The “Vigilante”, both individual and groups thereof, were the zenith of the “Golden Age” of 
Pulp Fiction Heroes: Bruce Wayne, “the Batman” of Gotham City; The Justice League of 
America; Kent Allard, “The Shadow”; Clark “Doc” Savage, the Man of Bronze, and Hugh 
“Bulldog” Drummond, the pre-cursor to James Bond, are just a few of the more familiar 
names. Yet these all stemmed from the Master Copy, the original “vigilante” heroes – The 
Four Just Men and Mr J. G. Reeder - pulp fiction superstars of their day.

The Just Men and J G Reeder are the most famous, and best, of the characters created by 
author Edgar Wallace, because they, more than all the rest of his literary creations, are 
actually aspects of Wallace’s character as he saw himself, particularly the Just Men – young, 
handsome, rich, honourable, brave, patriotic, respectful of Law but willing to risk life and 
limb to destroy the Evil that had put itself beyond Law. 

In order to understand the immense popularity of the Just Men and J G Reeder and how they 
reflected their creator’s self-image, we have to look to that creator himself, for the Four Just 
Men and Mr J. G. Reeder were extraordinary creations of an extraordinary man – Edgar 
Wallace. Named after a figment of his mother’s imagination, he was a genius blessed with the 
Midas Touch, but cursed with the personality of a compulsive spendthrift; he made and lost 
fortunes in an almost regular cycle and was alternatively vilified and lionized from week to 
week. 

The Four Just Men and Mr J. G. Reeder ARE extensions of Edgar Wallace, and if we want to 
know them, we have to know him, and thus begins a story of honour and self-sacrifice, genius 
and despair, love and betrayal, that no writer of fiction would ever dare invent because of its 
sheer implausibility…

Mary Jane Blair was born in 1843, in Lancashire, near Liverpool, to an immigrant non-
conformist Catholic family who rapidly gravitated like so many to live in London. It was not 
a slum, but her family were definitely working-class, “of the people” as P. G. Wodehouse’s 
‘Jeeves’ would put it. Her family had long been associated with the theatre and by her early 
teens, Mary (upgrading her name to Marie) was earning her living as a bit-part actress/dancer, 
theatrical dressmaker, stagehand, usherette, and general “Jane of All Trades”. She lacked both 
the “star” looks and that ephemeral “charismatic spark” that lifts a good actor out of the 
crowd into greatness, but she was earning enough to live on. Then, aged about 22 in the mid-
1860s she met and married a Merchant Navy Captain named Joseph Richards. 
Five years older than Mary, Joseph like her came from an Irish Catholic immigrant family – 
his parents John & Catherine Richards had left Limerick for Liverpool in the 1830s, a few 
years before the Blairs; John Richards was also in the Merchant Navy. Leaving the world of 
theatre without a backward glance (most of her female peers were long-married matrons with 
several children by her age), Mary settled into a domesticity that was contented – and short-
lived. Joseph Richards died at sea of a sudden illness, aged just 30 years at the beginning of 
1868, whilst Mary was eight months pregnant with their first child. Typically, neither the 
Captain nor Mary had any financial reserves whatsoever, so by the time his posthumous 
daughter, Josephine Catherine Richards, was born in the spring of 1868, just a month or so 
after her father’s death, Mary Richards was quite destitute. 

A woman of intelligence, perseverance and fortitude, Mary refused to meekly slink into the 
workhouse and bear the contempt of those brutal overlords for something that had been 
entirely beyond her control. Renaming herself Polly Richards, the name she was to keep for 
the rest of her life, the twenty-five year old widow took her infant daughter and moved around 
the Southern Counties in her old employment on the stage. 

Occasionally she returned to Liverpool area to live, temporarily, with either her own relatives 
or those of her late husband, but her own pride and knowledge she was diverting resources 
from their own children made these brief visits – for instance, in the spring of 1871, she lived 
with the Finch family in Liverpool. James Finch was married to Sarah Richards, her late 
husband’s sister, but they had two children of their own and were also supporting Polly and 
James’ mutual mother-in-law Catherine Richards, John Richards having also died shortly 
after his son, and Mary rapidly moved on. 

In that era, ‘actress’ was a pejorative synonym of ‘prostitute’, and Polly endured all sorts of 
slights and judgemental spite from those who erroneously assumed that little Josephine was 
the illegitimate result of harlotry. Indeed, on the 1871 census of Liverpool, both Polly (using 
her birth name Mary) and her brother-in-law James Finch listed their occupations as the more 
vague and respectable sounding ‘comedian’ rather than ‘actor’ and ‘actress’. For Polly, it was 
a bleak, grinding, hand-to-mouth existence and she played a daily game of brutally robbing 
Peter to pay Paul. 

Then, back from London in her birth city of Liverpool in 1872, weary and exhausted from the 
constant poverty of her situation and without hope of improvement due to her lack of 
ravishing beauty or extraordinary theatrical talent, Polly met her saviour. Mrs Alice Marriott 
and her husband were the proprietors of a small but highly reputable middle-class theatre 
troupe; Alice, acutely intelligent, ambitious, shrewd and imposing, was the driving force 
behind the enterprise the couple ran with their three grown up children and a small group of 
general dogsbody employees. Alice Marriott was also generous, kindly and compassionate. 
Meeting Polly who was desperately seeking work, Alice Marriott took her in. When the 
troupe left Liverpool, Polly and then 4-year-old Josephine left with it. Polly’s profound 
gratitude to the Marriotts turned into genuine affection. She developed a deep friendship with 
Alice and her two daughters, Grace and Adeline, becoming an “honorary” daughter and sister.

Alice Marriott however, had one great worry, her third child, who was so much the 
stereotypical only son of a forceful, dominating mother that he was almost caricature. Richard 
Edgar Horatio Marriott was the image of his father in looks and personality. Tall, dark haired, 
handsome, languid and placid of temperament, with a lazy charm, he was happy to drift along 
in his mother’s employ as a play’s ‘romantic lead’ (under the name Richard Edgar), receiving 
the flattering attentions of admirers – particularly women. Richard lacked totally any of his 
mother’s verve, extrovert keenness or ambition. Alice’s greatest wish was to see her son 
safely married to a “good” girl and siring a platoon of bouncing, golden grandchildren. The 
“problem” of Richard dominated the conversation of Alice and her daughters – the two 
biological and the one honorary.
Seeing a way to repay a little of her enormous personal debt to her beloved friend, Polly 
determined to expedite the process. In Dundee, Polly Richards discovered Jenny Taylor – 
small, delicate, of gentle mien, the perfect admiring mate for the handsome drifter – and 
wasted no time in bringing Jenny to Alice Marriott, who approved wholeheartedly. Thanks to 
intense matchmaking on the part of Polly, Grace, Adeline, Alice and a far from reluctant 
Jenny, Richard was gently herded in the right direction, and he and Jenny came to an 
Understanding.

Then disaster struck.

Polly Richards had a ‘one-night stand’ with Richard Marriott. There was no exculpation, but 
it must be explained that both were not exactly sober. It was mid-summer 1874 and Mrs 
Marriott’s troupe had had a lucrative run of success; at one of the frequent after-show 
celebrations, Polly and Richard were only two amongst several who had imbibed of the 
libation of Dionysus “not wisely, but too well”, to the extent that not a one of the usually 
sharp-eyed theatrical crowd were compos mentis enough to realise that Polly and Richard had 
briefly disappeared from the proceedings. Too drunk to really know what they were doing, 
the pair ended up in a ‘Boris-Becker-broom-cupboard-for-five-seconds’ style clinch. 

Polly was mortified and deeply, deeply ashamed of what she considered to be an 
unconscionable betrayal of her close friend Jenny Taylor – who was engaged to marry 
Richard in March 1875 - and Alice Marriott, especially as at her age (31) she was old enough 
to know better, and had never been particularly swayed by what she rightly guessed was 
Richard’s mainly superficial charm. As for him, it is probable he was so inebriated he had no 
memory of the incident. 

Disaster became utter catastrophe when, a few weeks into August 1874, Polly discovered 
herself to be pregnant with Richard Marriott’s child. 

Polly was appalled. It was unthinkable, on her part, to return Alice Marriott’s loving-kindness 
and Jenny’s friendship by destroying their lives with the result of a few minutes’ inebriated 
lunacy. With the steel that ran through her very core, Polly was decisive in action, determined 
to protect Alice and Jenny at any cost. (Richard Marriott appears to have been a distant third 
in her considerations, if at all, assuming she had any concern for him whatsoever). As soon as 
her condition became apparent, concerned Alice, Grace, Adeline and Jenny would descend 
with offers of help and gentle probing into the identity of The Cad. It was also possible that 
Richard Marriott had at the time been too drunk to remember his few minutes of inebriated 
fumbling with Polly, but once her condition became obvious he might remember what she 
had not reminded him of, realise he was about to become a father and panic! Even assuming 
Polly could withstand their questions and prevent Richard blundering, there was too much 
risk that the baby would so resemble the Marriott family that his or her paternity would be 
beyond doubt. 

Polly carried on working with the Marriott troupe as normal towards autumn 1874 until just 
before the pregnancy began to “show”, whereupon she invented a sudden, several months-
long obligation in Greenwich, which in 1874 was still safely a fair distance from London. 
Using what few financial reserves she possessed, Polly remained for nearly four months from 
Christmas 1874. Not even returning for Richard and Jenny’s wedding in March 1875 due to 
the “implacable” contract she was under, Polly entreated her midwife to find a family that 
was both respectable and willing to take on another child for the pittance Polly could afford to 
contribute to his or her upkeep. 

For once, Polly was fortunate. The midwife had birthed the ten children of a Billingsgate fish-
porter’s wife; George & Mrs Freeman were honourable, hard-working, industrious and 
presided over a warm, affectionate family. The couple also possessed the same compassionate 
generosity as Alice Marriott. Less than three weeks after her unborn child acquired a 
stepmother in the shape of Jennifer Taylor Marriott, Polly Richards gave birth to him, 
ironically, at Ashburnham Grove, Greenwich, on 1st April 1875 – otherwise known in 
England as April Fools Day. (Incidentally, another famous Edgar, Rice Burroughs the author 
of Tarzan, was also born in 1875). 

With the irrational paranoia that sometimes strikes the new mother, Polly was determined that 
no hint of the occurrence would ever reach and injure the Marriott family, thus she listed her 
son’s father as “Walter Wallace” – a name she appears to have plucked out of the air with an 
inspiration born of desperation; the world’s most influential thriller writer thus carries the 
surname of someone his mother invented on the spot in what could be a plot straight from one 
of his novels. That her paranoid precaution was irrational and hormonally inspired can be 
proved by the fact that in the seconds before she dreamed up the fictional father “Walter 
Wallace”, she listed her son’s Christian names as Richard Edgar Horatio, despite the fact that 
any reasonably bright three year old could have done the math with that clue. (Richard & 
Jenny Marriott would also have a son that they named Edgar Marriott).

But Polly’s plan was a complete success. When Richard was nine days old, she brought him 
to the Freeman family, and then she returned to her life with the troupe, finding ways to visit 
her son as often as she could without detection by her honorary family. Alice, Richard, Jenny, 
Grace, Adeline and Josephine continued through their lives without any knowledge of the 
grandson, son, stepson, half-brother and nephew living so close by. Of them all, only 
Josephine did not die in ignorance of his existence. Upon her engagement to be married at age 
sixteen, Josephine was let in on the secret by Polly, who felt honour-bound to inform her 
daughter of her only sibling, the half-brother living in Deptford. Josephine and Edgar never 
met each other; Josephine married William Henry Donovan in 1886 at the age of 17 and 
moved to Birkenhead, Lancashire, having her only child, Alice, a year later in 1887, before 
dying aged only 25 in 1894 at Birkenhead, when Alice Donovan was only seven years old. 

