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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Daughters of the Night," Edgar Wallace crafts a thrilling narrative that delves into the murky world of crime, deception, and the complexities of human relationships. Set against an atmospheric backdrop, the novel intertwines elements of mystery and melodrama, showcasing Wallace's distinctive prose style characterized by his keen insights into character psychology and societal norms. As the plot unfolds, readers are drawn into a labyrinth of intrigue where the shadows of the night hide both danger and allure, reflecting an era replete with anxieties about societal shifts and moral decay. Edgar Wallace, a prolific British writer of the early 20th century, emerged from humble beginnings and his diverse experiences'—ranging from war correspondent to playwright'—greatly influenced his writing. Wallace's deep understanding of the human condition is evident in this work, which echoes the burgeoning detective genre of his time while simultaneously exploring themes of female agency and societal roles. His adeptness in creating suspenseful tales enabled him to capture the imagination of a generation navigating a rapidly changing world. "The Daughters of the Night" is a compelling read for enthusiasts of classic crime fiction and those interested in early 20th-century literature. Wallace's masterful storytelling and rich characterizations make this novel not only a thriller but also a commentary on the complexities of gender and morality. Readers are invited to uncover the secrets that lie in the shadows, making for a gripping literary experience. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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The Daughters of the Night
Table of Contents
Introduction
When daylight’s assurances yield to the ambiguities of night, a modern metropolis becomes a stage on which respectability loosens, predatory enterprise flourishes, and the uneasy bargains among law, loyalty, and desire are exposed by shifting masks, whispered rumors, sudden betrayals, and the breathless calculus of survival that tests every character who steps from the lamplit pavement into the city’s deeper shadows, where money moves faster than truth, authority strains to keep pace with invention, and the promise of safety dissolves into a maze of rooms, roads, and faces that never look the same twice.
The Daughters of the Night is a crime novel by Edgar Wallace, one of the defining voices of British popular thrillers in the early twentieth century. Written and published in the 1910s–1920s period that consolidated his reputation, it reflects a fascination with urban after-hours life and the perils clustered around entertainment, money, and anonymity. Rather than lingering on psychology, Wallace crafts a lean, propulsive mystery that keeps events moving through short, pointed scenes. The book’s milieu is the metropolitan night-world, a crossroads of public spectacle and private risk, where the boundaries between audience and actor, bystander and suspect, can shift without notice.
The story stakes its claim early with a troubling event after nightfall that sets authorities and opportunists on intersecting paths, each pursuing advantage, safety, or truth. From that spark, the novel advances through investigations, narrow escapes, and sudden reversals, drawing the reader along a chain of consequences that feels both inevitable and unstable. The experience is one of velocity: questions multiply, alliances flex, and the city seems alive to every rumor. Wallace’s scene-craft favors tension at the edge of revelation, encouraging the turn of the next page. The result is an immersive chase through rooms, streets, and social circles where every clue carries a price.
At its core lie questions about visibility, power, and the stories people tell to survive the dark. The title signals the presence of women within this terrain, sometimes as actors with agency, sometimes as figures others seek to control or misread, and always refracted through the conventions of the era in which Wallace wrote. The book explores how status and money purchase privacy, how gossip can wound like a weapon, and how official procedures stumble when challenged by speed and spectacle. It also weighs the appeal of transgression against the costs it exacts, leaving readers to consider what, and whom, the night protects.
Wallace’s style here is recognizably his: brisk, economical, and geared toward movement. Chapters tend to close on a sharp turn or unanswered question; dialogue carries information quickly; description sketches just enough to fix a scene before the plot advances again. The tone balances hard-edged urgency with a flair for melodrama, producing a reading experience that is direct, vivid, and unabashedly entertaining. Observers of genre history may notice how the narrative privileges pace over deduction, situating the book closer to the chase-driven thriller than to the intricately clued puzzle. Yet the design remains coherent, with tension built from accumulations of risk rather than ornament.
Understanding its context can deepen appreciation. Wallace wrote for a mass audience in an era shaped by newspapers, lending libraries, and serialization, and his novels often reflect that cadence of cliffhangers and swift payoffs. The Daughters of the Night belongs to that ecosystem, and its rhythms suit commuters, night readers, and anyone drawn to compact, scene-by-scene momentum. Modern readers will also notice period assumptions about class, gender, and policing that mirror early twentieth-century norms. Recognizing these as historical artifacts does not blunt their impact; instead, it frames the book as both entertainment and a window onto the anxieties and appetites that animated its first readers.
