Money-Maker

EDGAR WALLACE -- Margaret Lane --Doubleday, Doran ($3).

In the strange case of the late Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace, prodigiously prolific writer of mystery yarns, legend outdid the truth only a little. Legend said that he was merely the figurehead of a big writing syndicate. Witnesses swore it was true, however flabbergasting, that he dictated a full-length thriller in 60 hours, 1,200-word articles in 20 minutes, a hit play in 14 hours. To complicate the picture, he was also called a lazy man, who squandered many an hour at poker, many an afternoon at the race track.

As a human writing machine Edgar Wallace had no rivals. But it would occur to few serious writers to pick him for the subject of a biography; if they did, it would be an almost irresistible temptation to make him into a satire or a sermon.

Margaret Lane neither jeers nor preaches.

Detached, sympathetic, shrewd, expertly written, her Edgar Wallace is an excellent biography on any grounds.

Like the friends of many another commercial writer, Edgar Wallace's averred that he could be a serious writer if he took the trouble. But they mistook the nature of his talent. His real genius consisted of an infinite capacity for taking pains to make money. And, like a true artist, he did not care what happened to the money after he made it.

With Edgar Wallace's background, an other writer might have been deflected from money-making by social conscience or social anger. By-blow of a provincial actress, adopted into a Cockney fishmonger family, he quit school at 12, worked as newsboy, printer's devil, hod carrier, milkman's helper, joined the army at 18, got plenty of hard knocks as he rose from jingo Boer War correspondent to London newspaper editor to rich writer. But said Edgar Wallace in later years: "There cannot be much wrong with a society which made possible the rise of . . . Edgar Wallace."

Like many another genius, Edgar Wallace did not reach maturity until he was past 40. His full flowering came after the War. A new publisher saw Wallace's mass-production possibilities. He divorced his mousy wife, married his shrewd secretary, 23 years his junior, shaved his Old Bill mustache, hired a speed typist, slept a maximum five or six hours a night, primed himself for writing on gallons of tea, handfuls of cigarettes. By 1928 he was making $250,000 a year, owned a string of race horses (they lost as consistently as he did at poker), a fleet of shiny big cars for his three children. Any suggestion of economy he took as a slur on his literary abilities.

Four years later in Hollywood, dragged down by overwork, finished off by pneumonia, 56-year-old Edgar Wallace died at the height of his success. His debts: something over $700,000.

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