Giving their adoptive eleventh child the much more prosaic appellation Dick Freeman, 
George and his wife proved themselves every bit as generous as the midwife foretold. Polly 
came on carefully contrived secret visits, but when Dick was a toddler, disaster struck again. 
With Richard and Jenny married and living in Jenny’s native Scotland where they were 
producing Alice Marriott’s longed-for grandchildren and Edgar’s paternal half-brothers and 
sisters, the troupe was gradually losing its momentum. The group got smaller as various 
employees married and settled down or moved to work with other theatre reparatory groups. 
Grace and Adeline also married, and Alice and her husband were getting on in years and 
slowing the pace. Despite their close and always familial bond, Polly’s sense of gratitude and 
her pride would not allow her to hang around the fringes of the Marriott family with them 
using their much-needed resources to subsidise her. She was forced to return to her youthful 
employment of bit-parts, stagehand and usherette jobs, which necessitated a commensurate 
drop in her earnings, especially as she was now too old for certain jobs, such as to play one of 
the heroine’s pretty coterie of girlfriends or do any energetic dance numbers.

By the late 1870s Polly could no longer afford to pay the Freeman family for Dick’s upkeep. 
Arriving with the grim news and an offer to place her son in the poorhouse, Polly found that 
neither Mrs Freeman, nor her twenty-year old daughter, Clara, with whom Dick had formed 
an intensely devoted bond, would countenance such a thing. Dick was a loved, wanted child 
and with the Freeman family he would remain, regardless of Polly’s ability or lack thereof to 
contribute financially. 

Overwhelmed with gratitude and relief, Polly abruptly made her departure from the two 
women before she lost her composure, and never visited her son again until he was an adult, 
inadvertently causing a misconception that would have dire consequences for both herself and 
her son. Mistakenly believing Polly’s abrupt departure to indicate a lack of love for her son 
rather than realising she had been overcome by her emotions, Clara and Mrs Freeman 
strongly disapproved. Although they would never have slighted her verbally, both Clara and 
her mother unconsciously displayed their belief that Polly was a flighty cold-heart and Edgar 
Wallace, who adored his adoptive mother and sister, absorbed this attitude until he believed 
Polly had carelessly and callously abandoned him – which would lead to a traumatic and 
tragic denouement between mother and son.

However, prosaic was never going to be enough for “Dick Freeman”. Edgar Wallace had 
inherited the darkly handsome build and features of his father and paternal grandfather, plus a 
healthy dose of their languid serenity and easy charm; he had his mother and paternal 
grandmother’s quick intelligence, his mother’s fortitude, and Alice Marriott’s ambitious 
focus. By the time he was eighteen, the restless Dick Freeman had been a rubber-maker, 
barrow boy, newspaper seller, ship’s cook and milkman. Despite being engaged to marry a 
local Deptford neighbour’s daughter, the also teenage Edith Anstree, he enlisted impulsively 
in the Infantry, an event that would set him on the course that produced The Four Just Men…

Naturally lazy, Edgar found soldiering hard on the feet, so he wangled a transfer into the 
Medical Corps, which was less arduous but still distasteful, so he wangled himself onto the 
Press Corps, where he found his true vocation in writing. In 1896, Edgar was sent to the 
increasingly volatile region of South Africa, where the 2nd Boer War of 1899-1902 was 
bubbling to eruption nicely, which, did he but know it, was the beginning of his odyssey to 
fame and fortune.

Edgar Wallace came up with the idea for the first FJM novel in 1905, in the middle of a long 
period of immense personal stress and anxiety. That stress had its roots in South Africa. By 
the time of the 2nd Boer War outbreak in 1899, Edgar was war correspondent for the Daily 
Mail in Johannesburg. Whilst in South Africa, he had done two things that would cause 
enormous upheaval, both positively and negatively, in his life.

The first was marriage, to a South African woman, Ivy Maude Caldecott, daughter of the 
Scots-descended Methodist Reverend William Shaw & Mrs Marion Caldecott. Ivy, in her late 
teens at their first meeting, rapidly came to admire Edgar’s articles and poetry that were 
published in the newspapers, and flatteringly viewed him, right though her life, as a literary 
genius. The Reverend Caldecott was less enamoured and portentously forbade not only 
marriage, but any contact whatsoever between the two. Ivy, shy, gentle and good-natured, 
promptly and blithely ignored her father’s diktat. 

For many years, the Reverend had nurtured a desire to return to England to pursue a religious 
hobby unencumbered by the “burden” of his wife and family and fondly imagined he had kept 
this desire from his wife’s feminine and therefore inferior intellect. Marion Caldecott, who 
quite typically for the Victorian era was much brighter than her husband, had long since 
shrewdly guessed that the Reverend would reach the stage of longing wherein he would pick 
the first plausible excuse to effectively abandon the family and was merely waiting for it to 
happen. Thus, when the whole Edgar/Ivy situation blew up, and the Reverend Caldecott was 
incensed by his daughter’s disobedient intractability, she sided firmly with her daughter. 

William Caldecott immediately left for England in “high dudgeon”. It says a great deal about 
his dour, self-righteous priggishness that no-one, including his wife and children, seemed 
bothered to see him go. As his ship detached from Johannesburg’s docks on the voyage back 
to Britain, William Caldecott’s fake fit of pique became the real deal when the penitently 
weeping figures of his remorseful wife and family failed to make any appearance whatsoever. 
The realisation that they were even gladder to get rid of him than he was to dump them was a 
blow from which his ego never recovered. Many years later, poor Ivy would pay the price of 
her family’s derision when the Reverend had his spiteful revenge. 

The second thing Edgar did was to scoop General Kitchener. Wallace had made something of 
a name for himself during the War. Whilst most newspaper correspondents back then haunted 
the Press Office and wheedled with the General’s staff for titbits, Edgar haunted the bars, 
back streets, train stations and so forth, getting information from the ground up. Even meeting 
the great Rudyard Kipling, he managed several impressive articles that irritated Kitchener no 
end. The General, middle-aged even then and unfortunately not retired before inflicting 
colossal damage to his own side through monumental ineptitude in World War 1, hated the 
press. When the British entered negotiations with Kruger in 1902 to end the war, Kitchener 
was psychotically determined no announcements would be made except via “proper 
channels”. The press were kept well away from the treaty camp, and telegrams were strictly 
censored. 

However, Edgar was well-prepared for this and had already devised and implemented a plan 
around Kitchener’s security, something beautifully simple, yet ingenious. It was exactly the 
sort of twist-in-the-tale plot device that makes his thrillers such good reading now, nearly a 
century later, and he would put them to excellent use in some of his best books, such as Again 
the Three, Red Aces and Terror Keep.

Whilst the other correspondents stewed, Edgar did nothing but get on the train that travelled 
past the peace camp and upon it he rode all day every day, drinking tea, smoking and reading. 
His friend who patrolled the camp on the inside had a simple task: wiping his face with a 
handkerchief. One colour indicated “no progress”, another, “some progress”. Then one day 
the friend wiped his face with the all important white handkerchief, “peace treaty signed”. 

While Phase 2 was underway, Edgar had previously put Phase 1 into operation. He had been 
befriended by the wealthy Harry Freeman Cohen, who readily agreed to be his accomplice. 
One day Edgar walked into the telegraph office bearing a telegram full of numbers that the 
operator, rightly believing it to be code, promptly refused to send. Edgar returned with Cohen 
and proof that he had purchased the shares on the date the telegram said. Reassured that the 
telegram contained nothing more than Wallace’s stock market dealings with Cohen, the 
operators henceforth immediately sent through all such telegrams he produced. Within hours 
of seeing a man moping his face with a handkerchief under the hot African sun, Edgar had 
sent yet another telegram of “share dealing” to England. The Daily Mail next edition 
headlines announced to the Empire that the Peace Treaty between the Boers and the 
Government of the new King-Emperor Edward VII (Queen Victoria had died in the third year 
of the war, 1901) had been signed.

Outrage erupted. Every paper from the august Times to the tabloid Daily Mirror demanded a 
retraction of such wild speculation that the Mail dared present as fact, with an apology. The 
Daily Mail repeated: the Peace Treaty had been signed. The announcement to that effect 
arrived in the middle of the furore, to the absolute fury of Kitchener, who discovered that 
everyone already knew, leaving him like someone who bursts onto the stage in full costume 
only to discover the place in darkness because everyone went home hours before. He was 
enraged, and sent Wallace a stinging letter telling him he would be barred from receiving the 
“medal” like the other reporters. 

Edgar had the letter published in the Mail along with amusing comments about the “puerility 
of the War Office”, but he could well afford to sneer.

Ivy had produced their first child, the healthy and whole Eleanor Clare Hellier Wallace, now 
growing into an adorable toddler, and Edgar was rich. Cohen, impressed with his wily routing 
of Kitchener, offered him the editorship of his new newspaper, the Rand Daily Mail, for the 
sum of £2,000 per year. Edgar amicably and respectfully resigned from the British Mail and 
took up his new position. His future was Golden, but it would turn to ashes.

Of Wallace’s many flaws, perhaps the most damaging was the way his love of finery 
combined with his spendthrift compulsion like nitro combines with glycerine. Immediately 
he, his wife and daughter took up luxurious living in Johannesburg. Secondly, Edgar was 
perfect as a reporter, but disastrous as an editor, not because of the job but his personality. 
Naturally indolent, he hated the rigid structure of the editorship, the office work and routine it 
consisted of. Finally there was the problem of his conceit. 

Though not stupid, Ivy had always believed Edgar’s literary talent extended to business and 
political matters.  Her total faith flattered Edgar – always unwaveringly self-confident, Ivy’s 
regard tipped him over the edge into the state where he believed himself to be infallible. Yet 
as a businessman he was quite hopeless, and he remained politically in a state of the utmost 
naiveté all his life. Today, like anyone who disagrees with them, the trendy chatterers ensure 
that Wallace is labelled racist and xenophobic under the rules of that pernicious idiocy that is 
Political Correctness, but this is untrue. 

Wallace was not racist in the sense he thought blacks were inferior to whites because colour 
never really mattered that much to him, but he firmly believed, along with millions of others, 
that all non-Britons were inferior to the British. He was also blindly nationalistic his entire 
life, despite witnessing the actions of Britain first hand in the Boer War – many British people 
today are unaware that Kitchener invented the concentration camps long before Hitler copied 
the idea, and that 16,000 Boer children and 4,000 Boer women would die in them by 1902, 
albeit due to unhygienic overcrowding rather than Nazi mass-murder. Wallace was there, and 
did not have the excuse of being born decades later. Like all Empires that have ever existed, 
Britain brought good and bad changes to her colonies. Great Britain was just as despotic and 
dictatorial as the Empires she replaced and those that in turn, like Germany, wanted to depose 
her. 

During the year 1902, three things occurred in succession: Chubby Eleanor died swiftly of 
meningitis, and devastated Ivy developed an irrational but sincere loathing of Johannesburg 
particularly and South Africa generally. Thirdly, Cohen had one political viewpoint and 
Wallace another. Since Wallace was obviously right and Cohen sadly misguided, vehement 
arguments broke out, resulting in a blazing row one day that Cohen, as the owner and 
financier of the paper, was predestined to win. 

Edgar was fired and in dire straits. He and Ivy were still mourning little Eleanor, and he was 
also well beyond his ears in debt. He had been in Cohen’s editor job for just over nine months 
and had been living well beyond his £2,000 per year salary since day one. 

Wallace’s next big fault was his inability to deal with emotional confrontations, particularly 
those of his own making – his sole response was “escape”, whether it was physical or 
figurative. This time, with angry creditors becoming impolite about unpaid bills, it was 
physical. He took the still subdued Ivy, who had no real idea of what was going on, and sailed 
for Britain, landing with exactly 12 shillings (60 pence in decimal currency) to his name. 
Their fine clothes got them into a boarding house without having to produce rent up front.

During Wallace’s time in Africa, his one prudent act had been to “keep in” with his old 
friends at the Daily Mail. The Master of Obfuscation, Wallace visited with the story of his 
daughter’s death and his wife’s fragile health, which was why he had decided 
compassionately to remove Ivy to a new life in Britain and take up his old position at the 
Mail…? He was promptly rehired and no-one turned a hair at his request for a month’s wages 
up front and in cash, since his eccentricity was remembered. 

