Snobbery With Violence

by Colin Watson

  CHAPTER 6

  King Edgar, and how he got his crown

  A familiar source of argument is the question of whether a man can become a bestselling author entirely by his own volition or whether he must have the aid of massive publicity. The opinion that predominates today is in favour of the promotion theory. It certainly is true that very large sums of money have been and continue to be spent in support of particular books considered to have high potential value, notably as film ‘properties’. Authors, as authors, are more rarely the subject of this kind of speculation, although one or two have been persuaded to make over their future output to firms that give them in return a regular income and the sort of paternal solicitude that might be lavished on an oil well or a stud mare.

  Raymond Chandler’s view of bestsellers, expressed in his essay The Simple Art of Murder, was characteristically sardonic. He saw them as ‘promotional jobs based on a sort of indirect snob-appeal, carefully escorted by the trained seals of the critical fraternity, and lovingly tended and watered by certain much too powerful pressure groups whose business is selling books, although they would like you to think they are fostering culture’. The difficulty of deciding what effect is really achieved by systematic campaigning on behalf of books is the same as that of assessing the value of any major advertising process – the sound and fury of the operation itself are apt to drown doubts. If there is one thing that the promotion industry does superlatively well, it is to promote itself.

  The facts of the matter are probably these. A writer whose work, irrespective of literary merit, fails to press all or most of the buttons that provoke stock responses, and consequent satisfaction, in the mind of the average reader, can be publicized as diligently as a detergent or a breakfast food, but he will never achieve commensurate sales. On the other hand, an author with instinctive button mastery, allied with inventiveness and staying power, could enter the bestseller lists with his eighth, tenth, or fifteenth book and remain there without the help of promotion. With it, success might be reached from six to a dozen books earlier, and maintained at a slightly higher level.

  In the 1920s, the accepted principle was that the public could safely be left to choose, with a minimum of prompting, its own favourites. Advertisements of books were issued, the bulk of them for insertion in the literary sections of newspapers and magazines, but they generally took the form of conventional announcements that made no attempt at systematic build-up of particular reputations. Most publishers in those days would have viewed very dubiously the modern advertising technique of presenting every other book as the ultimate apocalyptic fulfilment. One there was, however, who believed that if the right man came along – a writer of prolific capability and facile inventiveness – he could turn him into a money-making machine that would be the envy and the wonder of the publishing world.

  This optimist was Sir Ernest Hodder-Williams, head of the firm of Hodder and Stoughton, and the right man who did come along was Edgar Wallace.

  At first sight, Wallace in 1920 would seem to have been an extremely unlikely candidate for the role of king of thriller-writers. He was already middle-aged. His life so far, though colourful, had not been particularly successful. He was by nature a lazy man and an unbusinesslike one. With such books as he had written he had parted easily, selling the copyrights for less than a hundred pounds apiece. Anyone less shrewdly intuitive than Sir Ernest might have supposed that Wallace had inherited from his illegitimacy, his street-arab childhood, and a succession of jobs that included a newspaper correspondentship in the Boer War, too feckless and self-doubting an attitude to warrant confidence in his future performance.

  But these were not the factors that Hodder-Williams took into account. He noted instead that Wallace had one abiding ambition – to make a fortune. This he recognized as a driving force that needed only organization and discipline to prove mutually profitable. Wallace had other obvious qualifications for thriller kingship. His mind at forty-six was of extraordinary quickness. It could grasp ideas at once and build them unerringly into a fabric of drama. He was capable, when encouraged, of working at great speed and for long periods. His contempt for ‘highbrow’ authors went with a determination to make all his own writing objective and not subjective, to let nothing interfere with the action. He was not noticeably afflicted with that fatal disqualification from bestsellerdom, a sense of humour. Above all, Wallace’s essential vulgarity of mind – in the non-pejorative sense in which a publisher of popular fiction would view it – guaranteed his ability to gauge and satisfy the appetite of the ordinary reader.

