That’s the basic argument at least that British journalist Neil Clark attempts to present in Stranger Than Fiction. But the master of the thriller and crime genres isn’t celebrated with the kind of gusto or pomp and ceremony that a writer with such a popular following truly deserves. And a pub named in Wallace’s honor on London’s Fleet Street today remains a popular tourist haunt where fans still flock in their thousands. Yet despite his impressive output and huge cult following, Wallace remains very much an outside figure, both within the literary establishment and in popular culture, and he’s little known in the United States.Ī favorable biography was written about him by Margaret Lane in 1939. The draft screenplay he wrote for “King Kong” would give us one of the defining motion pictures of the 20th century. He penned almost 1,000 short stories, 23 plays, and 65 sketches. By 1990, the head of the Edgar Wallace Society boasted that sales of the author’s work had exceeded 200 million. In Germany alone, Wallace sold over 43 million books between 19. His posthumous career was even more impressive. Kept going by copious amounts of caffeine and cigarettes, he wrote frantically, in furious marathon-like sessions, where time was money, and words got converted into currency by the minute. Wallace’s daily work routine often went on for up to 17 consecutive hours. In terms of sheer quantity, Wallace’s output was simply astounding: he wrote over 170 books that were translated into 30 languages more films were made out of his books than any other writer in the 20th century and, during his most successful publishing year in the 1920s, one out of every four books sold in England had his name in the title. If the literary establishment ever decides to invent a prize for a 20th-century author with the greatest output of work, a portly English gentleman by the name of Edgar Wallace would be a serious contender.
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