Over the next few years, his personal stress simply increased. He was promoted back up to 
editor, which was more much-needed cash. Letters from South African creditors arrived 
regularly with increasingly venomous content, and the fact that Edgar threw them on the fire 
as they arrived did not stop them arriving. But Edgar could not enjoy his job – every 
afternoon he would put on his hat to go for a relaxing poker game, only to be halted by a 
running office boy because the “Chief”, Daily Mail owner Alfred Harmsworth, was irately 
holding on the telephone. The fact that Edgar was always so difficult to get hold of irritated 
Harmsworth no end. Ivy had also fallen pregnant with their second child, and was extremely 
nervous and depressed. This time the birth of a healthy baby would be no reassurance, for 
Eleanor had been a perfectly healthy baby, and had gone from being a perfectly healthy 
toddler to perfectly dead in the space of a day.

Then, in 1903, Polly Richards visited her son whom she had not seen in twenty years. After 
the death of the extrovert and forceful Alice Marriott, her troupe had dwindled and dissolved 
with the marriage of Richard and Jenny, plus her daughters Grace and Adeline. Polly, 
realising the imprudence of remaining in such close proximity to her beloved “sisters” whilst 
guarding such a devastating secret as their nephew’s existence – and Jenny Marriott’s 
stepson, the half-brother of her and Richard’s own children - had joined another troupe called 
the Hamilton’s. 

But in 1903, financially poor, terminally ill and in her 60th year of life, Polly sought out her 
son. That she hoped to obtain some financial bequest is beyond doubt, for she had followed 
his publicly lucrative career for several years, but she also wanted to see the man for whom 
she had sacrificed so much. Unfortunately Edgar had thoroughly absorbed the mistaken views 
of his adoptive mother and sister, Mrs Freeman and Clara Freeman, and so with 
unaccustomed cruelty, gave her a few pounds and cast her out harshly, stating she would 
receive nothing from him. 

Ivy, upon returning to the house and discovering his actions, reproached him for such 
harshness, and Edgar, who 99% of the time was a generous, forgiving man, was deeply 
remorseful. Unfortunately, it was far too late. Polly had stoically accepted her rejection and 
continued on to Bradford, where her condition suddenly deteriorated and she died in the city 
hospital, alone and un-mourned. She was saved from the ignominy of a pauper’s grave 
because Josephine’s husband, William Henry Donovan, though long remarried since Polly’s 
daughter’s death, found out about it and made haste to pay for her interment.

Guilt over his treatment of his birth mother would fester in Wallace for months until his 
conscience goaded him to make enquiries, leading to his niece, Alice Grace Donovan, which 
would only make the situation much worse. At the time though, Edgar knew none of this.

During the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-1905, the Daily Mail sent Wallace as a War 
Correspondent, and he met various Russian and British spies, which fired his imagination and 
set him on his thriller-writing path, although the most renowned of his “spy” tales, a short-
story named Code No.2, wasn’t published until 1916, in no less than Sherlock Holmes’ 
alumnus The Strand magazine1. 

Fresh back in the UK from the Russo-Japanese War back in early 1905, Edgar hit upon his 
Great Idea at a time when things were going reasonably well for him in his work at the 
newspaper, and there was no hint that events were, in fact, moving inexorably to him being 
unceremoniously sacked by Alfred Harmsworth. 
Wallace was convinced that his story, The Four Just Men, about four young, rich, handsome 
men who come together as a vigilante group and kill in the name of Justice, would be a 
“smash hit”, and in this he was absolutely correct, for his timing could not have been better. 

The public loved such juicy “pulp fiction” thriller-romances and devoured them insatiably. 
Just a few years earlier in 1901, public demand had forced Arthur Conan Doyle to resurrect 
Sherlock Holmes, and not even the death of the great Queen-Empress Victoria in the same 
year could dent enthusiasm for the Great Detective’s serial in The Strand. In 1903, Victoria’s 
son, the new King-Emperor Edward VII had granted Conan Doyle a knighthood (though not 
for his fiction),2 spurring on hundreds of aspiring thriller writers (including Edgar) with 
visions of Royal favour. Again due to public thirst, Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law E. W. 
Hornung published his third book of Raffles stories, A Thief in the Night, in 1905, at the 
same time Wallace was frantically writing The Four Just Men. Just a few years later, in 
1912, another Edgar, this time Rice Burroughs, would give Tarzan of the Apes to the world. 
Men like H. G. Wells and Jules Verne were thrilling readers everywhere with tales of time 
travel and journeying to the moon.

Then Wallace had another inspiration: advertising. He would run a competition in the Mail, 
and whoever guessed the correct manner in which the FJM had murdered the Foreign 
Secretary would win a £1,000 prize! This prize would be paid for by the profits from the 
novel, which would sell exorbitantly well because Wallace intended to advertise the book 
across the land, even the Empire, despite the fact that he had had to form his own publishing 
company, “Tallis”, to produce The Four Just Men because he could find no publishing house 
that would accept it. 

Alarmed colleagues at the Daily Mail quickly talked him into lowering the prize money down 
to £500, which was to be split into a £250 first prize, £200 second prize and £50 third prize, 
but they were unable to stop his extravagances in the privacy of his own home. Ivy, who 
might have reined him in, was in South Africa, visiting her ill mother, Marion Caldecott, who 
had expressed a wistful desire to see her young grandson, Bryan Edgar Wallace, in the 
erroneous belief she was not long left for the world. In fact, Mrs Caldecott would still be alive 
and well when Ivy and Edgar’s third child, Patricia Marion Caldecott Wallace, put in her 
appearance three years after Bryan, but at the time, it meant Ivy was too far away to put on 
the brakes. 

Having set up “Tallis” to print the book, Wallace duly took out adverts in newspapers and on 
hoardings, had flyers printed and even wrote a letter to Chamberlain asking him to work a 
mention of FJM into his speech to Parliament, which that worthy ignored. In theory, 
Wallace’s idea worked beautifully. In the spring of 1906, FJM was still selling excellently, 
months after the competition had been run and the advertising campaign ended. 

Financially, it was utterly disastrous. Superstitiously, Wallace viewed any sort of 
economizing as an omen that things were about to “go wrong”, that his “good fortune” was 
about to desert him, and so was always up to his ears in debt. Despite the South African 
creditors, and the fact that his job at the Daily Mail only paid £750 per annum instead of 
£2,000, he had instantly begun to live the high life again within days of obtaining his new 
position with the British newspaper. 

Like many parents who come from abject poverty, Wallace determined his children would 
want for nothing. Bryan would go to a public school (he did, Oundle, and Patricia went to 
Cheltenham) and have all the advantages denied to “Dick Freeman”. Wallace confidently, 
sincerely and utterly naïvely believed he would pay for the advertising and the £500 prize 
money from the profits of the book’s first two months sales!
 
FJM needed to make a bare minimum of £2,000, with no margin of error, just to pay the 
advertising bill, plus a further £500 to pay for the prize money. In addition to this, Wallace 
had not included a codicil clause in the competition rules limiting the payment of the prizes to 
one person per prize. He did not realise that without this proviso, the competition wording 
would legally require him to pay out £500 to as many people as correctly guessed the solution 
in each of the three prize categories. To illustrate, if three people correctly guessed in the first 
prize category, four in the second, and six in the third, Wallace would have to pay £750 in 
First Prize money, £800 in Second Prize money and £300 in Third Prize money (totalling 
£,1850) – something he was blissfully ignorant of.  

Unaware of this fact laying him wide open to a lawsuit from every winner should he default, 
Edgar Wallace ‘knew’ that only when FJM earned “£2,501” would he see any profit, but he 
was buoyed by a complete (and completely overestimated) confidence in the book “paying for 
itself” within three months of initial publication, which was almost psychotically over-
optimistic even for Edgar. In reality, despite the book’s consistently good sales, it would take 
at least two years of those sales being maintained at their initial publication rate, with no 
margin for error, for him to clear the debt – if only one person won in each of the three prize 
categories. Even worse for Edgar, the number of correct entrants (as opposed to those who 
were merely close) easily exceeded half-a-dozen within a fortnight of the competition being 
run in 1905.

Today, people write off for competitions and philosophically shrug their shoulders. Today, 
people accept the reality that newspaper articles are more often than not greatly biased and 
contain what might, charitably, be called “inaccuracies” even with regard to easily checked 
facts3. In 1906, this was far from the case. To a working class family in Edwardian Britain 
winning £50 never mind £250 was the equivalent of being sole winner of the Rollover Lottery 
Jackpot. To everyone in Edwardian Britain, newspapers were expected to be gold-standards 
of truth and veracity. The merest hint that a newspaper had, even unknowingly, declared false 
information to be fact would do irreparable damage, and probably bankrupt it within days. 

Edgar’s typical reaction was to ignore the situation and pretend nothing was wrong, but the 
solution had already been printed in the Daily Mail after the competition closed and so every 
winner knew they were one and so daily awaited their prize cheque hitting the doormat. By 
the summer of 1906, with months of no prize-winner announcement, the Daily Mail was 
getting an increasing number of letters containing increasingly suspicious questions regarding 
the veracity of the competition. 

Wallace had been firmly turned down when he approached Harmsworth for the £1,000 prize 
money at the start of his venture in 1905, but by mid-1906, to his ire, the latter had to step in 
and bankroll Wallace over £5,000, a much greater amount, as Wallace simply could not pay, 
in order to protect the Mail’s reputation as a serious newspaper and stave off the increasing 
threat of lawsuits. 

Harmsworth’s simmering irritation set the ball rolling towards the Firing of Wallace, but two 
libel suits were the nails in the coffin. Alfred Harmsworth had turned the paper into a crusade 
against the Lever brothers (yes of washing detergent fame) who were planning to increase 
soap prices, and eventually the brothers backed down. But Harmsworth continued gloating 
and approving scurrilous articles about the brothers after they publicly apologised and 
reconsidered. In anger, the Lever brothers brought a libel action against the Daily Mail. 

Part of the trial depended on an article by Wallace in which he quoted an “unnamed 
washerwoman” explaining how much the price rise would cost her. The Lever brothers’ 
counsel showed that these figures were vastly inflated and hinted at deliberate fraud. Edgar, 
who had invented her off the top of his head and had no grasp of finances due to living his 
entire life on credit, had had no intention of fraud. In the end, however, the Lever brothers 
won and to Harmsworth’s horror, were awarded £50,000 damages against the Daily Mail. 
Based on a 2005 inflation rate, in today’s terms the brothers had been awarded damages of 
about £3,600,000!

On the heels of this came another libel suit, from one Lieutenant B. St. George Collard. A 
Naval officer, he had given an order to some Navy engine-room stokers that they had 
misunderstood to mean that they must kneel to him, an order they promptly refused since they 
knelt only to “God and the King”. The situation deteriorated from there and when Edgar was 
sent to investigate reports of the “mutiny” he came down firmly on the side of the stokers, 
painting a picture of monstrous cruelty and Collard as a petty tyrant. In his article, he referred 
to an event that was untrue, since he never bothered to check any claim that reduced the 
“dramatic import” of his reports. Wallace repeated in his article the incorrect claim that 
Collard had, in effect, abused his power once before and lost six months’ seniority for it. 
Collard promptly went to his solicitors and was awarded £5,000 against the Daily Mail for the 
libel, in today’s money around £400,000.

These cases dragged on through 1906 and 1907, but Wallace was utterly oblivious. He was 
the man who had scooped Kitchener for the Peace Treaty, he had been present and written an 
eyewitness article when terrorists attempted to assassinate the King of Portugal and his new 
Queen on their wedding day, and during 1907 he was far away in the Congo, reporting on the 
brutality of the Belgians towards the indigenous Congolese who were producing lucrative 
rubber for King Leopold. Shortly after his return, Harmsworth, smarting from the non- 
repayment of the £1,000 loan and enraged by having to fork out £55,000 in damages (though 
the £50,000 was entirely his own fault) in cases that had both included Wallace’s articles, 
fired him.