  Wallace’s first contract with Hodder and Stoughton called for six books, for which advance royalties of £1,500 were paid. This initial step by his new publisher was tactically sound. By putting Wallace on a piecework basis, it provided the stimulus to his industry that previously had been lacking. Hodder-Williams also probably calculated that to hand a comparatively big sum to a man eager to indulge expensive tastes was the surest way of setting him on a road that he would not be able to leave again. In the following ten years, during which he wrote forty-six books for Hodder and Stoughton, Wallace proved that £1,500 to have been the most profitable literary investment of the age.

  Edgar Wallace was not a difficult man to publicize. He fitted exactly the popular conception of what an author ought to look like and how he ought to behave. He worked all day in a dressing-gown, chain-smoked through a flamboyantly long cigarette holder, and drank endless cups of tea. A hatred for draughts compelled him to have constructed a sort of inner office of glass, within which he sat at his desk like a live exhibit in a showcase. Outside his home, he indulged his physical laziness almost to a point of eccentricity. He never used stairs when a lift was available and would take a taxi rather than walk a few dozen yards.

  Such idiosyncracies were very much to the taste of a public who believed that success ought to be worn as a visible garment to offset the drabness of the life of the majority. When Hodder-Williams decided to step up the promotion of his firm’s biggest asset under the slogan ‘Make this an Edgar Wallace Year’, it was already obvious that the man was an ideal subject. The sheer volume of his production meant that every bookstall in the country was a billboard for the display of his name and the smoothly handsome profile beneath the down-turned hat brim. That bizarre holder which kept an eternally smouldering cigarette at least twelve inches clear of calm, worldly-wise eyes became a nationally familiar symbol.

  Wallace’s own experience as a newspaperman had given him the immense advantage of knowing what sort of performance commended itself to the Press. He took care always to be accessible, easy to interview, and unfailingly opinionated. He readily contributed articles on whatever matters happened at the moment to be uppermost in the bird-brains of Fleet Street. The Evening Standard actually featured Wallace for some time as its racing oracle. How any paper, even a Beaverbrook organ, could have been so splendidly self-deceptive as to employ as tipster a man who lost £100 a day on his own bets is a measure of the power of the Wallace legend.

  Disastrous devotion to the turf was not the only means whereby Wallace unburdened himself of an income which by 1928 had reached £50,000 a year. He spent £25,000 on a country house outside London, but when it was more convenient to be in town he would take over a suite in the Carlton Hotel and live there with his family, having first had installed a private telephone line to his secretary’s flat. The wages of the secretary and a score of household servants cost him nearly £50 a month. The travelling needs of his wife and himself were served not by one Rolls-Royce but by a pair; he also presented a car apiece to two of his children and another to his secretary. Guests at the supper parties for which he hired the entire Carlton Restaurant sometimes numbered two hundred. One of the biggest drains of his resources was occasioned by his hopelessly unbusinesslike handling of stage ventures. By keeping them running too long and ‘milking’ box office receipts he largely nullified the £100,000 profit which plays such as The Squeaker and The Rin
ger made between 1926 and 1931, the year of his death.

  So sensational a display of high living increased rather than diminished the affectionate awe in which Edgar Wallace was held by the reading public. They loved this dogged sportsman whose horses (like theirs) always lost. They applauded his big spending as if some of the scattered coins had rolled their way. And they adored – no doubt about it – the stories that he still found time to turn out at a prodigious rate from that curious three-sided glass box.

  From the analysis of the method and content of Wallace’s work which Margaret Lane has offered in her book, Edgar Wallace: biography of a phenomenon, the picture emerges of a writer supremely adept in an ‘off-the-cuff’ technique but observant all the time of a set of strict conventions. The nature of these conventions cannot be unrelated to what must have been the mental and emotional climate of fifty years ago, for Wallace came nearer to being universally read by his generation than did any other author.

  The first of the Wallace rules, as listed by Miss Lane, was subordination of everything to action. Nothing was to be what it seemed; confusion and suspense were to be maintained to the end, with none of the two-dimensional characters allowed a static moment. There was not a floor, not a wall, that might not suddenly go into motion. Even in the realm of crime fiction, there have been very few writers so constantly suggestive of restlessness.

  Bookstall Salesman. “SEEN THE MID-DAY WALLACE, SIR?”

