Edgar Wallace - Ultimate Collection: Crime Novels, Detective Stories, Historical Works & Memoirs E-Book
Edgar Wallace
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- Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
Musaicum Press presents to you an ultimate Edgar Wallace collection, formatted to the highest digital standard and adjusted for readability on all devices. This meticulously edited collection contains over 90 crime novels, including famous action adventure series, short stories, true crime tales and much more from incomparable Edgar Wallace: Edgar Wallace — Each Way (Biography) Screenplay: King Kong True Crime Stories: The Secret of the Moat Farm The Murder on Yarmouth Sands The Great Bank of England Frauds The Trial of the Seddons Herbert Armstrong - Poisoner The Suburban Lothario Crime Novels: Angel Esquire The Fourth Plague or Red Hand Grey Timothy or Pallard the Punter The Man who Bought London The Melody of Death A Debt Discharged The Tomb of T'Sin The Secret House The Clue of the Twisted Candle Down under Donovan The Man who Knew The Green Rust Kate Plus Ten The Daffodil Murder Jack O'Judgment The Angel of Terror The Crimson Circle Take-A-Chance Anderson The Valley of Ghosts Captains of Souls The Clue of the New Pin… The Green Archer The Missing Million The Croakers Double Dan The Face in the Night The Sinister Man The Three Oak Mystery The Blue Hand or Beyond Recall The Daughters of the Night The Ringer Detective Sgt. Elk Series: The Nine Bears Silinski - Master Criminal The Fellowship of the Frog The Joker The Twister The India-Rubber Men White Face P.-C. Lee Series Four Just Men Series: The Four Just Men The Council of Justice The Just Men of Cordova The Law of the Four Just Men The Three Just Men Again the Three Just Men The Earl of Nowhere Series African Novels: Sanders of the River The People of the River The River of Stars Bosambo of the River Bones The Keepers of the King's Peace Lieutenant Bones Bones in London Sandi the Kingmaker Bones of the River Sanders Again Sanders Mr. J. G. Reeder Series: Room 13 The Mind of Mr. J. G.
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Edgar Wallace - Ultimate Collection: Crime Novels, Detective Stories, Historical Works & Memoirs
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Table of Contents
Introduction:
Edgar Wallace — Each Way (1932)
Foreword
In October, 1931, I sat with Edgar Wallace in his suite at the Metropole Hotel, Blackpool, which constituency he was fighting in the Liberal interest.
In furtherance of his candidature I was producing a bi-weekly publication, Wallace’s Blackpool Banner, and we were discussing the layout.
“By the way,” I said, “can you suggest another title for this article? I’m tired of writing ‘Edgar Wallace, by Robert Curtis’.”
Wallace considered for a second.
“Call it ‘Edgar Wallace, by the Man who Knows Him Best’,” he said.
And that is my justification, if any be needed, for this volume.
Chapter One
Edgar Wallace did not write his most thrilling story; he lived it.
From the time when, as a ragged boy, he played truant from school and stood on the kerb outside the Press Club, selling newspapers in an effort to secure financial support for his love of ginger-beer, theatre galleries and “Devona” toffee, up to the time when, as Chairman of the Club, he entertained earls at lunch and drank his champagne from a pint tankard — it was one of the rare occasions when he would drink anything alcoholic — his life was a succession of episodes more thrilling than any serial story that came from his pen. I have often thought that if he had written the true story of his life as a novel, the public would have decided that his imagination had run away with him, and would have refused to swallow it.
“It is impossible not to be thrilled by Edgar Wallace.” They print that across the jackets of some of his novels. It is, no doubt, as regards his stories, one of those permissible exaggerations which a publisher may utter without a qualm. There must exist a small number of people who cannot read Edgar Wallace’s stories at all; there are doubtless others who read them and are not thrilled; there are, I know, some who devour them in secret and contemptuously decry them in public.
I once met a man — he was a well-known barrister, who must, I think, have been getting into training for a seat on the Bench — who asked me, with a very promising effort at judicial innocence: “Who is Edgar Wallace?”
I told him, with equal innocence, that he was the owner of the Wallace collection, and I am afraid he disbelieved me. But while I had been awaiting him in his chambers, I had counted seven of Wallace’s novels among his law books, and I happened to know that on the first night of Wallace’s last play the eminent counsel had been in the stalls — with a complimentary ticket. There are many like him.
But though there may be people who find it possible not to be thrilled by reading Wallace’s stories, I do not believe there exists a person so phlegmatic, or so blasé, or so completely insulated against the shocks of this mortal coil as to be in close contact with Wallace, for a few days, as I was for many years, without coming to realise the full meaning of the word “thrill”. Life within the orbit of Edgar Wallace was a rapid succession of high-powered thrills. During the years of my association with him I did many things — most things — with Wallace. I worked with him, lazed with him, went racing with him, travelled with him, spent money, lost money, made money with him; was broke with him and racked my brains for a likely means of raising the next five pounds; succeeded, failed, laughed, grieved, even grew stout with him — to our common sorrow. But in all the years of our friendship there was one experience which, though I sometimes sighed for it, never came my way: I was never dull with him.
Life to Wallace was all thrills. He loved living. I have heard him say that he never awoke in the morning without thanking God that he was alive. Everything that was happening in the world was of intense interest to him. He saw drama all around him, revelled in being in the midst of it, and was grateful for the chance which each fresh day gave him of plunging into it anew.
Everything which he did, he did intensely, and had little patience with those who lived at low pressure. “If you can’t get a kick out of what you’re doing, Bob,” he once said to me, “you’ve already got one foot in the grave.”