It was a nightmare. Ivy was pregnant with Patricia, the debts from FJM alone were enormous, 
and as usual, Wallace had been living way beyond his means. Edgar’s watch and chain, a 
diamond engagement ring, their fine clothes were rapidly disposed of but made little dent in 
the enormous arrears that they owed. Moving to a small, cramped house near Edgar’s old 
childhood home in 1908 with Bryan and the new infant Patricia, they kept a low profile. 
Edgar and Ivy had never been really suited for each other temperamentally, and it was only 
Ivy’s naïve faith in him and their prosperity that kept the cracks from showing. The anxiety 
made both exhibit a nervous tension that only drove them further apart. 

Edgar as usual, sought “escape” rather than facing the problem. He sought out his first love – 
Edith Anstree, the girl who had been his fiancée when he set out for South Africa in 1896, 
and whom he had forgotten all about within a year. Now Mrs Edith Cockle, married to a Navy 
Seaman, Edie was far too intelligent to fall for Edgar’s wistful flirtation, and sensibly realised 
that she, not Ivy, was the lucky one. Edgar had no intention of having an affair with Edie, for 
he was an honourable man, but his nostalgia was his way of escaping mentally and 
emotionally, since physical removal, with a wife and two children, was not an option.

Unable to escape literally or emotionally thanks to Edith Cockle’s intractability, he escaped 
mentally, losing himself in the world of fiction writing. In 1908 he completed the second in 
the Just Men series, The Council of Justice, his intent focus making it a better book than his 
original, The Four Just Men.

The three main characters in the series are Englishman George Manfred, Spaniard Leon 
Gonzales and Frenchman Raymond Poiccart. In keeping with Wallace’s blindly nationalistic 
devotion, Englishman Manfred was the undisputed leader. Tall, lean, dark haired and 
intellectually brilliant (like Sherlock Holmes) Manfred possessed the active character of A. J. 
Raffles. Even though Leon was the “scientist”, Manfred was the Action Hero, the Flash 
Gordon to Gonzales’ Dr Zarkov. When sentenced to death by hanging, it is Manfred who 
shows the nerves of steel until the other two can rescue him. For George Manfred, read Edgar 
Wallace, for Manfred WAS Wallace AS HE BELIEVED HIMSELF TO BE. 

The reality of course was much different. Yes, Edgar Wallace was generous, kind-hearted, 
handsome and physically courageous, but he was also petulant, temperamental, a compulsive 
gambler and an emotional coward who was forever creating disasters that he ran away from, 
either literally or emotionally.

Leon Gonzales was the group’s scientific genius, practicing the pseudo-science of 
physiognomy, an outgrowth of the equally repellent “eugenics” movement, invented and 
promulgated by none other Sir Francis Galton after he read his cousin, Charles Darwin’s 
book, Origin of Species. Eugenics was ferociously promoted by the virulently racist, ardent 
Nazi Therese Elisabeth Förster, better known as the sister of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. 
The siblings had been estranged for many years because of her disapproval of his 
philosophical ideas, and his repugnance for her anti-Semitic views and her anti-Semitic 
political activist husband, Bernhard Förster. Unfortunately for Friedrich, he had a mental 
breakdown in 1889, and shortly thereafter Bernhard committed suicide in Paraguay, 
prompting Elisabeth to return home. Seizing the opportunity she saw open to her, she quickly 
assumed control of publishing her brother’s writings and took bits from several of his works 
to produce herself The Will of Power, a viciously anti-Semitic and generally racist polemic 
which besmirched Friedrich Nietzsche himself as a racist for many years. 

“Eugenics” promoted the view that there were inferior and superior human species. Therese 
Nietzsche combined it with the Darwin4 theory of evolution (Friedrich had been an atheist, 
which was reflected in his writings) that basically denigrated humans into nothing more than 
another breed of ape. According to eugenics, physically/mentally handicapped people, those 
who had hereditary conditions (like Down’s syndrome) and those of the working class should 
be forcibly sterilised whilst those superior stock should breed more to replace them. 

The reason many people loved the theory of evolution – and still love it today – is that the 
idea relieved humans of moral responsibility for their actions. If evolution is true, a person 
can commit any horrific crime he or she desires without being held to account by any 
unforgiving higher power for their actions. The notion has led indirectly to such ridiculous 
idiocies as “evolutionary psychology” which teaches that a rapist/wife-beater/murderer is not 
a vicious thug but a victim “unable to help themselves because they are acting under ancient 
primitive instincts”, poor little lambs! 

Many leading lights in the suffragette movement, like Emily Pankhurst, and Emily Davison 
(who would be killed by King-Emperor George V’s horse in 1913) fiercely promoted the new 
contraceptive aids for women not out of any desire to liberate them, but because as devotees 
of eugenics they believed them to be a humane way of getting rid of the inferior “lower 
orders” – Mary Sanger, one of America’s most ardent champions of birth control for women, 
was in fact a fervent eugenicist and rabid racist working to ‘humanely’ extinguish inferior 
humans. Contraceptives would stop these men and women “breeding” while the superior 
classes produced more children to fill the gap. 

Eugenics failed not only because of its racism and impossible requirements for social 
engineering, but also because of human hubris. One large advantage of believing in God as 
opposed to evolution is that the bible teaches humans are a higher life form, special, 
important, different, whereas eugenics and evolution reduce mankind to nothing more than 
peculiar-looking breeding cattle. People liked the evolutionary idea of moral freedom from 
personal responsibility, but took offence at losing the “humans are special” tag that religion 
had provided. Growing out of eugenics, physiognomy was a less virulent form that cloaked 
itself in the guise of science.

According to physiognomy, criminality was biological, not social, and criminals could be 
identified by such characteristics as how far apart their eyes were set, the shape of their ears, 
nose and jaw, the size of their skull and slope of the forehead, the size and shape of the teeth. 
In antique and bric-a-brac stores, you can often see today white busts of the head with black 
lines and writing on them that physiognomy used to identify the “location” of certain 
characteristics. Supposedly an “expert” physiognomist could take one look a person’s face 
and instantly tell you whether he or she was a murderer, rapist, embezzler, arsonist, robber or 
homosexual. 

The last definition again has been used by the Politically Correct thought police to label 
Wallace homophobic, but it must remembered that until the 1950s, homosexuality was just as 
much a crime as robbery (lesbianism has never been illegal) and it was perfectly normal for 
people in general to view it as such. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs and 
dozens of other writers not slurred by the PC brigade also firmly believed that homosexuality 
was morally wrong, it was simply that they were fortunate enough to live in an age where 
people could have an honest opinion without immediately being accused of 
racism/sexism/homophobia/ageism/sizeism/Islamaphobia/[insert the ‘ism’ of your choice] by 
some ridiculous publicity-seeking idiots. 

An example of what was viewed as normal in Wallace’s time can be seen in the short story 
where a female character, talking to George Manfred favourably about Leon Gonzales whom 
she likes, casually refers to him as a “Dago”. George Manfred turned not a hair at this, today, 
extremely insulting description of his best friend. 

Leon Gonzales used his physiognomy expertise to a greater or lesser extent depending on 
Wallace’s mood. In one short story, it is used to masterfully distract the reader from the rather 
weak and obvious whodunit plot. After a murder has been committed, Leon meets a young 
man he knows to be the perpetrator of the crime because he smiles and shows two abnormally 
large canine teeth, certain physiognomic indicators of a homicidal personality. After the killer 
is shown to be someone else entirely, a confused Leon meets the man again in the company of 
George Manfred and is shocked to see he now has normal-sized teeth! 

It transpires that youth lost his real canines during a rugby match and the ‘murderer’s’ two 
were temporary fakes while he waited for more pleasing replacements. The Just Men series 
should not be taken as an authority on physiognomy or anything else. Wallace did not pick 
physiognomy to “showcase” his supposed racism, for he had no strong convictions regarding 
religion, science, politics or anything else, other than a childlike patriotism and a vague notion 
that Christianity was right because it was British. 

Like a spoiled child given free rein in a toy store, who snatches one object only to 
immediately discard it as he spots another bigger, shinier one, so too Edgar Wallace sifted 
through Religion, Science, History, Politics and so on, plucking a bit here, snipping a bit 
there, mixing it with a bit of this and that, and then writing it down in a hodge-podge of 
narrative. As long as it helped along his story, he didn’t care one way or the other. Today, 
physiognomy is as discredited as eugenics, mainly because it – unfortunately - doesn’t work. 
If paedophiles, rapists, murderers and muggers could really be instantly identified from the 
shape of their ears or the size of their teeth, the world would be a much safer place.

Raymond Poiccart is the least “used” character. Pictured as slightly older than the other two, 
with the heavyset frame of a Mycroft Holmes and an equally brilliant mind, Poiccart is a 
philosopher, a pondering meditative type, happier exercising his mind than his body. Poiccart 
spends a large amount of time breeding pigs (J G Reeder’s equally unusual pastime was 
breeding prize chickens at his farm in Surrey) or watching the oranges grow under the warm 
sun of his villa in Cordoba. 

The Fourth Just Man is interchangeable. When he wrote the first story back in 1905, 
Wallace’s inherent dislike of routine and too much “structure” presented him with a rather 
good idea: the “floating fourth”. So, Wallace killed off the “true” Fourth Just Man, 
Frenchman Clarice Merrell, in a shootout with police in France shortly before the “first of 
their adventures” (The Four Just Men) was published. Loyalty to their friend meant that he 
was never replaced, but it allowed the surviving three to accept a temporary “fourth man” as 
the situation required. 

Clarice Merrell is just a name, never described and quickly forgotten as the series progresses, 
accorded just the rather poetic description of his grave in The Council of Justice, despite 
Wallace early on implying these four had had many adventures together before Merrell’s 
heroic death leading the police away from his escaping friends. However, the disposal of 
Merrell meant that Wallace could keep the series “fresh”, as the addition of an ever-changing 
4th Man would prevent the books from being stale. In The Council of Justice, Wallace boldly 
made the Fourth Just Man a European prince, something he knew would appeal to what we 
today would call the “mass market” readership.    

Unfortunately, back in the real world, things appeared to be continuing grimly. Wallace was 
still suffering pangs of conscience over his treatment of his late mother, his marriage to Ivy 
was slowly but inevitably crumbling and the tension made his children fractious. Financially, 
things were appalling - Wallace had been forced to sell the entire rights to The Four Just 
Men in 1905 to one George Newnes for £75, and promptly had to sell The Council of Justice 
(£70) and his third book, also a thriller (£80) to get some ready cash virtually as the ink was 
drying on the last page. Every penny was swallowed up by the ocean of debt as soon as he’d 
earned it, and that didn’t even cover providing for the basic sustenance and covering of his 
wife, toddler son and infant daughter. The horror of penury and the workhouse loomed, until 
Edgar suddenly hit his Midas streak again.

He met a Mrs Thorne, who produced a minor magazine, and she agreed to accept a serial 
from him. Unfortunately, as he admitted to her, he was no good at romance – his charm, good 
looks and early marriage meant he’d never had to work at wooing a woman, nor did he know 
what women sought in a man. Mrs Freeman and her daughter Clara had been indulgent 
parents, not sweethearts, and his romance with Edith Anstree now Cockle had been the 
relationship of two children playing at being grown-ups. He was good at “blood and thunder”, 
with a body per page and smoking guns every other paragraph. 

Somehow he began relating his experiences in South Africa, and Mrs Thorne immediately 
recognised a Good Thing – that was his story. In 1909, Sanders of the River was promptly 
born as a long-running and eventually lucrative serial. Possibly the most well-known of 
Wallace’s ‘Colonial’ adventure stories, the books’ hero was Commissioner Sanders who ruled 
an African province (the River in question being the African Nile) on behalf of the British 
Empire. The series is also the most vilified of Wallace’s works by the Politically Correct 
thought police because of it’s unashamedly ‘Imperialist ideology’. Sanders rules the natives 
‘firmly but fairly’ but his idea of justice is to hang rebellious native chiefs, one modern 
reviewer labelling Sanders ‘the most odious fictional work I have ever read’.5 

Mrs Thorne could not pay much, but any income was better than nothing, and Wallace’s 
frantic writing for his new editor and other magazines, plus becoming a horse-racing 
columnist for several newspapers, at least kept the wolf from the door, even if it was the 
hand-to-mouth existence that, though Wallace didn’t know it, had been the fate of his mother 
and her infant daughter Josephine so many decades before.

