Stranger Than Fiction: The Life of Edgar Wallace, the Man Who Created King Kong by Neil Clark – review

The creator of one the best-known scenes in cinema was also the most widely read author in the world. So why is he so little known?

There is a plaque on Ludgate Circus, at the end of Fleet Street, that says of its dedicatee: “He knew wealth and poverty, yet had walked with Kings and kept his bearings. Of his talents, he gave lavishly to authorship – but to Fleet Street he gave his heart.” How many of the thousands of people who scurry past it each day know that Edgar Wallace, the man commemorated, was once the most widely read author in the world and had also been a newspaper seller, medical orderly, poet, war correspondent, crime reporter, editor, playwright, racehorse owner, director, parliamentary candidate and Hollywood screenwriter responsible for one of the most famous scenes in cinema history? While Wallace’s overlapping contemporaries, Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, both remain in the public eye, their creations constantly on our screens, who is now familiar with Wallace or has heard of his detective inspector Elk?

Neil Clark, a journalist and former chair of the Edgar Wallace Society, has written this affectionate but not too starry-eyed biography to rescue him from – to borrow EP Thompson’s emotive phrase – the “condescension of posterity”. Certainly Wallace’s life is as rattling a yarn as any of the 170 or so novels he knocked out at breakneck speed. Born out of wedlock in 1875 to Polly Richards, and with both of his parents actors, he was adopted by a kindly Billingsgate fish porter and his wife. Asked by a journalist years later to contribute to a celebrity feature entitled “What I Owe My Parents”, Wallace replied on a postcard: “sorry, cock, I’m a bastard.”

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