by Colin Watson
From these facts emerges the strong possibility that Wallace’s success was, in large measure if not completely, due to those very characteristics of his writing which a critic believing himself to be sophisticated would consider deficiencies.
Taking his last-mentioned attribute first – the disinclination to treat of sex save in the most perfunctory, unreal terms – might not this in fact have matched a widespread public attitude? Britain in the 1920s was not populated exclusively by Bright Young Things, nor had Suffragettism and the Black Bottom seduced a war-sickened generation to the delights of free love. The solid majority was still bound by Victorian inhibition, the result of sexual ignorance and fear. It was tolerant of titillation at the level of ‘bathing belle’ pictures in newspapers and the regimented leg waving of revue choruses, but regarded Marie Stopes as a filthy-minded eccentric and poor D. H. Lawrence as a menace to society. To these people’s self-defensive puritanism, Edgar Wallace offered nothing offensive, nothing disquieting. Negative virtues commend themselves to negatory minds.
Perhaps it also holds true that there is a quality in the contrivances of a lazy mind that appeals to people whose mood is one of reluctance to think. A Wallace book, like any other piece of escapist literature, was bought or borrowed as a means of temporary withdrawal from the demanding, worrying, disappointing world in which the reader normally lived. In that world, there were as many three-dimensional characters as he could cope with; it was a welcome change to be among a two-dimensional variety that required no effort to understand. All the cardboard figures were labelled – hero, heroine, villain, comic manservant, policeman – and so sympathy could be simply and accurately apportioned until the time came at the book’s end for it to be collected up again like so much play-money.
As for silliness of plot: its heavy reliance on coincidence, pseudo-scientific devices, unidentified foreign powers, miraculous survival, intuition, and all the other intelligence-defying tricks of the pot-boiling trade – here again, it may be that Wallace offered not an affront but solace of a kind. People were aware in their hearts that the 1914–18 war had solved nothing and that the public optimism of the politicians masked their impotence and perplexity. There was as yet no question of impending catastrophe, but something seemed to have gone sadly wrong with the process of perpetual improvement that had been assumed to be natural law not only by the Victorians but by many of their successors. To read of events reaching a happy conclusion by manifestly unnatural and illogical means provided relief from the unpleasant feeling of having been let down.
CHAPTER 7
Excitable Sydney Horler
Edgar Wallace was killed quite suddenly by the diabetes which he had unknowingly exacerbated by drinking vast quantities of well-sugared tea throughout every working day. He died in America during a visit in 1931 to help with the film production of one of his stories. The return of his coffined body by sea to Britain was like the home-coming of a dead monarch. The crowds that gathered in tribute to the most popular writer of the century were not to know until later that the king was nominally a pauper. His liabilities, including £58,000 owed to the limited company into which he had turned himself in 1927 as a means of reducing income tax, amounted to £140,000. All these debts were to be either paid or wiped out by negotiation and legal argument by 1937, the year of the formation of a new company, Edgar Wallace Limited, with his copyrights as sole assets and his four children as shareholders.
Soon after Wallace’s death, a sale of his furniture and personal belongings was held at the big house he had occupied at Bourne End, Buckinghamshire. Among the bargain hunters and sightseers was a plump, bespectacled, jolly-looking man who might have been taken to be a middle-aged family grocer on a day out. In two articles he displayed special interest and when the auctioneer reached them it was he who outbid everyone else. Sydney Horler, forty-three-year-old crime novelist, had gained possession of the Master’s desk and Dictaphone. He was also to acquire, though by somewhat different means, the services of the late author’s extraordinarily efficient and long-suffering secretary.
Horler at that time was probably less than half way towards matching Wallace’s output, but he enjoyed already the reputation and rewards of a fast and steady producer of popular fiction. Library shelves were packed with brightly jacketed novels bearing the ‘Horler for Excitement’ slogan. Smith’s bookstalls gave his work consistently prominent display. By being serialized in the News of the World, it reached the biggest newspaper readership in the country. Horler’s own estimate of the number of books he had sold by the early 1930s was two million. Although self-reckoning was not an exercise he pursued with much restraint, even half this figure would have represented a notable achievement.