It was as the world headed towards World War 1 that Wallace added Mr Jeremiah Golden 
Reeder to his repertoire. With his gingery sideburns, archaic way of dress and hesitancy of 
speech, Mr Reeder was highly idiosyncratic. Whereas the Just Men were vigilantes who killed 
for Justice, Mr Reeder’s quirk was that, though he worked for the side of Good (in the Public 
Prosecutor’s office of the Crown Prosecution Service) he had actually “a criminal mind” and 
was in the habit of suddenly dropping an explanation of how to commit some diabolically 
cold-blooded and ruthless crime into an innocent conversation. On one occasion, with 
psychopathic interest, he described to shocked Scotland Yard men how to mass-murder the 
majority of Britain’s schoolchildren by the ingenious and undetectable method of injecting 
strychnine into the daily delivered pint of milk. 

Strangely, for all Wallace’s chivalry, he portrayed women much more realistically than 
Conan Doyle or Hornung or Burroughs et al ever did. In Terror Keep, Olga Flack, the 
daughter chief villain Mad Jack Flack and niece of his two equally evil brothers, is correctly 
portrayed a conscienceless murderess instead of “miraculously” not being brainwashed by her 
upbringing and turning into a model of feminine virtue, as would have happened with Doyle, 
etc. Wallace’s understanding that if you brought up a child, even a girl, to be cruel, vicious, 
thuggish and nasty you would get an adult who was a waste of oxygen was remarkably 
advanced for the day. 

Along with the Just Men and others, Mr J G Reeder vanquished various villains under 
Wallace’s pen, but what makes so many of the stories so good is the twist-in-the-tale endings 
and/or the simple yet ingenious plot device that shows when, or why or how the murder/crime 
was committed. The most successful stories hinged on little things. For example, in one J. G. 
Reeder story, he unexpectedly receives a rather long letter from a conscienceless murderer he 
sent to prison. All of a sudden, Reeder jumps up and dashes to wash his hands repeatedly in 
carbolic soap. The killer, cunningly, was planning to murder Reeder by sending him a letter 
that he had thoroughly contaminated with the smallpox virus. 

Likewise, in another short story, Manfred is baffled when Leon Gonzales murders an insane 
scientist because the man has developed a lunatic belief that earthworms are evil and are 
trying to take over the world, and he plans to mass-poison the creatures into extinction! This 
story occurs after the Four Just Men were pardoned by King George V during World War 1 to 
help with the war effort (another example of Wallace’s devout nationalistic fervour) and had 
given solemn oaths not to kill again (later tales were thus set during and post war with them 
operating a private detective agency situated in Curzon Street, London, the symbol being a 
silver triangle). When Manfred talks to the distraught Leon, he discovers that without 
earthworms, all life on earth will become extinct. This fact is something science is only 
coming to appreciate today, decades later, and it is absolutely true. Without the biological 
wonder that is the earthworm, crumbling the soil, opening it to air, water and other nutrients 
as they pass through it, the world would wither, for crops would not grow, grass would die, 
and the food chain would collapse.   

It must be admitted that reading all the books one after another brings to light a variety of 
errors, such as Mr Reeder’s unchivalrous “wandering eye” amongst others, but it must be 
remembered that Wallace was striving for quantity not quality. It sounds nasty to say, but the 
truth is that the overriding reason for 99% of Wallace’s work was money. He needed any 
penny he could get desperately, as he was, customarily, living far beyond his income in a 
cycle of credit and debt, and had little time for literary finesse. Another reason for the rapidly 
produced succession of articles, plays, poems, short stories and novels like Sanders of the 
River, The Gaunt Stranger, Red Aces, The Mind of Mr J. G. Reeder, The Three Just Men, 
etc, from 1908 - 1918 was his slowly collapsing private life, which, in typical fashion, 
Wallace ignored as he was unable to cope with it, especially since he was responsible for 98% 
of the mess.

First there was his niece. In 1908, irrepressibly believing himself solvent again with the sale 
of the Sanders serial to Mrs Thorne, Wallace’s conscience goaded him into making fresh 
enquiries about his birth mother, Polly Richards, whom he was unaware had died shortly after 
he spurned her in 1903; this led him to the daughter of the half-sister he’d never known. Aged 
just seven when her mother sadly died at only twenty-five, Miss Alice Grace Adeline 
Donovan, named after Edgar’s paternal grandmother and aunts, was happy and eager to be 
acknowledged by her uncle. 

She had been only 17 when Polly died in 1903, and she was now an assured young woman 
approaching her majority of (then) 21 years. Her father’s remarriage before her 10th birthday 
meant she was keen to make acquaintance with relatives of her mother. Edgar and Grace 
Donovan remained lifelong friends, but the young woman was a scourge to his already sore 
conscience. 

Through Grace, the mistaken impression bequeathed by Mrs Freeman and Clara was 
destroyed. Through his niece, Wallace finally came to understand the honour and integrity of 
Mary Jane Blair Richards, and learned of the tremendous act of self-sacrifice she had made to 
protect her beloved friends Mrs Alice Marriott and Miss Jennifer Taylor, the wronged 
innocents whose lives would otherwise have been destroyed. The knowledge of the true 
nature of his mother was like acid to Wallace as he remembered his harsh rejection of the 
woman, a wrong he could never right as Polly had left and died. Surely his spitefulness had 
contributed to her death! It was just the sort of emotional realisation that Wallace was unable 
to accept, and though he pushed it aside, it ate at him.
  
Secondly, Ivy knew their marriage was doomed by 1910. She had always been a shy, “pipe 
and slippers” woman, while Edgar was extrovert and outgoing. She had made determined and 
successful efforts to be outgoing, but after the financial disaster of 1908, the strain was 
already too much. Edgar met a woman named Daisy, with whom he began an intellectual 
though not physical affair. Naturally flirtatious, Edgar found Daisy much more 
temperamentally suited to him than Ivy, who was happy to be a homemaker and quietly read 
her books of a night, though he and Ivy remained on affectionate enough terms for her to 
become unexpectedly pregnant in 1915.

Also in 1915, Edgar was rich enough to take on another secretary besides Robert Curtis, one 
nervous, timid, fifteen-year-old Violet King. Whereas Ivy had tolerated Daisy with courtesy, 
she recognised Violet as her successor; understanding that with maturity Violet would possess 
the ideal personality to match Edgar. Michael Blair Wallace, given his paternal grandmother’s 
maiden surname as exculpation by Edgar, was born in 1916 but the marriage had been over 
for some time. Ivy was never unpleasant to Violet, but she recognised that the introduction of 
the teenager into their lives meant she and Edgar could no longer drift along as they had been 
doing for the past eight years. Eventually Violet would turn from child into woman, and 
things would get a lot nastier. 

Assuring herself that Violet genuinely liked, and was liked, by her and Edgar’s children, Ivy 
began to gently withdraw from Edgar’s life, considerate enough, even though she was the 
wronged party, to make things as easy and unemotional as possible for him, though he at the 
time was harbouring no romantic feelings for Violet at all, being, like some men, far less 
perceptive than women in such matters. The process was speeded up by the currently raging 
World War 1, for which Wallace had been writing fiercely nationalistic articles (again, the PC 
thought police use these to label Wallace xenophobic, even though he was just doing what 
everyone else in the country was doing). The Wallaces took in a Belgian refugee named 
Pierre who was a similar age to Ivy, and the two were drawn together out of mutual 
loneliness.

In 1918, Ivy filed for divorce from Edgar. Bryan was 12, Patricia 9 and Michael just 2. Aware 
of the difficulties of step-families, Ivy had already laid the groundwork for Edgar and a 
willing Violet to retain custody of the children on condition she had free access. Gently 
reassuring Wallace that he was not to blame (he was in fact entirely at fault) and wisely not 
making any mention of the still-clueless man’s eventual relationship with Violet, Ivy moved 
to Tunbridge Wells whilst Pierre returned to his native Belgium. There the story should have 
ended, but life is often capricious and cruel. With the distance of the Channel between them, 
Pierre began to reconsider marriage to a middle-aged woman with three children, and his 
letters became infrequent, emotionally cooler, stopping altogether. Ivy learned indirectly of 
his marriage to a much younger woman. 

Ivy remained in Tunbridge Wells, for as she had foreseen, Edgar finally noticed the self-
possessed, calmly efficient secretary Violet King, who became the second Mrs Wallace in 
1921. Apart from infrequent visits by her children, all three of whom were at public school in 
accord with Edgar’s decree, she was entirely alone. After the divorce and Pierre’s shameful 
betrayal, she had lost her mother, Marion Caldecott, far away in South Africa. Turning for 
comfort to her father who lived in England, Ivy was turned away from his door with a self-
righteous tongue-lashing that lacked any drop of “Christian charity” from the lips of the 
hypocritical Reverend, who had effectively abandoned his family to their fate in South Africa 
nearly twenty years earlier. The spiteful man’s ego had never recovered from the blow dealt 
to him when he flounced out of the country in a pious huff, and poor Ivy received all the 
vicious verbal venom his façade of public probity meant he could never unleash upon his wife 
and other children, safely far from his vindictiveness in South Africa. 

Every Christmas, Ivy would go with her children to Caux where they would meet Edgar and 
Violet, the exchange being made with stilted embarrassment. To her dismay, not wanting 
children, Violet had found herself pregnant and gave birth to her only child, Penelope, in 
1923, the same year as his possibly most famous book was written, The Green Archer, a 
whodunit about a man found brutally murdered after being seen in a vicious argument with 
the owner of a haunted castle – could the culprit be not of this world?! 

Edgar’s favourite, and last, child, the chuckling, pampered toddler Penelope, so reminiscent 
of the long-dead Eleanor, only exacerbated the awkward marital situation, and the three adults 
made the visit as brief as possible. In 1925, however, Ivy was seriously ill with a pain in her 
breast that would not leave. Writing reluctantly to Edgar for money to surgically remove the 
tumour, she downplayed the situation for all she was worth, knowing his inability to cope 
with anything emotionally traumatic. 

Even now, so many years after Polly’s death, his treatment of his mother still sent him into 
fits of depression. Though the surgery was initially successful, the tumour returned 
terminally, and her condition deteriorated rapidly. Still, she maintained a cheerful, apologetic 
correspondence to Edgar requesting another “loan”, obfuscating so successfully he genuinely 
believed her to be suffering nothing more than a chesty cold. The doctor’s frantic summons 
got Bryan to her so she did not die alone like Polly, but Ivy Wallace succumbed to breast 
cancer in 1926, to the absolute shock of Edgar Wallace. Bryan was only 20, Patricia 17 and 
Michael 10. Penelope, the child whose resemblance to her dead daughter Eleanor caused so 
much sorrow to Ivy, was barely 3.

Edgar was devastated and distraught. He had turned away Polly and she had died. He had cast 
off Ivy, and she had died. What made Ivy’s death so unfair was that she only just missed out 
on the rewards that Edgar’s impecunious lifestyle was at long last reaping. Ivy had been his 
helpmeet and staunchest defender. Without her unwavering faith in Edgar’s abilities, her 
willingness to endure patiently and without complaint, her encouragement and reassurance, 
her willingness to be, in effect, a single parent due to Edgar’s woeful inadequacy at the job, 
her steadfast loyalty through years of great stress and anxiety, Edgar would have faltered.  

Ivy had been the one person singularly responsible for Edgar’s successes and his ability to 
repeatedly “bounce back”. Ivy was, almost literally, the “wind beneath his wings”. Without 
her many self-sacrifices, Edgar would never have Made It, but now Violet was reaping the 
rewards of Ivy’s hard work, and shortly after her death, Edgar Wallace would, poignantly, go 
from well-off and well-known to seriously rich and famous.

Three things happened within a short time span of each other. First, Edgar Wallace was 
introduced to Sir Ernest Hodder-Williams, one half of the famous publishing company 
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd.  Ernest had an almost prescient ability to “pick a winner” from 
amongst aspiring writers, and was also a shrewd judge of character. He took one look at 
Wallace, and saw his potential to be a great author. He also understood Wallace’s character, 
knowing that Edgar’s emotional cowardice and mercurial nature meant that he worked best 
under pressure, when he had little time to think. His best stories – The Just Men, J G Reeder 
et al – were all written during the period of 1908 onwards, when his fraught financial affairs, 
stressful private life and the anxieties of World War 1, the Spanish Influenza and so forth 
triggered Wallace’s instinct to “escape”, and since he could not physically leave, he withdrew 
into his imagination.

