Consequences – Forgotten Influences: Edgar Wallace

[AndyC]

Discuss @Thande 's latest article here

 

[Walpurgisnacht]

Great article!

The Four Just Men sounds pretty mental,

 

[Charles EP M.]

It's always sobering to hear of creative Ozymandiases, leaving influence but little trace of their fiction outside of an old 1950s book in a charity shop swearing "Look upon my backlist and despair"

 

[SenatorChickpea]

Great article!

The Four Just Men sounds pretty mental,

The Four Just Men is really excellent. It's incredibly shallow- it makes Rice Burroughs look like James Joyce- but it's a cracking read. You'll get through it one session.

 

[Thande]

The Four Just Men is really excellent. It's incredibly shallow- it makes Rice Burroughs look like James Joyce- but it's a cracking read. You'll get through it one session.

As I noted in the article, the first one is really groundbreaking for its day for its moral greyness and Sherlock- or Spooks-type storytelling, while the others really soften the concept by only making them go after objective baddies like THE RED HUNDREDS. (Which I guess is the ultimate prototype for the Commie-Nazi trope pre-Nazism, seeing as the name evokes the Black Hundreds but they're Communist).

 

[Alex Richards]

It's always sobering to hear of creative Ozymandiases, leaving influence but little trace of their fiction outside of an old 1950s book in a charity shop swearing "Look upon my backlist and despair"

50s Children's novelists of the Enid Blyton school are a good source of these.

 

[RyanF]

Wallace's influence runs into slasher movies of all things. The German adaptations of his work in the 1960s (called krimis) were an influence on some giallo films in the 70s which in turn gave some inspiration to a lot of the early 1980s slasher films.

 

[OwenM]

I read it many years ago, but on recollection I think it quite seems Politibrit in that the solution to the murder of the Home Secretary relies on knowledge of parliamentary procedure?