When I was crossing from America a few days after Wallace’s sudden death in Hollywood, one of the ship’s officers approached me on the Sunday morning and asked me whether, since Edgar Wallace’s body was on board, there was any special hymn which I would like sung at the service.
“Yes,” I said, “there is. I should like ‘Praise to the Holiest in the Height!’”
The officer looked doubtful.
“It’s hardly the sort of hymn—” he began.
“It’s the right hymn,” I assured him. “I have chosen it because, if Edgar Wallace is anywhere now and doing anything, I know he is thanking God for it.”
My first meeting with Wallace was in 1913. I was working in those days for the Dictaphone Company, transcribing on a typewriter the matter dictated on to the cylinders; and from time to time there were delivered to me large batches of cylinders containing literary and journalistic matter from someone who, for some reason or other, never divulged his name. All that I knew of the mysterious author was that his voice had a curiously husky quality, that his mispronunciation of various words made me shudder, and that he was always in a desperate hurry for the typescript.
As time went on, I became curious and made inquiries, only to discover that all that was known in the office was that the client in question lived at an address in the Haymarket, and that the manager was as mystified and as curious about his identity as I. It was, I believe, the manager’s suggestion that I should personally deliver the next lot of manuscript and see what I could discover. At any rate, I have always given him credit for the suggestion and been duly grateful to him.
A few days later I called at a flat in the Haymarket, and, on the pretext of having various queries to raise in connection with the manuscript, penetrated to the study, where I was received by a short, slim, decidedly goodlooking man, with a rather pallid face and a neat upturned moustache.
I told him who I was, but my confidence was not reciprocated; so while we discussed as many points about the manuscript as my ingenuity could invent, my eyes were busy in search of a clue. I noticed that on the bookshelves there was a preponderance of novels by Edgar Wallace, and a number of them lying about the room, and before I left I had a shrewd idea that it was Edgar Wallace to whom I had been talking.
A few days later came the confirmation. Our anonymous client sent in some handwritten manuscript to be copied, and I promptly turned up the Edgar Wallace file in the office, compared the writing of the manuscript with that of several letters which bore his signature, found the handwriting unmistakably the same, and congratulated myself on having solved the mystery in a manner of which even an Edgar Wallace sleuth need not have been ashamed.
Wallace in those days, though he was, of course, well known in Fleet Street, was only just beginning to loom on the horizon of the general public as a writer of fiction, and I was puzzled to see why he should be at such pains to conceal his identity. Later, I discovered that there had been method in his mystery. He had acquired his Dictaphone on the gradual-payment plan, instalments were in arrears, and to reveal himself as the author of the manuscripts would have been to invite a peremptory invitation to pay up — which, since he was in the middle of one of his hard-up patches, he could not do — or return the Dictaphone, which, since he was also in the middle of one of his patches of highspeed writing, was unthinkable. Wallace had found himself in a predicament and had tackled his temporary difficulty in a manner with which I was later to become all too familiar.
The discovery of his identity — I casually addressed him as “Mr. Wallace” at our next meeting, and he only smiled — placed me in a quandary. I had to decide whether, out of loyalty to my firm, I should reveal his identity, or yield to the promptings of the friendship which had already sprung up between us — fostered, I fancy, by our common love of horse-racing, and the fact that we both considered ourselves to be among the cognoscenti of the turf — and allow Wallace to retain the Dictaphone.
Fortunately, I was spared making the decision.
“How much do you earn at your job, Bob?” asked Wallace a few days later.
I told him.
“You’re worth more than that.”
I agreed — heartily.
“Have you got a typewriter of your own?”
I rapidly decided that the contraption in my possession might, with a little effort of imagination, be truthfully designated a typewriter, and said that I had.
“Then why don’t you work for yourself?” said Wallace. “I’ve got no money, but I’ll guarantee you a quid a week more than you’re getting now, and you can do all my typing for me. Is it a bet?”
It was. I acquired a Dictaphone. It was, even when it came into my possession, a very ancient model, as different from the modern electric machine as is the modern aeroplane from the boneshaker. It was worked by clockwork, and the spring was so weak that I was lucky to get through a cylinder with less than three windings. But it served its purpose. With my dilapidated typewriter and my debilitated Dictaphone I transcribed hundreds of thousands of words for Wallace.
I shall never forget my first introduction to what I later came to accept, more or less philosophically, as the genuine Wallace method of writing a story. I had been transcribing his Dictaphone dictation for some little time, and was congratulating myself on the fact that I was earning a pound a week more and doing far less work than previously. But any dreams I had of a calm and leisurely fortune were soon to be shattered. I had occasion to call at Wallace’s flat one Friday morning. Wallace, Dictaphone mouthpiece in hand, was seated at his desk.
“Hullo, Bob! Know anything?”
Throughout my long association with him that was invariably his first question when we met each morning. Wallace was always eager for a tip, and I have spent many an hour, while editors fumed for overdue contributions, arguing with him over the merits of our respective fancies for a race. If we agreed on the probable winner, it was backed by Wallace as a matter of course; if we did not agree — and as I have a liking for an occasional win I am glad to say that Wallace’s selection was not always mine — he would prove to me conclusively that his horse was bound to finish first, that mine had not a dog’s chance; after which he would ring up his bookmaker and back them both.
On this occasion we did not agree, and Wallace was in the middle of a most unconvincing demonstration that his horse could not avoid winning by three lengths, when he suddenly broke off.
