66 Facts About Edgar Wallace

Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace was a British writer of sensational detective, gangster, adventure, and sci-fi novels, plays and stories.

Edgar Wallace signed with Hodder and Stoughton in 1921 and became an internationally recognised author.

Edgar Wallace died suddenly from undiagnosed diabetes, during the initial drafting of King Kong.

Edgar Wallace was such a prolific writer that one of his publishers claimed that a quarter of all books in England were written by him.

Edgar Wallace sold over 50 million copies of his combined works in various editions and The Economist in 1997 describes him as "one of the most prolific thriller writers of [the 20th] century".

Edgar Wallace's great-grandfather was entertainer James Henry Marriott, and his grandmother was actress Alice Marriott.

Edgar Wallace's husband, Captain Joseph Richards, was born in 1838; he was from an Irish family.

The midwife introduced Edgar Wallace's mother to her close friend, Mrs Freeman, a mother of ten children, whose husband George Freeman was a Billingsgate fishmonger.

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.

Edgar Wallace was dismissed from his job on the milk run for stealing money.

Edgar Wallace was posted to South Africa with the West Kent Regiment, in 1896.

Edgar Wallace disliked army life but managed to arrange a transfer to the Royal Army Medical Corps, which was less arduous but more unpleasant, and so transferred again to the Press Corps, which he found suited him better.

Edgar Wallace began publishing songs and poetry, much inspired by Rudyard Kipling, whom he met in Cape Town in 1898.

In 1901, while in South Africa, Edgar Wallace married Ivy Maude Caldecott, even though her father Reverend William Shaw Caldecott, a Wesleyan missionary, was strongly opposed to the marriage.

The couple's first child, Eleanor Clare Hellier Edgar Wallace, died suddenly from meningitis in 1903, and the couple returned to London soon afterwards, deeply in debt.

In London, Edgar Wallace worked for the Mail and began writing detective stories in a bid to earn quick money.

In 1903, Edgar Wallace met his birth mother Polly, whom he had never known.

Unable to find any backer for his first book, Edgar Wallace set up his own publishing company, Tallis Press, which issued the sensational thriller The Four Just Men.

Problems were compounded when inaccuracies in Edgar Wallace's reporting led to libel suits being brought against the Mail.

Edgar Wallace was fired in 1907, the first reporter ever to be fired from the paper, and he found no other paper would employ him, given his reputation.

Edgar Wallace went on to publish 11 more similar collections.

Edgar Wallace wrote for the Week-End and the Evening News, became an editor for Week-End Racing Supplement, started his own racing papers Bibury's and R E Walton's Weekly, and bought many racehorses of his own.

Edgar Wallace lost many thousands gambling, and despite his success, spent large sums on an extravagant lifestyle he could not afford.

Ivy moved to Tunbridge Wells with the children, and Edgar Wallace drew closer to his secretary Ethel Violet King, daughter of banker Frederick King.

Edgar Wallace began to take his fiction writing career more seriously and signed with publishers Hodder and Stoughton in 1921, organising his contracts, instead of selling rights to his work piecemeal in order to raise funds.

Edgar Wallace was said to be able to write a 70,000 word novel in three days and plough through three novels at once, and the publishers agreed to publish everything he wrote as fast as he could write it.

Edgar Wallace wrote across many genres including science fiction, screen plays, and a non-fiction ten-volume history of the First World War.

The critic Wheeler Winston Dixon suggests that Edgar Wallace became somewhat of a public joke for this prodigious output.

Edgar Wallace invented at this time the Luncheon Club, bringing together his two greatest loves: journalism and horse-racing.

Edgar Wallace was the first British crime novelist to use policemen as his protagonists, rather than amateur sleuths as most other writers of the time did.

On 6 June 1923, Edgar Wallace became the first British radio sports reporter, when he made a report on The Derby for the British Broadcasting Company, the newly founded predecessor of the BBC.

Edgar Wallace wrote a controversial article in the Daily Mail in 1926 entitled "The Canker In Our Midst" about paedophilia and the show business world.