Today, the novel’s lure lies in its combination of atmosphere and acceleration: a city that feels watchful and volatile, a cast always one step from triumph or exposure, and a design that makes time disappear. Readers looking for an introduction to Edgar Wallace will find a clear expression of his strengths, while those familiar with modern crime fiction can trace continuities in pace, plotting, and the theatricality of danger after dark. Without needing to know more than the premise, one can step into its corridors and streets, sense the stakes, and ask the book’s central question: what truths look different when the night names the terms.
Synopsis
Set in the shadowed byways and bright frontages of London’s nightlife, The Daughters of the Night opens with a crime that unsettles both the underworld and polite society. A sudden act of violence, marked by an inexplicable token, draws the attention of Scotland Yard and whispers of a hidden organization operating after dark. Against a backdrop of music halls, river fog, and cabaret glamour, investigators begin tracing faint connections among entertainers, club proprietors, and nocturnal trades. The title’s phrase surfaces early, an evocative label for a rumored network whose purposes seem to blend companionship, concealment, and criminal enterprise beneath the city’s glittering lights.
An initial inquiry leads the police to a popular West End club where performers and patrons mingle behind a carefully arranged facade. A chance encounter brings a discreet civilian—drawn in through concern for a vulnerable acquaintance—into the orbit of the case. There, a small but telling clue links the original crime to routines and back passages known only to those who work the night. The investigators map movements, note improbable alibis, and suspect that seemingly minor employees act as couriers or watchers. The whispers grow clearer: the organization’s reach may extend from dressing rooms to riverside warehouses, masked by music and routine.
Following the evidence into dressing rooms and alleyways, the narrative introduces a resourceful young woman whose livelihood depends on performances and whose path crosses the investigation. Reluctantly, she becomes an informant, offering glimpses of coded signals and quiet exchanges that occur between acts. These hints suggest a structure that uses women as messengers and screens, moving valuables or information across the city’s night shifts. The authorities proceed cautiously, balancing the need to protect witnesses with the risk of alerting those at the center. Threads begin to converge on a narrow strip between clubland and the docks, where the city’s glamour dissolves into secrecy.
Suspicions crystallize around a triad of possibilities: a suavely philanthropic patron with ties to entertainment, a pragmatic club manager who controls staff movements, and a dockside broker adept at making goods disappear. A persistent newspaperman supplies stray facts, some helpful, some misleading. The phrase “Daughters of the Night” acquires a dual meaning—at once a poetic nod to those who work after dusk and a cipher for a clandestine ring. A second incident raises the stakes, showing the group’s willingness to act swiftly to silence threats. Yet each line of inquiry yields contradictions, suggesting a more disciplined operation than a simple gang of opportunists.
The investigation turns to patient infiltration. An officer works undercover, mapping corridors, noting watching posts, and learning the rhythms by which messages travel from backstage to the street. A ledger with cryptic entries surfaces, though its significance remains unclear. Red herrings point toward a cosmopolitan visitor whose charm hides ambiguous dealings, while the real organizers withhold their hands. The assisting civilian and the young performer face increasing pressure, as anonymous warnings imply that the network senses the scrutiny. From headquarters, demands mount for quick results, forcing the lead investigator to balance methodical groundwork with the need to preempt another calculated strike.
Momentum builds with a chase along wharves and through fog-bound streets, where a small exchange reveals a larger pattern involving illicit shipments and covert finance. An attempted interception on the river hints at the ring’s discipline and preparedness, yet leaves enough traces for the authorities to define its hierarchy. At the center lies a discreet mastermind who directs operations through intermediaries and couriers, rarely appearing and never speaking plainly. The organization’s reliance on the cover provided by crowded venues and shifting audiences becomes evident, as does its exploitation of routine and anonymity. With each move, the investigators narrow the circle without yet closing it.