“By the way,” he said placidly, “I’ve a serial to do — seventy-five thousand words — and I’m going to turn it in by Monday morning. I’m broke and must have the money.”
“Monday morning?” It was already midday on Friday and I had an uneasy feeling that Wallace was not being humorous. “Perhaps — by midday on Monday — if you’ve a good lot ready for me to get to work on—”
“I’m just going to start,” said Wallace calmly. “But we’ll do it — easily. You live at Hammersmith, don’t you?”
I did. But I could not see that living at Hammersmith appreciably brightened the prospect of getting a 75,000-word serial dictated, typed, delivered and paid for by Monday morning. But Wallace saw.
“I’ll start dictating right away,” he said. “We’ll get a corps of district messengers to carry the cylinders to you at Hammersmith as fast as I can dictate them, and we’ll work all day and night. You’re on a pony.”
I was living in those days in furnished apartments, and I am afraid my landlady had three rather disturbed nights. All night long my typewriter clattered — I was in constant dread that either it or my feeble Dictaphone spring might collapse beneath the strain imposed on them — and the arrival every two hours of a district messenger to hand me a fresh batch of cylinders for transcription and take back the typescript to Wallace, must have sadly interfered with her night’s rest.
Wallace read the first ten pages of my typescript, and by the next messenger came a note:
Dear Bob,
I don’t want to read any more of this. Do the fair copy straight away.
Edgar W.
PS. — Know anything for tomorrow?
I suppose I did sleep some time and eat now and then between the Friday and the Monday; but the only impression of those seventy-two hours that remains with me is of a dilapidated typewriter ceaselessly clattering and of wrists and arms aching abominably. But the story was finished according to plan, and by midday on Monday the manuscript was in the publisher’s hands, the payment for it in Wallace’s, and my “pony” in mine. We had both earned it.
In this manner were written many of his subsequent stories, and I soon came to recognise in the early stages the symptoms of an impending spasm of highspeed work. While Wallace had money, he could rarely bring himself to settle down to writing, and at the first signs of financial tightness I came to realise that it would not be long before I heard the inevitable “Bob, I’m broke”, and we should be plunging again into a whirl of furious activity.
How familiar that “Bob, I’m broke!” was to become! The calm smile with which Wallace invariably said it revealed the nonchalant temperament of the born gambler. Wallace, in everything that he did, was a gambler. Big risks had an irresistible attraction for him; big money lured him; but it was after the thrill of a big adventure that he hankered more than after the money. Money as such did not really interest him very much. It was just something which came along and was spent, but was not of any real importance. Money could always be made with a little effort, and, that being so, it was absurd to hoard it up. If there was money in the bank, Wallace would spend it, gamble with it, lend it, give it away — anything rather than save it. There was no thrill for Wallace in a money-box.
Most authors, I believe, find it impossible to do good work when they are worried, particularly if the cause of their worry is a financial one. If they sit down to plan a story, the vision of a Final Notice from the Gas Company floats before their eyes, and the prospect of the meter being borne away in a handcart effectually banishes inspiration. Truth is stronger than fiction, at least until some means has been found of preserving the continuance of the gas supply.
Fortunately, Wallace did not suffer from that disability. “Fortunately” because, had overdrafts, bills, threats of summonses and suchlike prevented his working, many of his stories would never have been written. It seems that most creative workers are innately lazy and can rarely bring themselves to settle down to work until the bank manager becomes recalcitrant or at any rate shows signs of incipient restiveness. Wallace was no exception; and as he was blessed with a bank manager whose views on the matter of overdrafts coincided — almost — with his own, there were sometimes lengthy periods when no stories were written.
He rarely worked until stern necessity in some unpleasant guise was knocking at the door; and then he worked at tremendous pressure and was not in the least disturbed by the knocking. His incurable optimism always persuaded him that the story would be finished and payment for it received before stern necessity kicked the door down.
Unlike most authors, he did his best work under the stress of financial stringency. When he was in funds, work was postponed to that distant date when money would be short again. Having survived one financial crisis, he always seemed to imagine that the next was only a vague possibility of the distant future, and promptly proceeded to do everything most calculated to expedite its arrival. At such times editors might be screaming for stories, but if the voice of the bank manager was silent or not too reproachful, the siren whisper of Epsom or Newmarket would always drown the editorial clamour, and only a very bad day on the racecourse would persuade him to give a sympathetic ear to the outcry.
I have often felt grateful to the providence which ordained that Wallace should not win the Irish Sweepstake. Whatever the state of his finances, he always contrived somehow to have about £40 worth of tickets, but luck never came his way. Had it done so, I am sure that I should have had no work to do for months. Even Wallace, I imagine, would have needed a month or two to dispose of the first prize in the Irish Sweep-
It is not surprising that Wallace, who honestly believed, as I have often heard him say, that money is one of the things in life which do not matter in the least, was frequently in financial difficulties. His temperament made it inevitable that his life should be punctuated at fairly regular intervals by financial crises of varying acuteness, and a graph of his bank balance during almost any selected period of his life would have been a zigzag affair of sudden ups and downs no less erratic than a meteorological chart of an English summer.
Often in my days with him I watched him carelessly wandering deeper and deeper into a jungle of debt from which I could see no hope that he would ever extricate himself and was convinced that Wallace at last had come to the end of his financial tether and that a crash was inevitable.
