#edgar wallace

[charnel-grounds]

The Sinister Monk / Der unheimliche Mönch (1965)

[petermorwood]

Plot Wheels

I showed a couple of examples, one old, one modern, on this post.

The old wheel was one of several supposedly used by "Perry Mason" writer Erle Stanley Gardner, and while the photo on the other post is an exercise in squinting, this website has the transcribed information from at least four wheels.

Here they are, though some - "servant", "heroine's maid" - are showing their age, so tweak and update as required.

I wouldn't suggest relying heavily on these - but at the same time, Gardner produced 119 or 82, the number varies, Perry Mason novels and according to Wikipedia at the time of his death was the best-selling American author of the 20th century.

So he may have been onto something after all... ;->

*****

A: Wheel Of Hostile Minor Characters Whose Function Is Making Complications For The Hero

These folks put obstacles in the hero's way and make it difficult for them to reach their goal.

1. Hick detective. 2. Attorney. 3. Newspaper reporter. 4. Detective. 5. Business rival. 6. Rival in love. 7. Father of heroine. 8. Blackmailer. 9. Gossip. 10. Meddlesome friend. 11. Suspicious servant. 12. Hostile dog. 13. Spy. 14. Incidental crook. 15. Hotel detective. 16. Thickheaded police.

B: Wheel Of Complicating Circumstances

1. Hero is betrayed to villain by spies. 2. Every move the hero makes takes him from the frying pan and puts him into the fire. 3. Heroine's maid is a spy. 4. Father of heroine is hostile to the hero. 5. Detective believes the hero is guilty and tries to arrest him/her at a critical time. 6. Hero commits an incidental crime. For example, he/she is caught speeding and is arrested. 7. Witness mistakes hero for villain. 8. Hero violates the law and is sought. 9. Heroine's mind is poisoned against the hero. 10. Some character is not as represented. 11. Rival in love tries to discredit the hero. 12. Zeal of hick cop upsets plans.

C: Wheel of Blind Trails By Which The Hero Is Misled or Confused

1. Witness lies. 2. A document is forged. 3. A witness is planted. 4. A client conceals something. 5. A client misrepresents something. 6. A friend pretends to betray the hero. 7. The villains assistant pretends to betray the hero. 8. A vital witness refuses to talk. 9. False confessions. 10. Genuine mistakes. 11. A witness takes flight. 12. A witness is kidnapped. 13. A witness commits suicide. 14. A witness sells out. 15. Planted clues. 16. Impossible statements.

D. Wheel of Solutions

How the hero surmounts the obstacles thrown in his way.

1. Gets villain to betray himself through greed. 2. Gets the villain to, of his own free will, plant additional evidence. 3. Plants fake evidence to confuse the villain. 4. Fakes circumstances so the villain will think he / she has been discovered. 5. Tricks the hero's accomplice into confessing. 6. Villain is hoist by his / her own petard. 7. Villain killed while he / she is trying to frame someone. 8. Gets villain to overreach himself/herself. 9. Meets trickery with horse-sense. 10. Squashes obstacles by sheer courage. 11. Turns villains against each other. 12. Traps [tricks?] villain into betraying a hiding place. Hero either a) creates a fake fire, or b) gives him / her something else to conceal, or c) makes it necessary for the villain to flee (and so must take something out of the hiding place).

[davidhudson]

Edgar Wallace, April 1, 1875 – February 10, 1932.

[ninaandjames]

King Kong (1933)

Artist Laurent Durieux

[mysterytheater]

Edgar Wallace's J. G. Reeder

The Mind Of JG Reeder - Complete Series 1969 : Edgar Wallace : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

The Mind of Mr. J.G. Reeder is a British television series which was originally broadcast on ITV in two series from 1969 to 1971.[1] It is b

The Mind of Mr. J.G. Reeder

1969 This light-hearted series from Thames Television, based on the short stories by Edgar Wallace, relates the adventures of an investigator in the Public Prosecutor's Office in the 1920s. Mr JG Reeder is the diametric opposite of Sam Spade, Philip Marlow and Mike Hammer. He is a shabbily dressed, diffident civil servant who prefers a cup of tea and a slice of seed cake to a shot of something stronger. Despite his outward appearance - of course - Reeder is a master detective with a razor sharp brain. In fact his mind gives him great cause for sorrow. He has, he claims, a criminal mind which allows him insight into motive and method denied to other men. These stories were well-presented (sadly in black and white) and Hugh Burden had the part of a life-time as Reeder, well supported by Willoughby Goddard as his expansive (in more ways than one) chief, Jason Toovey.

Sherlockians might appreciate this wonderful adaptation of Edgar Wallace's J.G. Reeder stories. Reeder's investigations and methods of investigation are less deductive reasoning than they are data collection and psychological profiling-- which didn't exist as we know them today when Edgar Wallace was writing. Reeder simply has a comprehensive knowledge of the criminal underworld and a knack for anticipating the actions and motives of professional gangsters due to what Reeder calls his "criminal mind."

The TV series, like the series of short stories upon which it is based, leaves some loose ends related to Reeder's personal and romantic life. If you find yourself desperate to know how things turn out for Mr. Reeder -- the loose ends are tied up in TERROR KEEP, a novel-length Reeder adventure with explosive action.