A reversal strikes when a trusted contact proves compromised, exposing the investigation to manipulation and widening the danger to key witnesses. A cryptic token, echoed from the opening crime, reappears in a new context, indicating the mastermind’s confidence and reach into respectable circles. The authorities adjust by separating rumor from verified fact, consolidating evidence, and shielding vulnerable participants. Plans coalesce around a time-sensitive operation intended to intercept a major transfer and compel the ring to reveal its inner command. Despite fissures in the alliance of suspects, the core remains intact, forcing the protagonists to accept a more intricate design than first assumed.
As the climax nears, the narrative intercuts coordinated moves: discreet raids, staged distractions, and careful surveillance across the city’s nocturnal spaces. A confrontation unfolds in a locale emblematic of the ring’s method—public enough to blend in, private enough to control. Identities are confirmed and motives articulated in broad strokes, detailing profit, leverage, and the use of nighttime labor as cover, while preserving specific surprises for the reader. The women within the network emerge as varied—some coerced, some calculating—complicating simplistic judgments. The resolution secures the essentials of justice without minimizing the ambiguities left in the wake of dismantled secrecy.
In its closing passages, the book restores order with measured restraint, noting the fates of central figures without sensationalism. The narrative underscores the limits of visibility in a city whose brightest lights create the deepest shadows, and suggests that systems of exploitation rely as much on respectability as on fear. The title encapsulates this tension: it honors those who labor after dark even as it names a clandestine architecture built upon their movements. The investigators’ success feels provisional but significant, and the final notes promise stability won through patience, vigilance, and an unsentimental understanding of how crime embeds itself in ordinary routines.
Historical Context
Edgar Wallace situates The Daughters of the Night in an interwar London whose geography and rhythms intensify the drama of nocturnal crime. The West End and Soho, with their nightclubs, theatres, and cabarets, contrast with the docklands and back alleys feeding the city’s shadow economy. Electric lighting, motorcars, and telephones reshape time and space, enabling swift movement and clandestine coordination after dark. Police courts such as Bow Street, the Thames Embankment, and railway termini like Charing Cross form a recognizable cartography of pursuit and evasion. The period’s volatile economy, postwar dislocation, and expanding tabloid press amplify public fascination with vice, giving Wallace a dense urban milieu of spectacle, secrecy, and surveillance.
The First World War’s aftermath decisively affected London between 1918 and the late 1920s: demobilization brought over 4 million British servicemen home; a sharp slump in 1921 raised unemployment above 2 million; and wartime controls under the Defence of the Realm Act left legacies in policing and licensing. Ex-servicemen, including those with wounds and trauma, struggled to reintegrate amid precarious work and housing shortages. Black markets that had flourished under rationing morphed into peacetime rackets. The novel’s atmosphere of weary veterans, opportunistic profiteers, and brittle gaiety mirrors this landscape, suggesting how the war’s psychic and economic residues nourished both urban hedonism and the criminal enterprises that shadowed clubland and the docks.
The expansion and policing of London’s nightclubs, especially in Soho and the West End, became a central public controversy from 1919 to the late 1920s. Proprietors like Kate Meyrick, whose 43 Club at 43 Gerrard Street drew aristocrats, actors, and criminals, faced repeated raids and prosecutions. Home Secretary William Joynson-Hicks (1924–1929) spearheaded a morality campaign that tightened licensing, used plainclothes surveillance, and coordinated crackdowns with the Metropolitan Police. Raids in 1924 and 1927 symbolized a state effort to regulate dancing, alcohol, and the gender-mixing that defined jazz-age nightlife. Wallace’s portrayal of nocturnal venues, gatekeepers, and their clientele echoes these clashes, dramatizing how clubland formed a contested space where class display, desire, and police power openly collided.
The postwar drug panic reshaped British law and public imagination. The 1918 cocaine-related death of West End actress Billie Carleton triggered sensational coverage, raids on suppliers, and a moral crusade against nightlife. Parliament enacted the Dangerous Drugs Act 1920 to implement the 1912 Hague Opium Convention, followed by stricter regulations in 1923 and international coordination after the 1925 Geneva Opium Convention. High-profile prosecutions of cocaine networks in 1922–1924, including cases involving restaurateurs dubbed by the press as foreign purveyors, fused xenophobia with fears of youth corruption. Wallace’s depiction of seductive commodities, clandestine supply chains, and compromised glamour in nocturnal London reflects these anxieties, framing vice not as isolated sin but as a system linking fashion, finance, and transnational traffic.