Edgar Wallace became active in the Liberal Party and contested Blackpool in the 1931 general election as one of a handful of Independent Liberals, who rejected the National Government, and the official Liberal support for it, and strongly supported free trade.

Edgar Wallace bought the Sunday News, edited it for six months, and wrote a theatre column, before it closed.

Edgar Wallace went to America, burdened by debt, in November 1931.

Edgar Wallace moved to Hollywood and began working as a "script doctor" for RKO.

Edgar Wallace wanted to get his own work on Hollywood celluloid, and so he adapted books such as The Four Just Men and Mr J G Reeder.

In Hollywood, Wallace met Stanley Holloway's scriptwriter, Wallace's own half-brother Marriott Edgar.

In December 1931, Wallace was assigned work on the RKO "gorilla picture" for producer Merian C Cooper.

Violet booked passage to California on a liner out of Southampton, but received word that Edgar Wallace had slipped into a coma and died of the disease, combined with double pneumonia, on 10 February 1932 in North Maple Drive, Beverly Hills.

Edgar Wallace's body was returned to England and he was buried at Little Marlow Cemetery, Fern Lane, Buckinghamshire, not far from his UK country home, Chalklands, in Bourne End.

Edgar Wallace died suddenly in April 1933, aged 33, while the estate was still deep in debt.

Wallace's eldest son Bryan Edgar Wallace was an author of mystery and crime novels.

The Edgar Wallace Mystery Magazine was a monthly digest-size fiction magazine specializing in crime and detective fiction.

Edgar Wallace has a pub named after him in Essex Street, off Strand in London.

Edgar Wallace narrated his words onto wax cylinders and his secretaries typed up the text.

Edgar Wallace rarely edited his own work after it was dictated and typed up, but sent it straight to the publishers, intensely disliking the revision of his work with other editors.

Edgar Wallace would do only cursory checks for factual errors before printing.

Edgar Wallace faced widespread accusations that he used ghost writers to churn out books, though there is no evidence of this, and his prolificness became something of a joke, the subject of cartoons and sketches.

Edgar Wallace's writing has been attacked by some for its conception of Africans as stupid children who need a firm hand.

Edgar Wallace did not use plot formulae, unlike many other thriller writers.

The critic Wheeler Winston Dixon maintains that Edgar Wallace covered a wide variety of perspectives and characterisations, exploring themes such as feminist self-determination, upsetting peerage hierarchies, science fiction, schizophrenia and autobiography.

Edgar Wallace enjoyed writing science fiction but found little financial success in the genre despite several efforts.

Edgar Wallace wrote the initial 110-page first draft for "The Beast" over five weeks, from late December 1931 to January 1932.

Edgar Wallace's diary described the writing process for this draft: Cooper fed aspects of the story in conferences and phone conversations; Wallace then executed Cooper's ideas, the latter approving the developing script on a sequence-by-sequence basis.

Edgar Wallace showed Wallace the fragments that were to be reused in the current script.

The fragmentary nature of Edgar Wallace's script meant that the main dialogue-free action of the film would have to be shot first, both as insurance and as a showreel for the board of RKO.

Edgar Wallace's screenplay begins with Denham and the party at the island, called "Vapour Island" by Wallace because of the volcanic emissions.

Edgar Wallace created the major characters, their relationships, and their role in the overall plot.

Edgar Wallace created the story's beauty and the beast theme.

Edgar Wallace says in a notation on the script that Kong is 30 feet tall, thus establishing Kong as a giant ape.

Early publicity stills for the movie have the title as "Kong" and "by Edgar Wallace" and show a lightning storm and flashes of lightning as envisioned by Wallace.

Edgar Wallace's treatment included an underwater scene from the attacking dinosaur's point of view as it approached a capsized boat.

Edgar Wallace happened to be Schoedsack's wife and was able to translate the expectations of the producers into the final script.

James Ashmore Creelman, who worked on the screenplay for The Most Dangerous Game, a film that Edgar Wallace was in discussions to write for at the time of his death, was brought in to tidy up the script.

In 2023, the original Wallace screenplay was published in KONG: An Original Screenplay by Edgar Wallace edited by Stephen Jones.