But that was before I had got to know Wallace and his methods. He was by nature a fighter, and he fought best when the boats had been burnt behind him and he must go forward or surrender, and I never knew him — not, at least, until the last few years, when he began to show unmistakable signs of overwork and nerviness — get rattled or even seriously worried over money matters. There was always a way out of the most bewildering financial maze, and the ingenuity he displayed in discovering the solution, the coolness with which he carried out the hair-raising expedients to which he was sometimes forced, were qualities which, had he chosen to turn his attention to Throgmorton Street instead of Fleet Street, could hardly have failed to win him a place among the world’s financial magnates.
Wallace, I am sure, would not have been content to be less than a magnate.
He was incurably generous. It was one of the most lovable traits in the character of the most lovable man I have ever known. He scattered his benevolence with as lavish a hand as he scattered money on any other object. He was lovably and lamentably sentimental. Almost any story of hard luck and poverty, no matter how blatantly untrue, was enough to send his hand groping for his wallet, and there was no lack of unscrupulous spongers to take advantage of his unselfish generosity. It became a by-word with the indigent parasites who always hovered around him, as well as among those who were in genuine need of help, that Wallace was always “good for a fiver”.
I was in his study on one occasion when an old friend of his came in with an all too familiar request.
“Can you lend me a tenner, Edgar?”
Wallace, I knew, was at the moment in sore need of money himself, and I expected a regretful refusal.
“Tenner?” said Wallace. “I really don’t know, old man. Wait a minute and I’ll see how the Pals Account stands.”
The friend left with a cheque for fifteen pounds.
It was only then, though I had been closely associated with Wallace for some time, that I discovered about the Pals Account. It was a special account into which, in his periods of affluence, he paid such money as he could spare for the specific purpose of meeting requests of this kind. His quixotic generosity was charming but ruinous. He would have been a much wealthier man if he could have found it in his heart to say “No” to a request for money. But an Edgar Wallace who could refuse a helping hand to one who asked for it would not have been Edgar Wallace.
I think he was fully aware of this improvident streak in his character. I remember the first occasion on which I asked him for a loan. It was only a fiver that I needed to help me through my financial morass, but I approached him very diffidently. I need not have felt any qualms.
“Sure, Bob,” said Wallace promptly. “Never be hard up for a fiver. I used to be, so I know what it’s like. I’m hard up nowadays for fifties and hundreds. I suppose one day I’ll be hard up for thousands.”
He was.
That, I suppose, was the secret of his inexhaustible generosity: he could never forget the days when he had been poor. Throughout his romantic journey from a courtyard in Deptford to a suite of rooms at the Carlton, the poor and unfortunate were always with him. He used to say humorously that it was the literary fare provided for him at Sunday School in his days of childhood that was chiefly responsible for his inability to say “No” to a request for help. It included a story called “Christie’s Old Organ”, over which he used to ponder and weep. The moral of the story was that one ought to be kind to people less fortunate than oneself, and Wallace reckoned that the complex introduced into his mental system by that Sunday School reading had cost him many thousands of pounds in the course of his life. How thoroughly he had taken the moral to heart!
With the best will in the world it was not always possible to produce the needed cash for charitable purposes, but J never knew Wallace fail to do something for a friend who was in genuine distress. His name was good security for a bank overdraft, if all else failed, and whatever the state of his own account he would lightheartedly put his signature to the guarantee form. After all, signing one’s name was a delightfully simple way of getting fifty pounds for one’s friend, and one could not let a pal down, anyway. I wonder how many such forms bearing Wallace’s signature there were scattered about the country at the time of his death!
I remember once venturing a mild protest when, in the midst of one of his most perplexing financial tangles, he had casually guaranteed an overdraft of £60 for a man who was a regular applicant for his charity, and who, as Wallace had admitted to me, had never been known to repay a loan.
“He’s hard up, Bob,” was Wallace’s excuse.
“So are you,” I reminded him.
He shrugged.
“And it’s a thousand to one,” I added, “that So-and-So will let you down.”
Another shrug.
“Being let down doesn’t matter.”
That was always Wallace’s attitude. Anyone might let him down — hundreds did — and it was accepted with a shrug and a smile. It was all part of the great gamble, and the true gambler does not squeal when he loses. I never knew Wallace bitter or resentful at being let down by someone whom he had trusted and helped, and the all too frequent experience never hardened his heart.
When he wanted to lend a helping hand he had a charmingly tactful way of doing it. It was he who, when I had been working for him only a month or two, suggested that, instead of working in my lodgings at Hammersmith, I should take an office in the West End and start a typewriting agency of my own. I agreed that it was an excellent plan, but with the small clientele which I then had, renting an office was a risk which I did not dare to take.
“Take the office, Bob,” said Wallace, “and I’ll pay half the rent.”
Protest was useless. It was to suit his own convenience, he assured me, that he wanted me to do it. Hammersmith was a long way from the Haymarket, and he wanted to have me close at hand, so that a telephone call would bring me to his flat within a few minutes. If I wouldn’t agree to his suggestion, he would rent an office himself and let me work there.
I took the office, and Wallace paid half the rent, and I pretended to believe that it was entirely for his own benefit that he did so. But I have never forgotten that it was to his generosity that I owed my first start in a business of my own. I did all Wallace’s work, and, with that solid foundation on which to build, the business grew apace.
And then came the war. This parted us. One morning in April, 1915, after worrying over the question for months, I suddenly decided to join up, packed away my typewriter and Dictaphone, and, without telling anyone of my intention, put myself at the service of His Majesty. I think I took it for granted that Wallace expected me to go sooner or later, and I did not mention the matter to him until my enlistment was an accomplished fact. Then, in all the glory of my new khaki kit, I called at his flat, confidently expecting his wholehearted approval both of what I had done and of my soldierly bearing.