Policing modernized rapidly in these decades. Scotland Yard established its fingerprint bureau in 1901; forensic science gained authority through figures like Sir Bernard Spilsbury, whose testimony shaped cases from Dr Crippen (1910) to the Brides in the Bath murders (1915). After wartime armed robberies, the Metropolitan Police formed the Flying Squad in 1919 to combat mobile criminals using cars and lorries. CID leadership under experienced detectives such as Frederick Wensley professionalized surveillance, informants, and inter-jurisdictional coordination. Magistrates’ courts, notably Bow Street, became theatres of public order. Wallace’s procedural attentiveness to raids, stakeouts, and scientific evidence mirrors these innovations, showing how modern detection evolved alongside modern crime, and how state technique and urban mobility entered a continuous tactical arms race.
London’s interwar gangland grew around racecourses, markets, and nightlife. Charles 'Darby' Sabini’s Clerkenwell-based syndicate dominated protection on southern racecourses and in Soho, clashing with rivals from Birmingham and south London mobs such as the Elephant and Castle gang. Violent confrontations erupted at Epsom and other venues, with 1927 particularly marked by pitched battles and police countermeasures. Extortion, bookmaking control, and taxi and cloakroom monopolies linked racecourse muscle to West End clubs. The novel’s intimations of protection rackets, doormen alliances, and sudden street violence reflect this milieu, translating newspaper reports of derby-day ambushes and Soho shakedowns into a narrative grammar of intimidation, coded loyalties, and the opportunistic overlaps between respectable entertainment and organized crime.
Immigration, cosmopolitanism, and moral reform intersected in Soho. The Aliens Act 1905 initiated modern British immigration control; wartime restrictions were extended by the Aliens Restriction (Amendment) Act 1919 and the Aliens Order 1920. International agreements against 'white slave traffic' (1904, 1910) and domestic Criminal Law Amendment measures fueled vigilance groups and police scrutiny of brothels and dance halls. Xenophobic press portrayals cast foreign restaurateurs and musicians as vectors of vice even as Soho’s economy depended on their labor and culture. Wallace’s shadowy intermediaries and ambiguous outsiders register this tension, showing how surveillance and sensationalism mapped onto a genuinely diverse district, where vulnerability and opportunity were distributed along lines of class, gender, and nationality.
As social and political critique, the book exposes the precarious bargain underpinning interwar urban pleasure. It draws attention to how licensing law, drugs policy, and immigration control combined to police bodies differently across class lines, sanctioning elite excess while criminalizing working-class and migrant livelihoods. Its clubland intrigues dramatize the moral double standard by which spectacle is celebrated on stage yet stigmatized in the street. By tracking the circuits of money, information, and desire between newspapers, police, and proprietors, the narrative suggests a system in which public order and private profit interlock, and in which women’s nocturnal visibility is alternately commodified and condemned by a city hungry for both transgression and control.
The Daughters Of The Night — Newnes paperback edition
The Daughters of the Night
CHAPTER 1
Jim Bartholomew, booted and spurred and impatient to be gone, sat on the edge of the table and watched the clock with a sigh. He looked too young a man to be the manager of the most important branch of the South Devon Farmers' Bank, and possibly the fact that his father had been managing director of that corporation before he died had something to do with his appointment.
But those who saw in him only a well dressed young man with a taste for good horses, and imagined that his accomplishments began and ended with riding to hounds or leading a hunt club cotillion, had reason to reverse their judgment when they sat on the other side of his table and talked business.
He glanced at his watch and groaned.
There was really no reason why he should remain until the closing hour, for yesterday had been Moorford's market day[1] and the cash balance had gone off that morning by train to Exeter.
But, if the truth be told, Bartholomew lived in some awe of his assistant manager. That gentleman at once amused and irritated him, and whilst he admired the conscientiousness of Stephen Sanderson there were moments when his rigid adherence to the letter of banking regulations and local routine annoyed Jim Bartholomew unreasonably. He took another look at his watch, picked up his riding whip from the table, and passed into the assistant manager's room.
Stephen Sanderson did just what Jim expected. He looked up at his manager and from the manager to the loud-ticking clock above the door.