Ernest also introduced Wallace to the notion of Royalties. He was amazed to meet authors 
who earned a steady, respectable income from their books and wanted a piece of the action. 
Instead of selling the rights to his books the instant they were written, Wallace signed long-
term contracts with Hodder & Stoughton Ltd, all of which protected his royalties, and was set 
to work on a variety of projects by Ernest with a vengeance. With Ernest’s shrewd prodding, 
Edgar Wallace produced material so quickly that his speed became legendary. He was so fast 
it became a standing joke that, if a person telephoned to speak to Edgar and was told that he 
was “writing a novel”, they promptly replied, “I’ll hold!”

For the first time, he became more well-known as a fiction writer than as a freelance 
journalist. He was courted, fêted, lionized and welcomed by those who once spurned him, all 
of which was very soothing to his ego and boosted his sense of self infallibility even further, 
leading to the grandiose name of his autobiography published in 1926, which was titled, 
without any evidence of irony, Edgar Wallace: The Biography of a Phenomenon.)6. As 
usual, though, the fame had its downside. 

Within a couple of years of this relentlessly prodigious output, the scoffers were spreading 
rumours, and some were printed in newspaper articles that bordered just the legal side of libel, 
that Edgar Wallace actually wrote only a fraction of “his” printed output, and secretly 
employed ghost-writers or unemployed journalists to do the rest. The rumours were publicly 
aired when a man sued Wallace, claiming he had stolen his story. Wallace won hands down 
after proving conclusively that it was literally impossible for the plagiarism to have occurred, 
and offered £5,000 reward to anyone who could prove a single word published under his 
name was the work of anyone else, but though the reward was never won, the rumours, kept 
alive by jealousy and envy, persisted even after his death. The truth was, Edgar Wallace was 
such a prolific writer (over 175 assorted works) because he didn’t write them – he dictated 
them.

 A human being thinks four times faster than he or she is able to speak, and speaks twice as 
fast as he or she is able to write. Wallace did not write his stories. He got up every morning 
and, with cue cards in front of him so he could keep names, physical characteristics, 
sweethearts and sidekicks in order, sat there and dictated his stories into a machine. When he 
stopped at lunchtime, his secretaries, including Robert Curtis and the extremely efficient 
Violet, now Mrs Wallace, typed up the manuscripts and proof read them, for Edgar, despite 
the cue cards, was in the habit of cavalierly changing character names, hair colour, and even 
gender once he was “on a roll” – which accounts, in fact, for J. G. Reeder’s constantly 
changing sweethearts from book to book - and sent a messenger boy to the publishing house 
with the finished manuscripts. Even with only odd occasions of working all day, Edgar could 
speak a half a dozen short stories per day, equalling thirty per week, equalling sixty per 
fortnight and so forth.          

The second event was his meeting with Gerald du Maurier, father of the more famous Daphne 
(authoress of Jamaica Inn and Rebecca). Edgar had published in a national newspaper an 
article about paedophiles; with his usual whole-hearted zeal, he had quite rightly vilified these 
monsters in no uncertain terms. However, in the course of the article, Wallace mentioned 
several then well-known theatrical “stars” by name; he was in no way accusing them of 
paedophilia or anything remotely close, but, he made the point that the lifestyle of show 
business left the children of these personalities and those who acquainted with them more 
than usually vulnerable. This article of Wallace’s is the one area where the PC brigade have 
wisely kept a low profile and not bleated the usual rubbish about people who are “sick” and 
just need therapy to turn them into lambs. Some people, regardless of what the 
psychobabblers tell us, are simply evil and like being evil. 

The problem with the article was not what it said, but the way Wallace said it. As usual, just 
like his other works that have been used to accuse him of homophobia, racism, misogyny and 
a whole host of imagined sins, the only thing Wallace was guilty of was bullying his readers 
with tactless, undiplomatic condemnations of various persons’ lifestyles, with a blithe 
disregard for his own hypocrisy, considering the long theatrical background of both his 
mother and father. It is ironic that in his tendency to view himself as infallible, trying to 
dictate how others should live, lecturing people on what they should regard as morally right 
and wrong and accusing anyone who disagreed of bigotry and prejudice, Edgar Wallace was 
acting exactly like the Politically Correct con artists, who, decades later, would become his 
chief persecutors.

Gerald du Maurier was absolutely furious at this harangue that less than tactfully scolded his 
friends for being actors and determined to deliver blistering reproof. Telephoning Wallace, he 
waited impatiently for him to answer and confirmed when Wallace asked him that yes, 
indeed, he was Gerald du Maurier. 

“Oh, did you get my letter?”

The savage denunciation was never uttered as the increasingly confused men finally agreed to 
meet over dinner. Du Maurier came to chastise Wallace, Wallace came because he thought du 
Maurier was interested in producing a play based on his novel, The Gaunt Stranger, which 
had been the subject of the letter (and which, interestingly, du Maurier never received). By 
the end of the meal, du Maurier had Wallace’s somewhat childish personality pegged to a T., 
and realised also that The Gaunt Stranger would be a huge hit. The only thing about it that 
was unsuitable was the title, which he changed to The Ringer. 

The Ringer is a familiar name in theatre history. The central protagonist is one of Wallace’s 
most famous anti-heroes, Henry Arthur Milton, a.k.a. ‘The Ringer’, a peerless master of 
disguise who is a ruthless vigilante that kills for personal vengeance. He is a phantom, a 
ghost; with nobody able to describe him he strikes terror in the hearts of evildoers. The plot of 
the play was standard Wallace – bright and brave Scotland Yard Inspector tangled up with 
villains, damsel in distress, murder, etc: 

Dynamic Inspector Wembury is having an unusually bad day – he has just taken over 
Deptford Police Division and his fiancée Mary Lenley has just become a secretary to a local 
rogue, a smooth-talking and outwardly ultra-respectable but vicious lawyer named Maurice 
Meister. 

Complicating the issue is Wembury’s obnoxious, brutish superior, the inappropriately-named 
Inspector Bliss who has just returned from America stuffed full of notions about Tommy guns 
and a British ‘FBI’, and the delicate fact that Wembury’s putative brother-in-law, Mary 
Lenley’s brother, is doing a four-year stretch for a robbery that Meister was heavily involved 
in.  

Wembury’s day goes completely down the drain when the police learn that The Ringer, who 
was listed as killed in Australia is in fact alive, well and back in Britain. The Ringer lists 
Meister for death, because Henry Milton left his younger sister in Meister’s care, only for her 
body to be found floating in the Thames. Meister insists on police protection, but of course, 
nobody knows what The Ringer looks like!  

The play was a huge success critically, popularly and above all financially; as a further spin 
on the standard ‘secret identity’ and something which only helped the play be a success, The 
Ringer’s accomplice, Cora, turns out in fact to be his wife, and Wembury comes close to 
provoking The Ringer’s ire by his interrogation of her, though her flirting doesn’t help! 
Always with an eye for opportunity Wallace promptly turned The Ringer into a novel as well 
as a play, which also boosted the revenue it generated. Of most relevance, the play’s success 
sent Wallace’s rising fame soaring into the stratosphere and set him firmly on the road to 
serious wealth and fame – via Hollywood.

Back at that point, as he was developing The Ringer with du Maurier and branching out 
eagerly into becoming a playwright, his third lucky strike came in with moving pictures, as 
film-making was then known. Always seeking new challenges and never deterred by his own 
ignorance of any medium, Wallace fancied himself a script-doctor and screenwriter, and for 
once his self-belief was matched by the reality. He was very good at writing for movies and 
he almost instantly developed a burning desire to see his own novels on the silver screen. To 
this end, around the time he met Sir Ernest Hodder-Williams, he attempted unsuccessfully to 
sell the movie rights to his books to various film studios; happily for his family’s financial 
future, these attempts all fell through. 

To Edgar’s delight though, in 1927 he struck celluloid gold when he was appointed Chairman 
of the Board of the British Lion film company. Though the position was largely a figurehead, 
the contract stipulated that in return for Wallace giving British Lion exclusive rights to 
everything he wrote, in return British Lion would provide an annual salary and a substantial 
amount of stocks in the company and a large (at the time unprecedented) stipend from every 
movie British Lion made based on his work and 10% of British Lion’s overall annual profits! 
In addition to this, the elder of his two sons, Bryan Wallace, was employed as a film editor by 
British Lion, bringing another income from the studio into the family (he was the editor for 
the 1931 film The Calendar, based on his father’s play of the same name).

From 1927-1931 Edgar wrote (or rather dictated) several screenplays and even appeared in 
cameo roles in several films in the manner of Alfred Hitchcock. Such was his increasing fame 
and fortune that in a fit of ebullience, Edgar dipped a toe in politics. In October 1931, he 
stood as the Liberal MP candidate for Blackpool, but failed because of his reputation for 
gambling. Not really distraught, in November 1931 he was heading for the U.S.A. and 
Hollywood.

By 1930, Hollywood was moving into talking pictures, and was desperate for any work of 
fiction that they could transfer to celluloid with it still making sense. The great P.G. 
Wodehouse, creator of Jeeves & Wooster, had reached Hollywood himself as a script-doctor 
in 1929 [see The Inimitable Wodehouse by Catherine Stewart]. Desperate for screenplay 
writers, scriptwriters and script doctors, someone like Wallace, who could produce high-
quality work at a very fast speed, was ideal, and they wooed him ardently. 

Characters like The Three Musketeers, Robin Hood, Zorro and dozens of others were lighting 
up the screen. Basil Rathbone had brought Sherlock Holmes to audiences undreamed of, who 
now clamoured for his stories and made the Conan Doyle family’s fortunes increase 
substantially. Ronald Coleman had done the same for Raffles, Olympic medal winner Johnny 
Weismuller was about to do it for Tarzan. Wallace was entranced. Soon J G Reeder, George 
Manfred, Leon Gonzales, Raymond Poiccart and Henry Arthur “The Ringer” Milton would 
be portrayed upon on that magical moving screen, bringing him more money and glory.

It would also enable him to escape his family in England, as Edgar unwittingly emulated his 
vindictive father-in-law, Reverend Caldecott. Ivy’s death in 1926 had caused Edgar sincere 
grief, but also caused to flower in him a morbid fear of his own mortality. Edgar’s lifelong 
delusions of invincibility and fairly good health were shattered by the inescapable knowledge 
that Ivy was only a few years younger than him. 

His lifestyle had been appallingly bad for decades; other than his brief stint in the Infantry, he 
had never partaken in any daily exercise, and his daily intake of sustenance comprised 
nothing but endless cups of sugary tea and over four packs of cigarettes, which he credited 
with assisting his prodigious writing output, wryly declaring that such a regime should 
‘provide enough inspiration for anyone’. Despite some persistent slurs, there is however 
absolutely no indication that he used illegal narcotics such as cocaine to achieve his 
extraordinary output of writing because of course he dictated the words rather than wrote 
them. Indeed, it is known that Wallace was practically a teetotaller and avoided rather than 
embraced alcohol. In addition to this, he had been under constant and intense mental and 
emotional stress for at least the past twenty years, constantly haunted by debt, near-disgrace 
and ruin. He was simply one of those people who ‘live on their nerves’ or nervous energy.

Unknown to anyone, even himself, he had also suffered for many years from sugar diabetes, 
and these two factors, the mental and physical, now combined to produce emotional 
instability greater than normal for even Edgar. In short, he became neurotic. He suffered from 
mercifully brief periods of depression and paranoia, when friends and family were only out to 
fleece him or must have ulterior motives for showing concern. However, his mood swings 
became more frequent and irritable anxiety showed itself regularly, making the family home 
of Portland Place a tense, unhappy place to be. 