I was sadly disappointed. Whatever he may have thought of me as a specimen of England’s fighting forces, Wallace certainly did not approve of what I had done. He was hurt and angry. He took the view that I was basely deserting him when he badly needed me, that I should have consulted him before enlisting, that I had shown an utter lack of consideration for him, and that I should make a rotten soldier anyway. He said he would see what he could do to get me out of the Army again immediately, and we would start to work on his new serial on the following Monday. Our relations, when I left him that morning, were decidedly strained.
A few days later, having been warned that I was sailing for Egypt almost immediately, I called again to bid Edgar goodbye — and found a very different Wallace from the one I had last seen. He was all anxiety to do everything possible to enable me to go with an easy mind. My whole family, he assured me, would be under his wing until I returned, and I was to worry over nothing. He was terribly sorry that I should be missing the best part of the flat-racing season.
I shall always remember his words to me as he shook my hand on parting.
“After all, Bob,” he said, “you’ll be helping to write history, and I only write popular fiction.”
Chapter Two
When he had spoken of my helping to write history, Wallace had been nearer the truth than he had suspected. I was invalided home from the East in 1916, and in 1917, on my discharge from hospital, was appointed confidential clerk to Field-Marshal Lord French, who at that time was Commander-in-Chief of the Home Forces.
Lord French was engaged in writing his famous book “1914”, dealing with the war, and my time was almost entirely occupied in taking down the book in shorthand from his dictation and transcribing on the typewriter. Fate seemed to have predestined me to be associated with the writers of thrilling stories.
Lord French, incidentally, had one characteristic in common with Edgar Wallace; he could very easily be distracted from the work of literary composition. With Wallace it needed only a race meeting to make him abandon desk, Dictaphone, secretary and editors and set off lightheartedly for the course; with Lord French it was usually some detail in the events which he was describing that caused him to interrupt his dictation.
He would suddenly pause, get up from his chair and go to a large-scale map of the Western front which hung on the wall, and indicate a spot with his finger. “You see, Curtis, it was like this,” he would say.
“We were here, and the enemy was there, and the problem I had to solve…”
And that would be the end of work for that morning. It was intensely interesting, but I must admit that military strategy and tactics were less intelligible to me than the strategy and tactics of Wallace’s crooks.
As soon as I was discharged from hospital I called on Wallace, and found him sitting at his desk, with his usual smile, and his Dictaphone mouthpiece in his hand. He might have been sitting just like that ever since I had left him.
“Hullo, Bob!” was his greeting. “Know anything?”
“All I know,” I answered, surveying him critically, “is that while I’ve been away you’ve added several inches to your waist measurement.”
Wallace said that was the worst communiqué from the front that had so far reached him. He added that during my absence he had had nine different typists, only one of whom could spell, or understood the uses of a comma, and he had just started a new serial which he wanted me to type. I must somehow wangle it to get free of my job with Lord French and return to the Wallace fold.
We agreed on a compromise; there should be no attempt at wangling, but I would do all the work I could for Wallace in my spare time. He felt, I think, that he was treating Lord French very well.
Demobilisation set me free in 1919, and I again started my own typewriting business, doing most of Wallace’s work for him as I had done before the war. This continued for several years. But reviving a business which had been dead for a long while was no easy matter. For a time I managed to keep it breathing, but only just. Everything at that time went wrong for me, and at last, when I could carry on no longer, I decided that the only thing to be done was to pocket my pride and tell Wallace just how matters stood. Reluctantly one day I went to see him, counting on his ingenuity to suggest some way out of my difficulties.
But I had counted on the wrong quality. His generosity was greater even than his ingenuity. He did not let me get very far with my story.
“You’d better come and join up with me as my secretary, Bob,” he said. “I’ve got no money, but I’ll guarantee you four pounds a week.”
Still the great-hearted gambler! Wallace told me later that he had always wanted me in his permanent, whole-time employment, but had never till then dared to commit himself to paying even a small regular salary.
So began a still more intimate association with him which was only broken by his sudden death in Hollywood. They were stirring years, full of interest and packed with thrills; and not the least of the thrills were those afforded by Wallace’s financial vagaries.
He was a lavish spender. The habit of counting the cost of anything in advance presupposes a measure of prudence and cautiousness which was not included in his make-up. In his heart I think Wallace had a contempt for prudence and cautiousness as virtues of a negative type which had something rather petty about them. He had scant sympathy really for the man who would first dip his toes in the water, and then, if it were not too cold, wade cautiously out and be careful not to swim beyond his depth. The right way was to take a header from the topmost diving-board and trust to providence that the water was deep enough to prevent your skull being cracked on the bottom.
Optimism and self-confidence were two of Wallace’s predominant qualities. If he wanted a thing he would never pause to consider whether he could afford it; he bought it. His optimism persuaded him that he would manage to pay for it somehow; his self-confidence never failed to convince him that he could make money just whenever he wanted to. Economy was a word of which he may possibly have heard, but which never intrigued him sufficiently to make him inquire into its meaning.
His motoring was a fair example. Wallace abominated walking. After the war, before the halcyon days of Portland Place, Bourne End and the Carlton, he was living in a flat Clarence Gate Gardens, Baker Street, which was approached by a flight of, I believe, twelve or thirteen steps; but he invariably went up and down by the lift.