The buying of the Wallace desk and Dictaphone typified the amiable exhibitionism of a man who never neglected an opportunity of advertising himself. Not long afterwards he was ringing up a London paper with a story about a voice – ‘unquestionably’ that of the late Edgar – which had interposed itself between two passages of Horler’s dictation on a new Dictaphone cylinder. He lent the cylinder to the newspaper as evidence and an account duly appeared on predictable ‘back-from-the-dead’ lines. This was only one instance of how Horler, himself a former newspaper man, availed himself of a Press as unfailingly accommodating in matters spurious and trivial as it was impervious to news of real significance. An untiring writer of letters to newspapers, he anticipated by many years the modern publicity technique of denying what has not been alleged. His favourite disclaimer concerned ‘the mantle of Edgar Wallace’, which he declared he had no ambition to assume.
In point of fact, Horler’s work owed much more to ‘Sapper’ than to Wallace. It was breathless, trashy stuff, vitalized by the deeds and chatter of such super-heroes as his Tiger Standish. Standish (the Honourable Timothy Overbury Standish, son of the Earl of Quorn) could have been Bulldog Drummond’s twin brother. He was about thirty years of age, immaculately tailored, broad of shoulder and lean of hip, nearly six feet tall. His nose was slightly askew – ‘a relic of a scrap somewhere or other’ – and a wide mouth displayed strong, white teeth. ‘I tried,’ Horler once told a radio audience, ‘to endow Standish with all the attributes of a thoroughly likable fellow … he likes his glass of beer, he is a confirmed pipe-smoker, he is always ready to smile back into the bright eyes of danger … Standish is not always the soul of courtesy. Just as he has a way with a girl, so he has a way with an enemy. He is speaking now to Aubrey Hamme, the unpleasant piece of work he strangles at the end of Tiger Standish Comes Back: “Didn’t recognize you at first, but it’s Ye Merrie Hammebone, surely? Sorry I didn’t notice the frill round your neck. How’s your pal Carlimero? Still in hell? And the bloke with the pickled face – let’s see, what was his name? Rahusen or something like that?” “You ought to know how Rahusen is,” retorts Hamme. “I? Why, I haven’t set eyes on the thug since I croaked his junior partner, that stinking Italiano.” A terror to his enemies, a hero to his valet and a male-angel to his wife: that’s how I like to think of Standish.’
And that, no doubt, is how millions of readers also liked to think of the clean-limbed, virile, no-nonsense sportsman in whom his creator honestly believed he had enshrined the best qualities of his race and class. For Horler was far too serious-minded to have perpetrated Standish as a joke, and much too innocent of cynicism to have devised this or any other character simply to exploit the prejudices and credulity of a mass readership. It is true that he once declared that he had only two missions in life: ‘one, to write books, and the other, to see that they bring me in as much money as possible.’ But many another bestselling author has made this kind of claim. Candid avowals of love of money are believed to sound endearingly raffish; they must not be taken to indicate lack of sincerity in these writers’ work. Horler’s personal convictions were no different from those proclaimed in his books. That they happened also to be shared by his readers, his sales proved.
What makes Horler an especially
rewarding subject of study in relation to the ideas that prevailed in large sections of British society between the wars is the fact that he was more voluble, more anxious to put his opinions on record, than any other non-intellectual writer of the period. Not content with allowing characters in well over a hundred novels to echo his notions, he was forever sending declamatory and argumentative letters to newspapers and to individuals. Those that editors declined to print – probably for fear of libel actions – Horler unashamedly worked into one or another of the collections of self-revealing snippets that he published from time to time in book form under such titles as Strictly Personal and More Strictly Personal.