  All this, however, had to be resolved to satisfy the second convention: that the world be seen as an essentially safe place, a sunny garden at the end of the secret passage. No serious harm could be allowed to befall any of the ‘good’ characters, however horrifying the means of dispatch that the ‘bad’ ones might prepare for them. It was permissible for criminals temporarily to thwart the law, but never in a way that might shake the reader’s confidence in it. (Wallace’s policemen were sometimes baffled; they were never ridiculous).

  The third convention was the banishment of anything that might produce genuine emotional reaction, anything capable of upsetting standard assumptions. Margaret Lane defined the objects of this rule as ‘excitement without anxiety, suspense without fear, violence without pain and horror without disgust’. She could have added crime without sin and sentiment without sex.

  Trying to assess Wallace’s work in literary terms would be as pointless as applying sculptural evaluation to a load of gravel. He wrote as well as he needed to write in satisfaction of a voracious but uninstructed public appetite. At least he spared his readers the pages of portentous padding which less brisk operators saw fit to inflict upon theirs, while here and there, one even detects a spark of original and lively characterization. It is a pleasant surprise, for instance, to receive this piece of information about his detective, Mr J. G. Reeder:

  All his life he had had a suspicion of milk. He had calculated that a nimble homicide, working on systematic lines, could decimate London in a month.

  For most of the time, though, Wallace’s story-telling was fast, facile and careless. A man who habitually planned six and more novels simultaneously and who once completed a book of 80,000 words in a single week-end could not afford to linger over the fashioning of phrases. He had to snatch them out of stock. The following are but a few of those he used in one typical sequence of events in the story of Terror Keep (1927):

  She had hardly done so when she heard a sound which brought her heart to her mouth … slipping off her shoes, she sped along in the darkness … plucking up courage, after a few minutes she retraced her steps … when, to her horror, she felt it moving away from her and had just time to shrink back when … hoping and praying that she would find a niche into which she could shrink … with a gasp of horror she realized that in the confusion of the moment she had taken the wrong direction … as she stood motionless with fear … for a second he stared at her as though she were some ghastly apparition of his mad dreams … in a second she was flying up the awful staircase … not for a fortune would she have looked behind … her breath was coming in long sobs; her heart beat as though it would burst … and then there came a sound which froze the marrow of his bones … the scream of a human soul in agony … suddenly Margaret saw something which made her breath come faster … in terror she struggled madly, but the man held her in a grip of iron, and then her senses left her and she sank limply into his arms … it seemed almost an eternity before she came to the surface. Fortunately, she was a good swimmer …

  The plots of the Wallace books were simply hastily contrived vessels into which could be poured a stream of cliché of the above order. Here, by way of general illustration, is that of the Three Oak Mystery.

  Detective Socrates Smith, retired from Scotland Yard with the help of a legacy of £6,000 a year, is invited to stay with a former colleague, John Mandle, at his country house near London. Mandle has a pretty step-daughter, Molly Templeton, and two near neighbours. One is Bob Stone, yet another ex-Yard man; the other is a Mr Jetheroe, soon to be identified as a former convict. Smith’s fellow guest at Mandle’s house is his brother, Lexington Smith, who falls in love with Molly.

  One morning the brothers find Mandle shot dead. Stone is discovered trussed up at his home. The police are informed but they hand over the entire investigation to Smith. Smith hopes that a clue to the reason for the murder may be found in a secret drawer of the dead man’s desk. Before he can search, somebody fires the house and it burns to the ground. Undeterred, Smith buys a hatchet in the nearest village and chops up the charred remnants of the desk. He finds two keys, labelled ‘Pool-in-the …’ and succeeds in connecting this partial address with a deserted house on Dartmoor. Meanwhile Jetheroe has been shot and his body has disappeared.

  Smith travels with his brother to Devon, finds ‘Pool-in-the-Moor’ and cuts his way through the overgrown garden with another hatchet, this one bought at Exeter. Inside the house, which no one has entered for twenty years, Smith finds bloodstains and a spent bullet. A scorched fragment of a thousand-franc bank-note lies in the fireplace. It looks to Smith as though he has discovered the scene of the murder of Deveroux, the Lyons Bank robber, who was supposed to have escaped abroad in 1902 after eluding Mandle and Stone, both at that time policemen officially on his trail.