Tubes, ‘buses, or even taxis never seemed to commend themselves to him as methods of transport worthy of his serious consideration, and he formed the comfortable but expensive habit of hiring a large and luxurious limousine car on any and every occasion.
His bills from the hire company were appalling, and on the arrival of one such account I prepared two statements which I hoped would so impress Wallace that he might take steps to bring down his motoring expenditure to a more reasonable figure. One statement showed the sum he had spent on car hire during the preceding twelve months, and the other, which set out the cost of running a car of his own, including chauffeur’s wages, garage, running expenses, etc., proved conclusively that by becoming a car owner he could effect a very considerably saving.
I showed the statements to Wallace. I am sure he was impressed, because he remarked that I should make a very good accountant. And that, for some years, was as far as it got. I should have known better than to introduce that word “saving” into the conversation. I am sure it scared him off.
Eventually, of course, he bought a car. It was a handsome car, but I never could bring myself to like it, for it was the cause of my unwittingly letting Edgar down. There arrived at the flat one afternoon his bank manager, a charming and long-suffering man. Wallace, in the midst of an overdue instalment of a serial, had heard the call of the turf and gone off to a race meeting, so I entertained the manager with a cup of tea, and sat and chatted with him in the study. In the course of our conversation I casually mentioned that we had just bought a car, and I wondered why the bank manager sighed and looked so wistful.
I understood a few days later, when there arrived a letter from the bank, couched in gently reproachful terms, regarding the amount of Wallace’s overdraft.
Up to that time I had not been fully admitted into Wallace’s confidence as regards his financial affairs, or I should certainly have conducted his bank manager along some less hazardous conversational path. Edgar, I fancy, realised the risks to which such reticence exposed him, and thereafter in money matters there were no secrets between us.
From that time the standard of our motoring comfort and elegance rose by leaps and bounds. Once Wallace had started buying cars, it was difficult to stop him, and ultimately we arrived, as I knew we were bound to arrive, at the crowning dignity of a Rolls-Royce.
The Ringer, Edgar’s most successful play, had been produced a couple of weeks previously by Sir Gerald du Maurier at Wyndham’s Theatre. It had met with instant success, and cheques for such heartening sums in respect of royalties had begun to arrive that I began to fear that, as long as the play was running, squeezing blood from a stone would be a simple matter compared with extracting articles or stories from Wallace. He was making bigger money than he had made for a long time — bigger, perhaps, than he had ever made — and I knew that something was bound to happen.
“Bob,” said Wallace one sunny morning, after duly inquiring if I “knew anything” and making a bet with his bookmaker over the telephone which sent a cold shiver down my spine, “Bob, we’re doing well.”
Spring was in the air, but Wallace did not need that stimulus to be himself. I cautiously agreed that the prospects were less gloomy than they had been recently, but doubted if they were sufficiently dazzling to justify the bet he had just made. There was a look in his grey eyes of which I was afraid I knew the meaning.
Wallace grinned.
“Let’s play up the luck and buy a car.”
“But you’ve got a car—” I began.
“A good car,” said Wallace, and picked up the receiver of his telephone.
His idea of a good car was on a par with his ideas of most other things; what it lacked in prudence it made up for in bigness of conception. There glided up to our doorstep a few days later a luxurious limousine of the most expensive type obtainable — to be superseded a year or so later by another, still more luxurious and expensive, which, as it stood shining and glistening by the kerb, made even Portland Place look poverty-stricken and in need of a fresh coat of paint.
Everyone who saw it admired it — with one exception. Captain Erskine-Bolst, M.P., who was Wallace’s political opponent in Blackpool at the last general election, referred to it in one of his speeches as “that yellow horror”. Thus can political prejudices blind us to true beauty. To Wallace that remark was, I fancy, the unkindest cut of all in a campaign by no means notable for its freedom from personalities.
Edgar did everything thoroughly. Having turned his attention to cars, he saw the matter through in his usual freehanded way. Every member of his family, with the exception of his youngest daughter, Penelope, whom, since she was only four years of age, he was reluctantly compelled to pass over, was presented with a car, and a whole fleet of vehicles was garaged in the mews behind the house.
Wallace at this time was making a very big income, and he continued to play up his luck. He had a beautiful country house at Bourne End, a flat in Portland Place, a furnished flat in the Haymarket, which was used exclusively as an office and was rarely occupied by anyone but myself and an assistant secretary, and a suite of rooms at the Carlton, with a private telephone line to the Haymarket premises.
I remember receiving an urgent summons one Sunday to go down to Bourne End, and drove there in my car. It was a very old car; it had been middle-aged when I had acquired it; its sole claim to survival was that it went.
Edgar’s Rolls, with its long, shining body, stood in the drive, and I stopped my contraption beside it with a screeching protest from the brakes which was more than usually strident. Wallace, not unnaturally, came out to discover what was responsible for breaking his Sabbath peace. He strolled around my car, inspected the licence, rubbed the door panel with the tip of a finger, peered at the spot he had laid bare, and gave a quizzical smile.
“According to the licence, Bob, your car is blue,” he said laconically, and led the way into the house.
There was work to be done that afternoon — Wallace did much of his work during the weekends — and no further reference to my car was made. I did notice, however, that as I started up the engine to leave, Edgar sighed and eyed the bonnet reproachfully.
The next morning he called me into his study.
“Bob,” he said, “The Squeaker’s just being produced in New York, and if it’s a success I’m going to buy you a new car.”
But he could no more be patient in his generosity than he could be patient in anything else. Within an hour came another summons to his study.