[blueinkedfrost]

Orwell's essay on fascist literature, 'Raffles and Miss Blandish'

Raffles and Miss Blandish, the review of George Orwell. First published: October 1944 by/in Horizon, GB, London

Broadly speaking, Orwell's hallmarks of 'fascist literature' are:

Triumph of the strong over the weak.

Harsh, extra-legal punishment given to enemies.

External rewards (status, wealth, success) valued above internal rewards (conscience, honour, affection, good form).

Of course, 'strong' and 'weak' are subjective. Fascism is known for this contradiction: the enemies of the state are both strong in that they are a wealthy group that secretly controls the world and will dominate you unless you fight back, and simultaneously they are also weak, effeminate, cowardly, and contemptible.

Orwell's traits of non-fascist writing are where the narrative valorises the following traits:

An underdog fighting against vast established power is the hero, not the reverse.

Treat the weak respectfully. This means keeping to the principle, 'don't kick a man while he's down'. Defeat an opponent, but don't humiliate them or torture them.

Regard friendship as sacred, valuing collaborative efforts as much as the heroic individual.

Refuse to kill except under extreme circumstances (such as self defence, being in the army, turning in a murderer with knowledge they'll be executed).

Refuse to violate hospitality law (don't rob or mistreat someone whose bread and salt you've eaten as a guest).

Keep to a social code at great personal cost, even if it's somewhat archaic or culturally specific.

Value internal rewards (conscience, honour, affection, good form) above external rewards (status, wealth, success).

To which I want to add 'a sense of humour'. Writing of the power-worshipping school often has few or no funny or whimsical bits in it.

Orwell places Miss Blandish in the fascist category, Raffles in the non-fascist category, and Edgar Wallace's novels between the two. That is because Miss Blandish is an unending shock saga of the American underworld where protagonists and antagonists alike use brutal violence to accomplish their ends, whereas Raffles and Bunny are English gentleman burglars who steal for a living but live by a social code.

A significant missing fascist elephant in the room is anti-Semitism, a particularly common quality in fascism, and which appears in the Raffles series in its normal ugliness. Orwell did not comment on this matter in this essay. I'll link to Orwell's own words on the general topic.

Another missing anti-fascist element here is machismo, where fascist writing generally values masculinity above femininity and condemns non-standard gender roles, eulogising a 'traditionalist' past that often never existed. Umberto Eco has more.

Orwell on Edgar Wallace:

Hence the curious fact that in Wallace's most characteristic stories the ‘clue’ and the ‘deduction’ play no part. The criminal is always defeated by an incredible coincidence, or because in some unexplained manner the police know all about the crime beforehand. The tone of the stories makes it quite clear that Wallace's admiration for the police is pure bully-worship ... His policemen behave much more brutally than British policemen do in real life — they hit people with out [sic] provocation, fire revolvers past their ears to terrify them and so on — and some of the stories exhibit a fearful intellectual sadism. (For instance, Wallace likes to arrange things so that the villain is hanged on the same day as the heroine is married.)

Reading a lot of Edgar Wallace lately, I think the first criticism is apt. They are more action novels than detective novels, not properly giving the reader the chance to solve a puzzle before the detective does.

R. Austin Freeman's novel A Silent Witness (Thorndyke series) uses this hanging/marriage trope Orwell describes. The hero's engagement and the murderer's execution are both published in newspapers on the same day. I read this more as fairy-tale logic where the good are rewarded and the bad punished at the end of the story, than sadism. But it's worthwhile to compare the Wimsey novels, where the detective agonises about the death penalty being applied to a criminal he's detected. In Gaudy Night, the novel on Wimsey's engagement, the perpetrator is not going to get the death penalty. In Busman's Honeymoon, Wimsey would have been horrified if a matter personal to him and his wife were announced on the same day the murderer was executed, and his wife shields him from his horror at being the cause of a person's death. While Orwell accuses the Wimsey novels of having a morbid fascination with corpses, I read Sayers' anatomical details and exploration of exciting new murder methods as a fascination with knowledge instead. Wimsey is a surviving old-code Englishman, whose traditionalism is an inextricable part of his character and who would probably play cricket with Raffles very happily. (Wimsey is a batsman and Raffles a bowler - a match!)

Orwell's take on brutality in the hero's interrogation methods is still relevant today. Lazy writers continue to use the fiction trope, "protagonist tortures enemy and successfully gets truthful information out of them", but this is a fiction trope because torture generally doesn't produce truthful information in real life. Pragmatic bad consequences of using torture include that your enemies will be much less likely to surrender to you knowing they will be tortured, and other enemies will use your inhumane behaviour as an excuse for their attacks. But more central to Orwell's point is this - Torture carries a moral weight because it involves brutally injuring a helpless human being, and the narrative must let that weight fall on the character in order to ring true.

Orwell ends with this line.

[O]ne is driven to feel that snobbishness, like hypocrisy, is a check upon behaviour whose value from a social point of view has been underrated.

This seems like it's surprisingly good advice. I see an echo in Dorothy Thompson's words:

Believe me, nice people don’t go Nazi. Their race, color, creed, or social condition is not the criterion. It is something in them.

Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t—whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi. It’s an amusing game. Try it at the next big party you go to.

[veryslowreader]

The Joker by Edgar Wallace

Autumn Crocus

[chernobog13]

THE ZOMBIE WALKS (1968)