Friction rapidly developed, especially as his three elder children were now adults in their own 
right and gave back as good as they got (He was estranged, briefly, from Bryan, until Violet 
persuaded the younger man to make peace, despite, as usual, Edgar being the one at fault). 
Edgar had only ever been any good at being a “fair weather father” – he indulged them 
utterly, was ever ready for cuddling, wrestling, playing and shopping trips to buy pretty 
dresses or shiny toys – and was no good for the truly important issues of fatherhood - helping 
them with homework, teaching them practical life skills, staying up all night with the 
feverish/vomiting child, disciplining and training them – in his ideal world, his children 
would all be Peter Pan. Their inexorable ageing only highlighted the one thing he could not 
escape, and it was only with 6-year-old Penelope that he could maintain his façade of all-
knowing wisdom.
Most of all, he became irrationally jealous of Violet. Ivy had been close to Edgar in age, but 
her death made him acutely aware that he was a full quarter of a century older than his second 
wife, who in her turn was barely six years older than his oldest son Bryan. Little Penelope, 
unwittingly, was a constant reminder to Edgar of the unpalatable fact that Violet was in fact 
virtually the same age as his oldest child, the long-dead Eleanor; one can only wonder how 
the situation would indeed have been exacerbated had Eleanor not succumbed to meningitis 
back in 1902 and Edgar had been faced with the reality of his second wife and his firstborn 
child being contemporaries.

Also, like most flirts, Edgar never understood how such disrespectful and silly behaviour in 
front of one’s marriage mate caused Ivy such hurt, but now the boot was firmly on the other 
foot, as he watched his young wife meet much younger, handsomer men on a daily basis. It 
has to be admitted that after a few months, his basically groundless suspicions and harangues 
did have some basis in reality. Violet was never and was far too honourable a woman to ever 
be, unfaithful, but she found his attitude intolerable. As an excellent typist and Personal 
Assistant to Edgar she had a full workload, besides finding herself a de facto single parent, as 
Ivy had had to be, and these heavy loads, combined with Edgar’s emotional outbursts, piled 
on even more stress. After a while, it is hardly surprising that she sought a few hours respite 
of humorous conversation with youthful, amusing and non-neurotic companions.               
 
So, in November 1931, Edgar set sail for Los Angeles, full of ideas; above is his image on the 
front cover of Time magazine from 1929, courtesy of the Internet Wikipedia website. Upon 
arrival, however, he found stumbling blocks to the portrayal of his own characters, 
particularly the most popular ones, his Four Just Men. He was eager to transform them 
because of course George Manfred was Edgar Wallace according to his own world-view, but 
it wasn’t that simple. America was, and sadly still is, one of the most racist nations on earth, 
and perpetrates more human rights abuses against its citizens than many drug-lord controlled 
South American dictatorships even today. In 1931, that racism was much more blatant. In 
order to succeed in Hollywood in 1931, especially to become a “movie star”, you had to be a 
middle-class, middle-American He-WASP – Heterosexual White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. 

Fame and fortune meant reinventing yourself, especially if you were non-white and non-
American. The very beautiful, All-American small-town-girl-made-good film star Rita 
Hayworth, for example, was nothing of the sort. She was actually a Catholic Mexican called 
Marguerite with a healthy dollop of Eastern European Roma ancestry. Good ole New York 
boy Phil “Sergeant Bilko” Silvers was a Russian Jew named Fischal Silvers, who had 
emigrated to the city from Moscow as child, at the same time as another Russian Jew child 
named Isaac Asimov. Rock Hudson is known to many as the cute hero of Doris Day’s Pillow 
Talk, and Montgomery Clift brooded handsomely in John Wayne films, but both were 
homosexual; James “Rebel Without A Cause” Dean was bisexual. Back then, the media 
respected, as they now do not, that there was a divide between a person’s public and private 
life, which enabled such stars as Hayworth to create in safety entirely fictional backgrounds 
for themselves that they would not get away with today.  

The tall, distinguished, Sherlockian George Manfred would pose no problem, for audiences 
would love his handsome Englishness, perhaps even Ronald Coleman would portray him! 
Likewise, “Raymon Pwakar” could be turned into “Raymond Packart” or perhaps even 
Hollywood heartthrob and bona fide Frenchman Charles Boyer (Gaslight) would play him. 
But to portray Leon Gonzales, a non-white, non-American, non-Protestant character as a hero 
(in the books, Leon is a scientific genius whose IQ exceeds that of Manfred) was unthinkable.

So Edgar, very sensibly in the view of the majority, put his own work on the back-burner. 
After all, his fears in England had been silly – he had hardly ever been ill in his life, and 
Hollywood would provide him with new things to conquer and become rich off for years. As 
well as fiction writing and plays and journalism, he was also an editor and film director – in 
short, he had many strings for his Hollywood bow as the need arose. 

If anyone had claimed that Edgar Wallace had barely two months left to live, they would have 
roundly been laughed at. 

Edgar’s main job was script “doctoring”. People were scouring the world of fiction so fast 
and churning out screenplays at such a speed that gaping holes in plot and dialogue were 
creeping in. Also, some stories contained elements that were simply unfilmable. Just like 
George Lucas’ 1977 Star Wars thrilled audiences with it’s advanced hitherto unknown special 
effects (most of which the harassed director had to invent as he went along) so too, way ahead 
of his time, Edgar Wallace had the “knack” of turning five pages of rambling incoherence 
into a 1930s “Independence Day” – lots of blood and thunder, a dash of romance, and some 
witty, sharp dialogue between the characters, such as you see in the Bogart/Bacall,  
Tracy/Hepburn and Bette Davis-type films. 

One of his first successes was the Basil Rathbone vehicle, Hound of the Baskervilles. Next 
he began to work on another screenplay, which became known to the world as King Kong. At 
the same time, one of his own new plays, The Green Pack, was opening to favourable 
reviews, thus boosting his “exposure” and the opportunity of getting the Just Men onto 
celluloid. 

One of the many Britons who came to Hollywood and were successful was the 
actor/comedian Stanley Holloway, renowned for being the mainstay of such classic Ealing 
comedies as Passport to Pimlico and The Lavender Hill Mob. Holloway was also famous for 
his comic ‘monologues’ and had brought with him the ‘secret of his success’ – namely his 
writing partner. By then 50 years old to Edgar Wallace’s 55 years of age, Holloway’s 
scriptwriter was a noted poet and comedian in his own right and had transposed his Christian 
and surnames to make the ‘stage’ name by which he was known professionally: Marriott 
Edgar.

He was, indeed, Edgar Marriott, Edgar Wallace’s younger paternal half-brother. Shortly after 
Richard and Jennifer Taylor’s marriage, they had relocated permanently from England to 
Scotland, where their children were born, including Edgar Marriott in Kirkcudbright in 1880. 
Richard, completely unaware of the existence of his firstborn child by Polly Richards, thus 
had no idea that he already had a child bearing his names of Richard Edgar Horatio, hence, 
Edgar Marriott. 

Did Edgar and Edgar know each other and were they aware of their relationship? The answer 
to both questions is almost certainly ‘yes’. Edgar Wallace’s niece Alice Grace Donovan 
retained, initially through her grandmother Polly, contact with her “honorary” family the 
Marriotts, being named after Alice, Grace and Adeline Marriott of course. When Edgar 
tracked her down after Polly’s death, he became aware of the existence of his paternal semi-
siblings and they him through the intermediary of Grace. It is unlikely that Edgar ever met 
any of these (bar Marriott Edgar) but both parties were “aware” of each other. 

Marriott Edgar wrote Stanley Holloway’s most famous monologue, The Lion & Albert, in 
which he named the eponymous lion Wallace:

There were one great big Lion called Wallace; 
His nose were all covered with scars -  
He lay in a somnolent posture 
With the side of his face on the bars.

This is generally acknowledged today to be a ‘winking’ in-joke nod towards his elder half-
brother. In 1938, five years after Edgar Wallace’s death, Edgar Marriott wrote the script for a 
movie produced that year, Old Bones of the River, based on Edgar Wallace’s Sanders of the 
River series. Unlike Edgar Wallace, Edgar Marriott would live to a respectable eld, dying in 
1951 at the age of 71 years.

By this time it was February 1932, and Edgar abruptly began to suffer blinding headaches. A 
doctor was summoned and quickly diagnosed the problem: sugar diabetes. Considering how 
frequently this illness causes blindness, Edgar Wallace had struck lucky again in having so 
little pain from his years with the disease, but this time his luck was out. Newspapers carried 
the headline: WALLACE GRAVELY ILL. A few days later, accepting sedatives for the head 
pain, he slipped into a semi-coma, and an urgent cable was sent to Violet Wallace. As her 
ship left Southampton, she received the news that Wallace had slipped into a coma, and died 
on 7th February 1932. 

Typically, Wallace was honoured in death as not in life. His coffin lay in state aboard the 
ship, covered in the Union Jack and flowers; when the hearse reached London, flags at Fleet 
Street flew at half-mast and the bells of St. Bride’s tolled mournfully. (Edgar Wallace had 
always valued his position as a war correspondent/domestic journalist above all else – when 
he was elected chair of the Press Club, he inaugurated the now prestigious Luncheon between 
the press and the racing world, bringing together his two favourite things – newspapers and 
racehorses, under one roof, and as usual, he spent his money generously for the benefit of 
impoverished journalists).  

Below is a truncated family tree of Wallace: 

=   indicates marriage
… indicates illegitimacy
?    indicates child

 

		
										
  

















But the Just Men, J G Reeder, The Ringer and his other creations still had their part to play 
in the tragic-comedy that was Richard Edgar Horatio Wallace’s life. For the last few years 
from 1927 up until his death, Wallace had been earning a stupendous £50,000 per annum, just 
under £2 million per year in 2005 terms7. Yet when he died, he had debts of £140,000 [£6.5 
million by 2005 rate of inflation] and no “liquid assets”, i.e., cash. 

In short, he was as penniless as Mary Jane Richards had been over 65 years earlier upon 
giving birth to her Captain’s posthumous daughter. His only assets (apart from a couple of 
expensive racehorses that consistently lost and drained his finances like a hole in the bottom 
of a bucket) were the royalties from his works (which included the later Just Men titles 
amongst others) and the income from his British Lion contract.

Wallace had made the ultimate escape and left the wreckage for others to sort, but as usual 
Violet Wallace’s calm efficiency saved the day. Upon the advice of Sir Patrick Hastings, 
King’s Counsel, she placed the mess of his estate in the hands of Mr Theodore Goddard, and 
together the trio attempted to sort out the entanglements. Negotiations reduced debts from 
£140,000 to £64,000, with some like Wyndham’s Theatre accepting a £6,000 lump sum and 
£6,000 of deferred payment. Timely royalties of £26,000 reduced the outstanding amount to 
£38,000 by 1933. 

Edgar’s will left Violet three-sevenths of his estate and each of his four surviving children 
one-seventh each, but upon his death in February 1932 this amounted to a whole lot of 
nothing.  A new company was formed to channel all the royalty payments into one place, but 
the five saw no benefit – for every penny that entered was immediately despatched to pay 
creditors, some of the more tenacious of whom stretched back nearly forty years to Edgar’s 
rash youth in South Africa. However, thanks to the perseverance and acumen of Hastings, 
Violet and Goddard, Edgar’s luck kicked in again, and in March 1934, only two years and one 
month after his death, the enormous debts had been cleared and the company was actually 
paying dividends to the four of Edgar’s five heirs that still lived, the exception being Violet. 

Sadly, just like her predecessor Ivy, Violet Wallace never got to reap the benefit of all her 
hard work. Edgar’s neurotic suspicions came to naught, for she had died only fourteen months 
after him, in June 1933, with the estate still in debt (as it would be for another nine months). 
Her will left her three-sevenths to Penelope, who, with four-sevenths of a stake in the royalty 
company, became the major beneficiary and stakeholder. 

At the time, Penelope couldn’t care less about the financial rewards she would shortly begin 
to reap. Violet’s untimely death aged just 33 left the 10-year-old girl an orphan whose only 
relatives were her three semi-siblings, her 47-year-old cousin A. Grace Donovan, a group of 
paternal half-aunts and uncles she’d never met and the even more distant cousins who were 
the children of her great-aunts Grace and Adeline neé Marriott. 

