Master of Mass

(See front cover)

PEOPLE--Edgar Wallace--Doubleday, Doran ($2).

The Man. "I'm sorry, sir," says the butler over the telephone, "Mr. Wallace is writing a play and must not be disturbed before it's finished. . . . What's that, sir? . . . You'll hold the wire?"

Author Edgar Wallace's reputation for speed, no comic myth, follows logically enough upon prolific production. Last year he had six successes on the London stage, and in New York The Sign of the Leopard. In the spring, when only four of his plays were running simultaneously, he gave a banquet at the Savoy for his theatrical employes, and his guests numbered 590. Not content with writing the plays and entertaining the players, he has latterly become his own producer and designer of scenes--all this being a development of the last three years. Readers of the morning papers are more accustomed to him as dramatic critic; readers of the evening papers depend on his racing column for invaluable tips.

But the great mass of his public cherishes him for quite another reason: dean of mystery and detective fiction, he has written 400-odd short stories, and, at the last census, 140 full-length yarns. One in every four books sold in England is by Wallace, and the tremendous sale in Germany, the U. S., Australia and South Africa, brings his yearly total to 5,000,000 copies. His U. S. publishers are boasting "a Wallace per month" for the next twelve months, and his German Verlag distributes a catalog two-thirds of which concerns Wallace Detektiv-Romane and Theaterstuecken.

Small wonder that Author Wallace, indefatigable, portly and debonair, lives a crowded schedule. He begins the day at 7 o'clock by consuming eight newspapers, dictates mysteries until 10 a.m., breakfasts, resumes writing until 1. In the afternoons he supervises his play rehearsals, inspects cinema versions of his stories, or attends the races. He owns a string of horses and squanders a literarily fabulous income.

In odd moments he has dictated "a sort of a kind of an"* autobiography, lavish with anecdotes of "people," ranging from his fishmonger foster-father to William Jennings Bryan, his son's godfather. Written objectively, the effect is as though he were telling of somebody else. Written carelessly in helter-skelter, unkempt style, People might well have been tossed into a dictaphone between tea and dinner.

His Story. Escaped from board school, with three Shakespeare plays as the sum of his knowledge, Edgar Wallace drifted from newsboy to sea-cook and back again. He worked for a milkman, a florist, a printer, a mason; turned up in the Army while still in his 'teens. In South Africa he resigned from the military in favor of newspaper work, and during the Boer War coded many a scoop to his London paper, much to Kitchener's embarrassment and the censor's discomfiture. The war over, Wallace was appointed editor of the Transvaal's largest newspaper, and on the proceeds he played with notorious bulls and bears of the Johannesburg market. He made $12,000 one day, lost $20,000 the next, and landed back in London with exactly three shillings in his pocket.

Newspaper Genius Lord Northcliffe took him on, pitched him into the kaleidoscopic career of a special correspondent. He covered royal weddings in Spain, religious troubles and riots in France, Stomach Tax in Canada, celebrities and murders and mysteries at home. Out of his heterogeneous experience he retains an exaggerated admiration for "the clean and decent poor" (famed Backbone of England) and for "the brotherhood of working journalists, salt of the earth." For criminals, his specialty, he has neither admiration nor sympathy--"not even a sneaking sympathy. They are a little less interesting than lunatics, a little less romantic than sewermen. Their lives are drab and ugly, fuggy and fusty, and the majority 'go crook' only because they are too lazy or too unintelligent to earn an honest living." Yet he makes them both interesting and romantic in yarns that palpitate with thrills and suspense, mystery and bizarre glamor.

His Works. That prisons are too pleasant, and justice too lenient, he thought years ago when he wrote his first full-length thriller, The Four Just Men. He thinks so still, and releases this month The Three Just Men--the survivors of his eccentric millionaire quartet who administered justice when the law failed. A labyrinthine maze of blood and thunder, his latest concoction works itself up to a grand finale with airplanes training guns on a London riverfront den of vice, and deadly snakes slithering across the floor toward a lovely victim. That she was heiress to a gold-mine in South Africa she did not know; but her half-demented captor knew; and the Three Just Men knew--almost too late. The man who was bringing her the deeds was fatally and mysteriously struck in the neck. Two tiny pricks in a patch of angry red flesh suggested snakebite. But a London "bobby" had been watching the luckless man for some time, and could testify that neither snake nor biped had been near him. Mercurial Mr. Meadows of Scotland Yard was baffled; but the Three tracked the criminal along circuitous bypaths of villainy, killed him with his own venomous mechanism. Just what that was--"Crime Club members never tell."

Good recent Wallaces are The Clever One, an engrossing tale of counterfeit money, and The Twister, ingenious yarn of English race tracks and Dutch diamond swindles. Old favorites are: A King by Night, The Green Archer, The Door with Seven Locks, The Girl From Scotland Yard, two of which Queen Mary bought at a London three-penny-six-penny shop for the king (TIME, March 11).

Not nearly so suave as J. S. Fletcher nor so subtle as E. Phillips Oppenheim, Edgar Wallace stands alone for versatility and production volume. As purveyor of mass literature for King, commoner and shopgirl, he is the master.

*The title of his first song hit was "A Sort of a Kind of a."