Stranger Than Fiction: The Life of Edgar Wallace, the Man Who Created King Kong
£15.40£17.10 (-10%)
‘It is impossible not to be thrilled by Edgar Wallace.’ So said the blurbs of Wallace’s own books.
Indeed, he was a prolific author of over 170 books, translated into more than thirty languages. More films were made from his books than any other twentieth-century writer, and in the 1920s a quarter of all books read in England were written by him. His success is written in black and white, but his life got off to an inauspicious start.
Edgar Wallace, the illegitimate son of a travelling actress, rose from poverty in Victorian England to become the most popular author in the world and a global celebrity of his age.
Famous for his thrillers, with their fantastic plots, in many ways Wallace did not write his most exciting story: he lived it, and here Neil Clark eloquently tells his tale to allow you to live it too.
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Additional information
| Publisher | The History Press (27 Oct. 2014) |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Hardcover | 256 pages |
| ISBN-10 | 0752498827 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0752498829 |
| Dimensions | 15.6 x 2.54 x 23.39 cm |
by cruiser
its okay an interesting man
by Julie
A very good book about a great man.
by Wingate
As a cinemagoers in the 19 60s I well remember the series of one hour films made at Merton Park.Subsequently I have seen many of the other films made from his books.I was pleased at long last to be able to read the life story of this profligate writer and spender.One suspects that the section about his involvement in King Kong was inserted to encourage the controversy it has aroused.
by Ken Bell
As a child in the 1960s I used to watch a TV series called The Mysteries of Edgar Wallace, so finding out something about the man came as a pleasure. It is a pity that he is almost forgotten today, but in the inter-war period he was the most popular writer of adventure fiction going, and his career as a journalist is also worthy of note, if only for his disasters which cost his employers both money and readers.
Wallace was almost a one man publishing industry in his own right. Hie output during and after the Great War was prolific, and he did it by adopting the new technology of the day. Not for him a pen and paper, still less a mechanical typewriter: he invested in a Dictaphone and then dictated his novels onto wax cylinders which were then given to secretaries to type up. The fact that he got the Dictaphone machine on credit and then could not meet the monthly payments, probably says more about Wallace’s attitude to money, which was to spend it freely, than it did about his abilities as a hack writer.
Wallace had been trained to write under pressure and to deadline by his previous career as a freelance hack on Fleet Street. Give the man a headline, a deadline and a word count and he would cough up the required number of words, always within that deadline. On more than one occasion his desire to cobble a tale together got his newspapers into trouble, such as the time when he wrote about how the soap manufacturers were reducing the weight of their soap bars and thus putting poor washerwomen onto the breadline. That one ended up in court, as well as costing the newspaper a fortune in lost circulation. Then we must not forget the confession of Dr Crippen which didn’t actually exist, but that did not stop Edgar Wallace from producing the required number of words on the non-existent document, and collecting his fee, presumably.
All this and more is given to the reader by Neil Clark in his engagingly entertaining account of Edgar Wallace, his life and his times.
by Tony Byworth
Apart from being aware of his thrillers, and a couple of his African “Sanders” stories, my knowledge of Edgar Wallace was virtually non-existent. So this book provided a revealing insight into his achievements, far greater than I ever imagined, not only as a phenomenal novelist (over 170 books) but also as short story writer, dramatist, newspaper columnist, war correspondent and race horse tipster and, to a lesser extent, theatrical producer and film director. What is even more staggering, he not only took on several of these activities at the same time and worked at incredible speed, on occasion totalling over one dozen books in a year and writing a play over a weekend!
But Wallace also spent money as fast as it came in, with horse racing and personal generosity taking a lot of his wealth, alongside a lack of business acumen (though taking on a literary agent did help his financial stability), and dying with considerable debt to his name
An fascinating read that well details his life from impoverish childhood to success as one of the best selling and most filmed authors in the world, my only disappointment is that the book’s cover is misleading as the large-printed “King Kong” sub-title hardly matches up to the small coverage within its pages. Although he did create a screenplay, his sudden death in Hollywood sadly precluded any further involvement.
by Paranago
Well written and researched book about a largely forgotten literary figure. In my view, the book loses a star because of its spurious subtitle. Wallace certainly was not the inspiration for King Kong – that was Merian C. Cooper – and Neil Clark should have known better than to equate writing a Hollywood script for a story with ownership of its ideas.
by Richard Masloski
Here is what I do NOT like about this book: the blatantly misleading and erroneous subtitle!
This from Wikipedia:
The King Kong character was conceived and created by U.S. filmmaker Merian C. Cooper.
And this from author Joe DeVito: “From what I know, Edgar Wallace, a famous writer of the time, died very early in the process. Little if anything of his ever appeared in the final story, but his name was retained for its saleability … King Kong was Cooper’s creation, a fantasy manifestation of his real life adventures.”
Give credit where credit is truly due – as in the subtitle to Mark Cotta Vaz’s sublime biography of Merian C. Cooper: LIVING DANGEROUSLY: The Adventures of Merian C. Cooper – Creator of KING KONG
I’ll repeat that: Merian C. Cooper – CREATOR OF KING KONG! To argue otherwise is tantamount to believing Carmen Nigro played King Kong!!!
by J. D. D
I was delighted to find this new biography of Edgar Wallace. The author is no doubt bored with comparisons, but Margate Lane’s 1939 `Edgar Wallace, the biography of a phenomenon’ was one of the first adult books I read, and Neil Clark acknowledges that he owes a great deal to this beautifully written biography, but he has added a great deal, with many anecdotes and memories of Wallace, bringing us closer to Wallace’s personality,his great kindness to others, and his brilliance. He brings Wallace to life in a way which somehow eluded his other biographer.
I hope this book leads to a revival of some of Wallace’s work. I think `On the Spot’ was televised many years ago, and surely some of his other plays deserve an airing. Anyway, its a gripping and fascinating story,and I highly recommend it .