Surveying his own field of authorship, Horler professed to see little of worth. He considered that far too many novels were being written by ‘half-baked Oxford undergraduates, man-obsessed old maids, homosexuals with polished periods, and pin-heads of all descriptions’.
D. H. Lawrence he regarded as a ‘pathological case, a consumptive who was driven by his disease to write about sex’. The experiment of reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the unexpurgated edition, Horler said, had made him retch. ‘If that was art, then every sanitary inspector should be able to turn out a literary classic.’ Nothing could have surprised him less than the assertion by a friend returned from Monte Carlo that Lawrence was ‘loathed by every decent-minded person on the French Riviera’.
Michael Arlen he dismissed as ‘the only Armenian who never tried to sell me a carpet’.
Proust was ‘the neurotic and probably decadent Frenchman who worked in a cork-lined room, and whose habits and views on life are naturally abhorrent to most healthy human beings’.
Three lines of a prose work by Aubrey Beardsley had been enough to give him the urge to be violently sick. ‘Even for a genius smitten by tuberculosis, Aubrey had a mind like a sink: it was a mercy, I think, that he did not continue to live to perpetrate further ghastly obscenities.’
Horler’s horror of explicit sexuality may appear from these comments to have been obsessive, but it must be remembered that when an exactly similar attitude was displayed by police, magistrates, and the Home Office in relation to books and works of art – as it frequently was during the 1920s and 1930s – the public as a whole was acquiescent.
Writers whom Horler admired included A. E. W. Mason, his favourite; ‘Sapper’ and Wallace, his models; John Buchan, J. B. Priestley and P. G. Wodehouse. Valentine Williams, a prolific producer of spy stories and thrillers, impressed him as a creator of masterpieces; but John Dickson Carr, specialist in sealed room mysteries, ‘bewildered’ him. Of Dorothy L. Sayers (‘that industrious woman’) his opinion was low until she wrote a derogatory notice of one of his own books, when it plunged to a depth at which expression was no longer possible. American writers who won his approbation were Harold MacGrath, S. S. van Dine and Earl Derr Biggers, but he thought the crime fiction of their compatriots – Dashiell Hammett in particular – ‘crude to the point of mental disgust’.
Horler once declared that he would rather be read in Wapping than in Bloomsbury. The psychological novel, ‘with its problems and soul-searching’, made no appeal to him and he said that writing sensation fiction was a trick the highbrows were incapable of pulling off. ‘Their stuff doesn’t thrill, it merely twitters.’ But … ‘give me a pretty girl, a likable young man, a Bentley sports car and a spot of trouble round the corner – then I’m working at my trade’.
Two qualifications Horler would have insisted upon: that the pretty girl be adequately dressed, and that the young man possess an unquestionably heterosexual disposition. Modesty of women’s clothing was a question on which Horler felt as strongly as any of those hundreds of people who seem to have had nothing to do after 1930 but write to newspapers about carnally provocative fashions. He was distressed when J. Jefferson Farjeon, author of historical romances, complained in a review of one of Horler’s books that the heroine was ‘too rapid’.
‘I like my heroines to be peppy,’ retorted Horler. ‘If they could be induced to give one their confidence, they would all be found to wear what the Americans, with their marvellous slang, call “scanties” – winter and summer.’ But when a man stopped him in the Strand in order to pursue the subject, he ‘had to tell him that, whilst my heroines might be peppy, they were invariably pure’. And later that summer Horler was siding with those spectators at an Eastbourne tennis match who publicly showed their disapproval of a girl player’s shorts.
One of his last recorded pronouncements on female exposure suggested some mellowing of attitude. He congratulated the News Chronicle on its ‘Open-air Girls, 1934’ competition and declared that some of the entrants were charming examples of the ‘thoroughbred’ Englishwoman, with whom there was no one in the world to compare.
