Reeder's Sixth Sense

Why is Edgar Wallace called the King of the Thriller?

The answer is right on the surface. He taught 20th-century writers how to create gripping stories.

Really?

The plots of Edgar Wallace are so unbelievable in the way they twist and turn the actual storyline that at some point the reader is hypnotized by anxiety. He starts fidgeting in his chair and asking himself what will happen next; he gradually loses control over himself and, like a walking—no, a reading corpse—wanders through the labyrinths of a mad plot constructed by the author.

Wallace built the labyrinths of his novels as if assembling them from a child’s construction set, so you’ll always meet a hero who will inevitably win at the end, a heroine who will be rescued from something worse than mere death, villains of various kinds—but still classifiable...

Wallace’s method for building the plot, like many other brilliant ideas, is very simple. At the start, the writer always offers an intriguing setup that will be resolved only at the end, through a long and tedious explanation. That was the case with most sensational novels—the best representatives of the genre that dominated the 19th century. Wallace understood that for 20th-century readers, at least most of them, it became boring to read a huge novel containing only one intrigue. To be honest, Wallace’s own literary craftsmanship wouldn’t have allowed him to create endless descriptions of estates, characters, and sensations. His literary talent, nurtured in the best years through journalism, was very limited. Here he needed to create small, compelling stories that could fit on a newspaper page. Edgar Wallace was a different person—fast and self-confident. His strength was his ability to create small forms, and that’s why he came up with a very cunning move.

The plot of his novel consisted of one intrigue—as I’ve said—using the familiar forms of a literary work expected by readers. But inside, the novel was made of episodes, chapters, and parts, each with its own intrigue—its beginning, development, and resolution at the end of the episode. Yet if we were to read such a novel straight through, it would be too much like a collection of adventure stories. So the clever writer placed the beginning of the next episode before the resolution of the previous one. The construction became tightly interwoven: the hero doesn’t even have time to figure out one situation before he plunges headfirst into the next.

And Wallace’s novels seem naive to us only because his plots, ideas, and discoveries were used in the 20th century so many times that they now look trite, chewed over, and secondary. The effect of the novels was such that dozens, if not hundreds, of writers rushed to tell stories about noble avengers, about private detectives who replaced the right to police and courts. Thousands of writers began to use a technique in which, within one big intrigue, there are several smaller plotlines woven into a single narrative. All the authors of classic detective fiction acknowledged how strong the influence of Edgar Wallace’s novels was—how he captured readers’ attention and trained them to read popular literature. Finally, even Arthur Conan Doyle himself hoped to find in Edgar Wallace a literary successor.

Listen to 8 stories by Edgar Wallace and judge for yourself…