“I’ve been thinking,” said Wallace. “The Squeaker doesn’t come on in New York for a month yet, and your car will never hang together till then. You’d better take a stroll along Great Portland Street and buy yourself one.”
I began to thank him, but he would not listen. Once again he was only doing it from purely selfish motives. If people saw his secretary in a ramshackle vehicle such as I drove, they would suspect him of paying me a starvation wage. It was a little thin, and no pretence of believing it.
“It’s frightfully kind of you—” I began.
“Besides,” interrupted Wallace, “you leave the atrocity outside the house, and as a residential district Portland Place is being ruined.”
Within an hour I had added yet another saloon, blue beyond all question, to the ever-growing transport facilities which were at our disposal, and Edgar, with his usual nonchalance, signed the cheque.
In those latter days of prosperity Wallace had a large staff of servants — a valet, two footmen, two chauffeurs, several gardeners, a butler, a groom, and the usual complement of housemaids and parlourmaids and cooks and whatnot. I wonder, had he lived to return from Hollywood, how many cars he would eventually have had attached to his establishment!
His recklessness in involving himself in financial difficulties was only equalled by his ingenuity in getting out of them. There was, of course, always the final resort of writing a story — either a short story or a serial, according to the exigencies of the crisis. But writing a story, even given the inclination to do so and a day when there was no racing to lure him from his desk, required a certain amount of time; and in the earlier days of my association with him, when the financial crises were of constant occurrence and pronounced acuteness, time was usually an important factor. As an accessory in many of his financial machinations I went through some of the most nerve-racking ordeals of my life. Wallace, even at the most crucial moments, never turned a hair. I used to wish sometimes that a hair or two had been capable of turning.
He walked into my room one morning with his usual smile and made the all too familiar announcement.
“Bob, I’m broke.”
I made no comment. I waited to hear whether a story was to be written at breakneck speed or some new ingenious scheme for raising the wind to be put into operation. I was prepared for almost anything — except for Wallace’s next remark.
“Write me a cheque on your account for a couple of hundred, will you?”
I stared at him, dumbfounded. He was as well aware of my financial instability as I was of his, and though he might not know, as I knew, that the balance in my account, if the bank had met the last cheque, was £2 on the debit side, he must know that he was asking me to write a cheque for about ten times the largest sum that ever stood to my credit for more than a couple of days.
“It’s all right, Bob,” he said easily. “I must have two hundred quid this morning, and I can’t think of any other way of raising it. But I won’t let you down. You shall have the cash to pay in before the cheque is presented.”
I wrote the cheque. It was the first cheque for a three-figure sum that I had ever drawn, and there was only an overdraft of £2 to meet it; but I signed my name with an air of nonchalance which must have satisfied Wallace that he had a promising pupil. I would not have signed that cheque for any other man alive.
It was a tribute, I think, even to Wallace’s well-known loyalty to his word— “Thou shalt not let anyone down” was his eleventh commandment — that I thought no more about the matter until, the following afternoon, he thrust a wad of five-pound notes into my hand.
“Thanks, Bob,” he said. “You’d better go and pay it in at once.”
As I entered the bank I had a sensation that something was amiss. The cashier’s welcome, never any too cordial, was noticeably chilly; I noted that the clerks were staring at me over their ledgers with unfriendly eyes, and I do not think it was fancy that the bank messenger sniffed as he passed me. Someone tapped my shoulder.
“The manager would like to see you, Mr. Curtis.”
The manager, scowling and frigidly distant, had a question to ask. Why, he demanded, when my account was already overdrawn, had I had the criminal temerity to utter a cheque for two hundred pounds? The cheque, of course, had been dishonoured, and he awaited an explanation.
I did my best to give him one, but he was not in the least interested. I flourished my wad of notes, but it was like a red rag to a bull. By some unexpected mischance the cheque had been presented earlier than it should have been in the normal way — Wallace knew to a nicety all details concerning the clearing of cheques, and none was more skilled than he in the tactical use of an account — the money had not been there to meet it, and here was an infuriated manager demanding to know what I meant by it and refusing to let me answer. Finally he intimated that, as soon as I had repaid my £2 overdraft — plus interest — I might consider my account closed.
“Sorry, Bob,” said Wallace when I told him what had happened. “But you can open an account at another bank, and I’ll guarantee the overdraft.”
My bank manager in those days had never shown me any marked affection, and I am afraid that this incident turned his diffidence into something very like hatred. If time has not mellowed him, it may be some slight balm to his outraged feelings to learn that, all unwittingly, he shared in a scheme which, at any rate for a few hours, helped one of the best of good fellows out of a serious difficulty. Had he known Edgar Wallace as I knew him, he would have done the same for him himself.
But Wallace had more original and ingenious methods than that. He was a great opportunist, and none knew better than he how to turn present circumstances to his own advantage.
At one time, when he was writing the racing column for a well-known journal, he struck a more than usually barren patch. It lasted so long without showing any signs of improvement that I began to wonder whether Wallace had lost his skill or was suffering from an unprecedented dearth of ideas.
“Bob,” he said one morning, “why shouldn’t I be a tipster?”
I had thoughts of pointing out, as a reason why he should not, that the number of winners among the horses he tipped in his racing column was negligible. But I remembered that no tipster would consider lack of winners among his tips a disqualification for his business, and contented myself with expressing the opinion that, if the tipster’s business was intended as a money-making project, writing a story would doubtless prove far more remunerative.
“I’ve got an idea,” said Edgar, his eyes alight with excitement.