While benevolent, her half-brothers and sister had problems of their own, having lived their 
entire lives in a world where Edgar Wallace solved every problem with a cheque or a large 
banknote; they were faced with making their way in the world without that comfortable 
financial cushion, and it was an effort.

Providentially, from 1959 there was a resurgence of interest in and enthusiasm for Edgar 
Wallace’s works, particularly his thriller stories, centred in Germany and the Balkans. Many 
of his books were turned into TV series or TV movies by German, Czechoslovakian and 
Russian TV companies and film studios. Due to this interest, Bryan Wallace, who became a 
director and film editor, relocated to Germany and helped produce many of these ‘silver 
screen’ de facto tributes to his late father.  

In 1969, however, Penelope Wallace founded an Appreciation Society for her father; she ran 
this and was President of the Edgar Wallace Appreciation Society, promoting her father’s 
books, plays, movies and TV series until she passed away in 1997; her daughter, also 
Penelope, now runs the Society. It can be found on the Internet, increasing the audience 
reached by Wallace in a way he could never have dreamed of.   

Aesthetically speaking, it is all to the good that the Just Men and J G Reeder had such 
problems making it to the silver screen, considering the appalling mess Hollywood made of 
such transfers. Anyone really interested in Tarzan and Sherlock Holmes, et al is advised to 
read the books and leave the visual versions well alone. Poor Tarzan went from the keenly 
intelligent, erudite hero of Edgar Rice Burroughs to a monosyllabic moron. Johnny 
Weissmuller deserved not just an Oscar but a medal for his ability to utter rubbish like, 
“Tarzan love Jane”, while keeping a serious face – if he’d thought of it, Weissmuller would 
probably have uttered the observation made by an exasperated Harrison Ford to George Lucas 
regarding the wooden, stilted dialogue of Star Wars, “‘You can write this shit, but you can’t 
say it!’” Sums up the Tarzan films perfectly, I regret to say. 

While Basil Rathbone made a rather good Sherlock Holmes, Dr Watson’s keenly intelligent, 
tart-tongued observer was reduced to being a bumbling, blustering buffoon, a sort of idiotic, 
John Bull type Englishman who displays a spaniel-like adoration of his companion. His 
utterance of an awe-struck, “I say, Holmes!” every ten seconds rapidly triggers in the viewer 
an overwhelming urge to throw something hard at the screen. The fan of these stories can 
only shudder at what Hollywood would have inflicted on J G Reeder and the Just Men.

In financial and other ways, however, the loss of Reeder and the Just Men has been very 
detrimental to Wallace in the UK. Ghastly as they were the Hollywood films and later, TV 
series, brought a wide range of characters into the lives of people who would never have 
come into contact with them otherwise. There is the apocryphal story of how, in the later 
Vietnam War, a small group of American Marines/Navy SEALs/Soldiers were encircled by a 
much larger force of Viet Cong. As the VC moved in to massacre the outnumbered and 
outgunned Americans, their commander had an inspiration – whipping out his cigarette 
lighter, he pretended to be Captain James T. Kirk, and summoned the Enterprise to blast the 
entire area with phasers. The VC, believing Star Trek to portray real American actions, fled 
the area before the ship could get them, and the troops safely escaped unharmed. It is just 
enough of a bizarre and highly improbable occurrence to be absolutely true, but the point is, 
the media of TV and movies brought characters to people on a global scale, to those who 
would never have had the opportunity to know them otherwise. 

The constant repetition of these films and TV shows on daytime television, in school holidays 
and so forth regularly brings them to the attention of a new generation, who in their turn 
discover the characters for themselves. Characters like Sherlock Holmes, Raffles, Zorro, The 
Three Musketeers, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Dorothy of Oz, Jeeves & Wooster, the 
children of Narnia, etc., have all experienced surges and re-surges in the sales of books 
following movie or TV adaptations of them. A film of Biggles in the early 1990s produced an 
upsurge of interest in the books by Captain W. E. Johns; Jeeves & Wooster, brilliantly 
portrayed by Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry (updating in it’s turn the 1970s version with Ian 
Carmichael) triggered a major reprint of P. G. Wodehouse; the emergence of the next Bond 
film every couple of years keeps the 007 books in print; the late Jeremy Brett and Edward 
Hardwicke made a superb Holmes & Watson; real-life aristocrat Nigel Havers portrayed 
Raffles in the BBC adaptation in 2001, a few years after they adapted The Lion, The Witch & 
The Wardrobe. Most recently, the trilogy of movies based on J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the 
Rings received rave reviews.              

J G Reeder and the Just Men have none of these advantages, due to the unfortunate timing of 
their creator’s death and the fact that their 1960s TV mini-revival was largely localised to 
Germany. Some fans of the tales worked them into pastiches, such as popular Western author 
J. T. Edson. He cleverly cleared up the inconsistencies of the tales, especially those of J G 
Reeder, in his Company ‘Z’ Series, by “explaining” that Jeremiah Golden Reeder was the 
“head” of a British Secret Service Agency, run from the security of his family’s prize-poultry 
breeding farm in Surrey. Helped by the strong Reeder family resemblance, especially 
amongst the males, Reeder worked a “deception”. His three paternal nephews, sons of his 
three brothers, were also in the organisation and with appropriate make-up, whoever was in 
residence at the family’s London home, Daffodil House, pretended to be the “J. G. Reeder”. 
Since the three nephews were, respectively, John Gray Reeder, Jason Grant Reeder and James 
Garfield Reeder, each one could truthfully claim to be Mr J. G. Reeder. According to Edson, 
Jason Grant was the “J G Reeder” of Terror Keep, whilst John Gray Reeder was the hero of 
Red Aces, thus also explaining away the apparent lechery of Mr Reeder, who married the 
heroine of an early tale but was back eyeing up the talent in a later story.

Edson’s books, very popular in the 1960s and 1970s, (selling over 11 million copies globally) 
helped rekindle knowledge and interest in Wallace, but Edson moved to America after being 
deemed “unpublishable” by certain radical liberal editors because he did not blindly conform 
to their fanatic views on such things as sexuality and using a character who was a “Johnny 
Reb” not a “Yankee” as a hero. His books (he was still writing until his death shortly after 
2000) are still available from the US through agencies such as Amazon.com, but the lack of 
visual adaptation has hurt his own works as well as those of Edgar Wallace that he publicised. 
Wary of the mess Hollywood made with Tarzan, Edson vetoed any film adaptation of his 
most famous characters, The Floating Outfit, when war-hero-turned-actor Audie Murphy, the 
only person he deemed “right” to play chief hero “Dusty Fog”, was killed in a plane crash, 
and now, in 2006, the vast majority of the British reading public has never heard of one of 
this country’s major successful fiction writers of recent times. Likewise, Edgar Wallace 
languishes in obscurity, the rarity of anyone having actually read any of his works as opposed 
to just vaguely hearing the name, making him an easy target for all sorts of ridiculous 
criticism and charlatanism like “psycho-history”. 

This is perhaps the greatest tragedy of Edgar Wallace, for he was the “father of the thriller”, a 
good writer of crime and adventure novels, and it was only pure mischance that means we 
today do not rank his name in the same league as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

The life of Edgar Wallace in History:


Timeline:
Event:
King or Queen
1837

 Victoria
1843
Mary Jane Blair born Liverpool, Lancs

1867
Mary Blair marries Cpt Joseph Richards

1868
Joseph Richards dies, his daughter Josephine C. 
Richards is born; Mary changes her name to 
Polly Richards

1872
Polly meets/joins Marriott theatre troupe

July 1874
Marriott troupe experiences commercial success 
– Polly & Richard Marriott have unprotected 
sex whilst drunk

Aug 1874
Polly realises she is pregnant

Oct 1874 – 
April 1875
Polly leaves troupe on pretext to hide her 
pregnancy, moves to Greenwich

March 
1875
Richard Edgar Horatio Marriott marries 
Jennifer Taylor unaware he is a father

1st April 
1875
Polly gives birth to Richard Edgar Horatio 
Wallace

9th April 
1875
Polly gives her son to Billingsgate fish porter 
George & Mrs Freeman

1877
The Marriott troupe disperses, Polly cannot 
afford to pay for Edgar’s upkeep – last visit to 
her son until 1903

1880
Edgar’s paternal half-brother Edgar Marriott 
born in Kirkcudbright

1885
Josephine Richards engagement to W H 
Donovan, Polly reveals existence of her half-
brother to her – they never meet.

1886
Josephine married William H. Donovan

1887
Alice Grave Adeline Donovan born

1894
Josephine Donovan dies aged 25 yrs, Edgar 
seeking to escape rash affiancing to Edith 
Anstree, enlists in Army

1895 – 
1899
Edgar in South Africa, joins Press Corps and 
marries Ivy Caldecott 

1900
Eleanor Caldecott born in Johannesburg, Violet 
King born in England

1901

 Edward VII
1901 – 02
Edgar outwits General Kitchener, becomes 
editor of Rand Daily Mail

1902
Eleanor Wallace dies of meningitis, Cohen fires 
Wallace, return to UK.

1902 
Wallace rehired as editor/correspondent by 
Daily Mail; in serious debt

1903
Polly visits Edgar, is spurned; dies

1904 – 05
Ivy pregnant and distraught; Edgar escapes to 
Baltic to cover Russo-Japanese War, gets FJM 
idea

1905
Bryan Wallace born in UK, Edgar runs FJM 
competition – popularly successful, financially 
ruinous.

1905 -07
Edgar involved in two libel suits against Daily 
Mail, visits Belgian Congo

1908
Patricia Wallace born, Harmsworth fires Edgar, 
marriage begins to fail; Edgar tracks down his 
niece Grace Donovan

1909
Edgar writes Sanders of the River

1910

George V
1915
Edgar takes on a new secretary, Violet King

1916
Michael Wallace born, Wallaces take in 
Belgian refugee, ‘Pierre’

1918
Ivy divorces Edgar, moves to Tunbridge Wells, 
is spurned by her father

1921
Edgar marries Violet King

1923
Penelope Wallace born, Ivy discovers she has 
breast cancer

1926
Ivy Wallace dies of breast cancer

1927
Edgar appointed Chairman of British Lion film 
production company

Oct 1931
Stands as Liberal MP for Blackpool (defeated)

Nov 1931
Leaves UK for Hollywood, is successful, meets 
his half-brother Edgar Marriott

7th 
February 
1932
Edgar Wallace dies of sugar diabetes in Los 
Angeles; his estate is discovered to be in serious 
debt

April 1933
Violet Wallace dies suddenly aged 33

Mar 1934
Wallace’s estate clears debts and starts paying 
dividends to heirs

1936

Edward VIII
George VI
1959
Mini-revival of Wallace’s work in Germany 

1951
Edgar’s half-brother Edgar Marriott dies

1952

Elizabeth II
1969
Penelope Wallace founds/administrates Edgar 
Wallace Appreciation Society in honour of her 
father

1997
Penelope Wallace dies


© 2006, C D Stewart

1 www.krjasto.sci-fi/ewallace
2 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was awarded his knighthood for a series of articles in which he was 
an apologist for British actions in South Africa during the 2nd Boer War of 1899-1902, not 
because he was the author of Sherlock Holmes.
3 The author tested this by comparing a prominent front-page article in several national 
newspapers in 2001, which included the age of a person. No less than four of the newspapers 
recorded the person as being, respectively, 16, 17, 15 and 18 years of age – despite the person 
being alive for the journalist to ask their birth date, or the information being found at the 
O.N.S. or a variety of other authorities.
4 Charles Darwin had been working on an evolutionary theory for many years, but he could 
not “write” – he was literate but his prose was unintelligible, ponderous and confusing. In a 
moment of weakness he “appropriated” the theory and the wording to describe it from a much 
younger, much poorer botanist/explorer who had come up with the theory independently and 
sent it to Darwin for his opinion. The botanist’s name, ironically, was Alfred Russell Wallace.
5 www.thrilleruk/kingofthethrillers
6 www.krjasto.sci.fi/ewallace
7 How Much Is That Worth Today? www.eh.net/hmit/ppowerbp