Ian Handford: From abandoned baby to king of crime fiction

Edgar Wallace was born in Fishgate in December, 1875, to Marie Richards (Polly) and Richard Horatio Edgar. Having been left abandoned on the ninth day of life he was found by a fish porter at Billingsgate who took him home to Ashburnham Grove, Greenwich, where he was made part of a family of ten named him Dick Freeman.

He grew up to be an impudent teenager who eventually ceased all formal education aged just 12.

He went to work at a firm of printers while selling newspapers on the street and finally worked in a shoe shop. 

Having boarded a trawler out of London , he now tried his luck at sea but soon an urge to write became an obsession.  On return from sea he would now always carry a pocket dictionary with him and assiduously studied it every day.

Then in the 1890's he joined the Royal West Kent Regiment being part of its medical team destined for South Africa. 

There he was soon contributing to the Cape Journal using a "Kipling style" of writing. Having adopted the name of Edgar Wallace, the christian name mirroring his "adopted" father, Edgar eventually extended his writings to publishing poems like “The Mission that Failed” and “Writ in Barracks” in Capetown which finally led to him working as a journalist with Reuter's S.A.

As a "second correspondent" with Lord Methuen's paper, by luck a typist then inadvertently sent one of his regular despatches to the Daily Mail which brought an immediate  response from Lord Northcliffe who quickly re-appointed him its overseas correspondent based in South Africa.

The typist involved with the error was a Miss Ivy Caldecott - the daughter of a Wesleyan Missionary. To repay this stroke of luck Edgar would soon offer her marriage which in April 1901 she eventually accepted. On their return to London Edgar found the Daily Mail was now fighting a £50,000 lawsuit for a false claim on "mutiny" which he had written.

When a second legal action occurred his Lordship finally sacked him. The incident became a true turning point for Edgar as in 1905 he published his first adventure story "The Four Just Men" and his public loved it. His writing career had commenced and now over the next 20 years he produced no less than 150 adventure and crime books while writing 17 plays.

Then asked to write scripts for Hollywood his daughter in law the biographer Margaret Lane was quoted as saying "he always ensured his public got suspense, action and excitement, humanised by a deft touch in characterisation and easy humour " but no sex.  Many of his stories were set in West Africa including: Sanders of the River (1911), Bones (1915) and The Clue of the Twisted Candle (1916).

His first visit to Torquay came in 1921 when leasing "The Grove" on Babbacombe Beach Road where he stayed for three months and entertained notables like;  Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Oscar Wilde, John Ruskin and the composer Fred Clay plus Rosina Vokes - agent for GS operettas.

He also befriended the postman a Mr Varnham - who being an avid follower of Rudyard Kipling, saw Wallace as his hero.  On learning Varnham was also a fisherman Edgar nurtured this friendship and as Varnham said later he found Mr  Wallace a "very affable, unassuming man, living a free-and-easy life, and found that he had an amazing thirst for knowledge". It seems on discovering Varnham had another career fishing and knew everything about mackerel to whales we "would yarn for hours" said Varnham. 

He also confirmed: "Wallace considered himself a commercial writer who gave a certain public what they were willing to pay for" continuing - he told me he would be returning to Torquay next year and would arrange to go fishing with me. Yet on his return to London his next play became a failure and that promise was never fulfilled.