“Joe Austin” was not the actual name under which Wallace chose to carry on his tipping venture, but it will serve. Not many days later some thousands of persons who were interested in racing received a circular letter from one Joe Austin, setting out in glowing terms the qualifications which entitled Joe to their confident patronage, and the prospects which were theirs if they had vision enough to follow, and, of course, pay for, his advice.
Joe, it appeared, was in the habit of receiving last-minute information from sources of unimpeachable reliability concerning the winners of certain races. He was to receive one such titbit next week — for a race on the Wednesday, let us say. It would be absolutely last-minute information and he would not himself receive it in all probability until the morning of the race, but he undertook that to every person who forwarded him the sum of one shilling the tip should be communicated before midday on the Wednesday. It was a cleverly written circular with the authentic tipster’s touch about it. In the subtle way which such circulars have it somehow persuaded one against one’s better judgment that Joe Austin was a man with unequalled means of securing secret information and of irreproachable integrity. I have received hundreds of tipsters’ circulars in my life, but I have never seen one better calculated to coax a shilling from a punter’s pocket.
Wallace showed me the circular — he had spent a long time on its composition — and asked me what I thought of it; and, though experience had made me a very hardened sceptic, if I had not known that Joe Austin was Edgar Wallace, in whose racing tips I had learned to place only the very feeblest confidence, I should have handed him my shilling, ill as I could afford it, there and then.
I had only one criticism of the circular to make. Wallace, like most authors, was not incapable of making grammatical slips, and part of my duty as his secretary was to stand as a watchdog between Wallace and the purity of the English language, and put such trifling lapses right. I never troubled to point them out to him. But he was sending the circular straight away to be duplicated without my having an opportunity to edit it, and there were two mistakes so glaring that I felt in duty bound to point them out.
“Anything wrong?” inquired Wallace, noting, I suppose, my pained expression.
I handed him the letter.
“If the subject of a sentence is in the plural,” I said, not, I am afraid, without a hint of superior knowledge in my manner, “it is invariably followed by a verb in the plural. See paragraph one. And in the second paragraph ‘was’ should be ‘were’.”
Wallace grinned.
“I put those mistakes in purposely,” he said.
I suppose I showed my perplexity.
“Because,” he explained, “Joe Austin is a genuine racing tipster. Did you ever get a letter from a racing tipster which didn’t contain a mistake in grammar?”
I was silenced. Wallace, I realised, was right. With his customary thoroughness he had made Joe Austin true to type down to the very smallest detail.
The circulars despatched, we waited for the result — Wallace with his usual optimism, I with decided misgivings. Joe Austin’s ungrammatical letter did the trick; letters containing coin, postal orders or a shilling’s worth of stamps came pouring in, and my uneasiness increased. At length I ventured to broach with Wallace the cause of my misgivings.
“All these people are sending you money,” I said, “which they probably can’t afford. They’re banking on your giving them a really good tip—”
The look of reproach in Wallace’s eyes made me pause.
“That’s all right, Bob,” he said. “I’m not going to let them down.”
“But if you’ve no real information to hand on to them—”
“I have,” he said. “I’ve a good ‘un for the big race on Wednesday. “So-and-So” — naming a famous jockey— “gave me the tip a week ago. It’s the biggest certainty there’s been this season, and he told me to put my shirt on it.”
He waved a hand towards the pile of postal orders on the table.
“I’m giving them good value for their shillings,” he said, “and they’re providing me with the shirt. That’s fair enough, isn’t it?”
I might have known it. Wallace was incapable of being anything but fair.
By the Monday morning Joe Austin’s letter had brought in over £200 in shillings, and Wallace was delighted. I did not share his delight. I could not for the life of me see how the scheme was even to pay its way, let alone show the handsome profit on which Wallace was counting. Each client had forwarded only one shilling; each telegram to be despatched on the Wednesday morning would require a shilling stamp; the printing and postage of the circulars had to be paid for according to all the established rules of bookkeeping the net result on Wednesday must inevitably be a balance on the wrong side. I did just hint at the likelihood of such a contingency, but Wallace only grinned.
On the Monday evening I understood. That night Joe Austin posted to all his clients a second letter. It gave the name of the horse which was the “good thing” for the race on Wednesday, and stated that, as the information from the unassailably reliable source had already come to hand, Joe Austin was passing it on to his clients immediately. The tip was the biggest racing certainty of the season, and some of them might wish to indulge in antepost betting.
Only about a dozen telegrams had to be sent to clients whose shillings arrived too late for a letter to reach them in time, and the difference between the total sum received in shillings and the total expenditure on 1½ d. stamps and the circulars, was roughly £200. Wallace, of course, had had it all mapped out ahead and had never intended sending telegrams.
He himself put his shirt on it. On the Tuesday he put the whole £200 on the horse in question, and when, in the afternoon, I went to his study to tell him that the horse had won at 6/1, he only nodded.
“Did you back it, Bob?”
I admitted to a modest bet of 10s.
“That’s all right,” said Edgar. “I put ten quid on for you.”
That was the end of the tipster’s business. Wallace was in funds again, there was no further cause for immediate anxiety, and consequently Joe Austin was consigned to those realms of imagination from which he had originally come.
By some such ingenious expedient we weathered in those early days the frequent financial hurricanes that bent us. Wallace was nothing if not ingenious. As an exhibition of ingenuity combined with nerve, I think that one of his bouts with the unfortunate Inland Revenue official to whom fell the arduous task of extracting income tax from Wallace, would take a good deal of beating.
