his ginger beer and theatre tickets. He left home at 15 to work on a trawler out of Grimsby, hated it, stole a pair of boots and walked the 143 miles back to London. At 18, he enlisted in the Royal West Kent regiment, transferred to the medical corps and headed off with the army to South Africa on the eve of the Boer War. As a young private, he wrote a poem to welcome his hero Rudyard Kipling to the country, which was published in the Cape Times.

This is The American Conservative's take:

Wallace’s output was simply astounding: he wrote over 170 books that were translated into 30 languages; more films were made out of his books than any other writer in the 20th century; and, during his most successful publishing year in the 1920s, one out of every four books sold in England had his name in the title.

Wallace’s daily work routine often went on for up to 17 consecutive hours. Kept going by copious amounts of caffeine and cigarettes, he wrote frantically, in furious marathon-like sessions, where time was money, and words got converted into currency by the minute

His posthumous career was even more impressive. In Germany alone, Wallace sold over 43 million books between 1926 and 1982. By 1990, the head of the Edgar Wallace Society boasted that sales of the author’s work had exceeded 200 million.

Wallace left the UK for Hollywood in 1931. It was there he would make history. As the NeoText website puts it:

While working as a hired screenwriter for RKO Production Company in 1931, Wallace was given a task by producer and screenwriter Merian C. Cooper. The job in question was to write both a novel and a script based on Cooper’s idea for a film creature that would soon become known as King Kong. Cooper knew that Wallace was a commercial success and planned on capitalizing on that fact by advertising the movie as being based on an Edgar Wallace novel. The mystery author got to work on January 1, 1932, and was finished with the first draft called The Beast by February 5. 

Cooper deemed the script not good enough, but on February 10, just as Wallace was getting started on a rewrite, he passed away. And even though none of the drafts were used except the plot outline that the two had previously established, Cooper co-credited Wallace for the creation of Kong (“from an idea conceived by”). Today, Wallace is widely known for his role in the inception of “The Eighth Wonder of the World” (as Kong is called), but clearly deserves much more recognition than that, seeing as how he left an indisputable mark not only on the world of literature, but also on the world of cinema.

From everything I can ascertain, Wallace deserved just as much credit for King Kong as Leigh Brackett did for The Empire Strikes Back. Over one hundred and sixty films have been based on Edgar Wallace's works, by the way.

Just as Edgar’s parents were artists/'creatives', his children followed in his footsteps. Once again, from Infogalactic:

Violet Wallace's own will [Violet was Edgar's widow] left her share of the Wallace estate to her daughter, Penelope, herself an author of mystery and crime novels, who became the chief benefactor and shareholder. Penelope married George Halcrow in 1955 and they went on to run the Wallace estate, managing her father's literary legacy and starting the Edgar Wallace Society in 1969. The work is continued by Penelope's daughter, also named Penelope. The Society has members in 20 countries. The literary body is currently managed by the London agency A.P. Watt.

Wallace's eldest son Bryan (1904–1971) was also an author of mystery and crime novels. In 1934 Bryan married Margaret Lane (1907–94), a British writer. Lane published Edgar Wallace's biography in 1938.

Wallace—who came from absolutely nothing—was one of the originators of the 'thriller' genre, cranking them out at pulp speed. He dominated the British literary market for several years. Edgar would go on to live large and then help script one of the most iconic films of the twentieth century. Research by more than one Robert E. Howard scholar has basically 'proved' that REH did see King Kong. 

Raise a glass to the shade of Edgar Wallace, sword-brothers. They do so every night in the London pub dedicated to his memory. We still need a bar named "The Robert E. Howard". Any takers?

*This post is dedicated to Mark Finn.