  The brothers return to the house of Bob Stone, where they had left Molly Templeton after the fire. She has disappeared. False messages send them to London in search of her. On their return, Socrates confronts Stone and accuses him of Mandle’s murder and the abduction of Molly. Stone admits his guilt, produces a gun and locks Smith in a cupboard.

  At the house of mystery, ‘Pool-in-the-Moor’, Molly is in the custody of a woman with a criminal record earned while she kept a private lunatic asylum. During the night, Molly descends to the cellar and with a pick that has been left lying about she demolishes a brick wall, disclosing the skeleton of Deveroux, the Lyons bank robber. This upsets her, as does the sight of the face of a mysterious stranger at an attic window.

  The stranger proves to be a policeman, assigned on Smith’s instructions to keep an eye on Molly. When Stone arrives and tries to extort from Molly a promise of marriage, the policeman appears in the doorway and announces: ‘My name is Sub-Inspector Frank Weldon from Scotland Yard. I shall take you into custody on a charge …’ A shot rings out and Weldon pitches forward. Stone has fired from the hip. He bundles the body into a car and dumps it in a nearby lake. He then enters the cellar armed with two automatic pistols and awaits developments.

  Socrates and his brother are not long in making an appearance. Another arrival is Mr Jetheroe, recovered from his wound so fully that he has been able to scale the fourteen-feet-high garden wall, set with broken glass. He proves to be none other than Molly’s father, who has been awaiting a chance to clear his name. Sub-Inspector Weldon also has revived, thanks to the coldness of the water in the lake, and reports for further duty.

  Stone dies in the shooting that ensues. Molly accepts Lexington Smith’s offer of marriage. She says she c
annot take a penny of Mandle’s ill-gotten fortune (his share of the loot of Deveroux, the Lyons bank robber). Socrates says: ‘Anyway, Lex has got quite a lot.’ Jetheroe adds, fondly: ‘And so has Lexington’s future father-in-law.’

  Lexington’s eyes meet the girl’s. ‘Money!’ he says, contemptuously.

  It may readily be judged that the readers of the 150 or so novels which Edgar Wallace turned out on essentially similar lines to The Three Oak Mystery were in no great danger of philosophical, moral or political derangement. They were treated to nothing worse (provided they were not stylistically sensitive) than a vicarious dash from one unlikely situation to another. How exciting this was felt to be depended on the individual reader’s degree of ignorance of real life; alternatively, on the extent to which he was ready and able to disregard the voice of experience and reason in the interest of his own entertainment. Practice, it seems, can make the suspension of intelligence a progressively easier matter. Wallace’s books would never have achieved the astonishing sales that ultimately they did if they had been rejected by all sensible and educated people. The author Clemence Dane wrote in 1933: ‘There is a joyous crowd of story-tellers which frankly accepts the fact that good stories and money-making go together. Edgar Wallace is their king … And though he may sneer, the highbrow generally reads the low-brow’s Blood-stained Cabbage-stalk avidly …’ She was right: in or around that year, it was estimated that of every four books being read in Britain one was an Edgar Wallace.

  Such a situation indicated something more than casual, undiscriminating acceptance. Wallace was demanded. Censorious critics of the time used the word ‘drug’ repeatedly in connection with his work. The epithet was appropriate enough, no doubt, but it did not explain why this deluge of superficial, silly, slipshod fiction found addicts at every social level. Clemence Dane’s reference was to ‘good’ stories but if by that she meant to connote convincing characterization, ingenuity of plot, credible conflict and logically satisfying resolution, Wallace was a non-starter. Orwell accused Wallace of intellectual sadism. It seems unlikely, though, that anything so subtle would have won readers by the million. Wallace never created a scene of cruelty comparable with those that were to be commonplaces of crime fiction twenty years after his death. Nor did any of his novels portray sexual behaviour beyond the stage of chaste enfoldment in arms. He himself declared more than once that there was ‘too much nastiness in modern literature’.