Homosexuality, according to Horler, was rife in the London of 1932. He urged that it was high time for Scotland Yard to tackle ‘the alarming increase of sex perversion’ in the capital. Whilst on his way to call on Mr Matheson Lang, the actor, he had been accosted three times by male prostitutes in Wardour Street. ‘At least ten youths with painted faces and peculiarly cut clothes’ had been in evidence, to say nothing of a ‘clergyman with rouged cheeks’. Two years later, the situation had not improved, apparently, but at least Horler had managed – during an exploratory tour of the underworld for the London Star – to discover a root cause. ‘An authority’ whom he consulted ‘blamed in part the public schools and told me some amazing facts’.
The aggressive masculinity with which Horler and his fellow thriller writers endowed their heroes may well have been found reassuring by a generation that war had sadly depleted of young males. He himself was clearly anxious, for whatever reason, to be identified with his Tiger Standish. ‘Yes,’ he mused, ‘a pipe, a dog and a golf club: if you want to win the heart of a man, give him one of these. And when I say a man, I mean a man – not one of these emasculated cigarette smokers.’ He declared that the thought of Ivor Novello made him groan with despair.
All this may sound like parody, but so do many of the sincere protestations of an age not yet far enough removed in time for its ideas to cause us no embarrassment. Effeminacy was not only regarded as something absolutely reprehensible in itself; it was felt in some strange way to lurk within other things of which one disapproved. Eventually, advertising and the spread of habit removed the stigma from cigarettes, but minority tastes that failed to qualify for commercial promotion – from vegetarianism to classical music – continued to be linked in many minds with unmanliness. ‘Sissy’ was a useful, because nebulously emotive, word with which disparage anything not shared or not understood.
Even Bernard Shaw, whose beard at least was the antithesis of femininity, did not escape the dislike of the plain dealing, plain thinking Little Man. Was it, perhaps, because his high degree of articulacy was, like most intellectual attainments, considered ‘sissy’? Horler knew only that the mere sight of Shaw’s photograph in a newspaper was enough to rouse him to a state of fury. ‘He ought to be severely suppressed,’ he wrote of this man whose ‘megalomania has induced him to cut grotesque capers at an age when he is much too old not to know better.’ No one had asked Shaw to come to England, and yet, having been welcomed, all he did by way of gratitude was to scoff ‘at our religion, our laws, the traditions which we admire and do our best to uphold’.
Shaw, of course, was a great irritant of complacent people – as he had set out to be. His cleverness puzzled and therefore infuriated; it was promptly labelled ‘sarcasm’ and as such could be discounted. A fondness for appearing in a state of near-nudity on beaches, where he invariably was photographed by journalistic pilot-fish, also offended a good many folk. The fact that he was a kindly, generous man, whose wit disguised the fallibility of his opinions, would not, even if it had been generally known, have much modified their view of him as an atheistic, meddlesome, unpatriotic old faddist. England had reached that stage of religious decline and imperial decay when people who no longer went to ch
urch or seriously believed in the efficacy of gunboats were fiercely resentful of being complimented on their loss of faith. The casting of slurs on religion was a highly risky business, as novelists and playwrights learned to their cost as soon as they were tactless enough to put clearly into words the widely, if guiltily sensed deficiencies of the established creed. Significant was the choice of a bishop, not a politician, to set off the chain of events designed to remove the awkwardly disposed Edward VIII from the throne in 1936.
Aware of their public’s spiritual perplexity, the writers of leisure fiction took care to side with the angels. Just as the majority of crime novels had blatantly nationalistic overtones, such religious sentiments as their characters occasionally expressed were of an order that even the most sensitive of Britain’s non-practising Christians would approve. Horler was one author who did not need to dissemble in this matter (unlike the writer he so much admired, A. E. W. Mason, who had to borrow a prayer book from his chauffeur’s wife whenever he wished to play squire in the church near his country estate) for Horler had only to hear a broadcast of the wedding of the Duke of Kent to Princess Marina to be moved to eulogy:
