page_title: Edgar Wallace
section_title: 1898–1918
hierarchical_section_title: Edgar Wallace / Life and work / 1898–1918
caption_attribution_description: Photographs of Edgar Wallace as an officer in the Medical Staff Corps (c.1898) and as war correspondent to the Daily Mail, 1902.
context_page_description: Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace was an English writer.
  Born into poverty as an illegitimate London child, Wallace left school at the age of 12. He joined the army at age 21 and was a war correspondent during the Second Boer War, for Reuters and the Daily Mail. Struggling with debt, he left South Africa, returned to London, and began writing thrillers to raise income, publishing books including The Four Just Men. Drawing on his time as a reporter in the Congo, covering the Belgian atrocities, Wallace serialised short stories in magazines such as The Windsor Magazine and later published collections such as Sanders of the River. He signed with Hodder and Stoughton in 1921 and became an internationally recognised author.
  After an unsuccessful bid to stand as Liberal MP for Blackpool in the 1931 general election, Wallace moved to Hollywood, where he worked as a script writer for RKO. He died suddenly from undiagnosed diabetes, during the initial drafting of King Kong.
  Wallace was such a prolific writer that one of his publishers claimed that a quarter of all books in England were written by him.
context_section_description: Wallace began publishing songs and poetry, much inspired by Rudyard Kipling, whom he met in Cape Town in 1898. Wallace's first book of ballads, The Mission that Failed!, was published that same year. In 1899, he bought his way out of the forces and turned to writing full-time. Remaining in Africa, he became a war correspondent, first for Reuters and then the Daily Mail (1900) and other periodicals during the Boer War.
  In 1901, while in South Africa, Wallace married Ivy Maude Caldecott  (1880?–1926), although her father Reverend William Shaw Caldecott, a Wesleyan missionary, was strongly opposed to the marriage. The couple's first child, Eleanor Clare Hellier Wallace, died suddenly from meningitis in 1903, and the couple returned to London soon afterward, deeply in debt.
  In London, Wallace worked for the Mail and began writing detective stories in a bid to earn quick money. A son, Bryan, was born in 1904 followed by a daughter, Patricia, in 1908. In 1903, Wallace met his birth mother Polly, whom he had never known. Terminally ill, 60 years old, and living in poverty, she came to ask for money and was turned away. Polly died in the Bradford Infirmary later that year.
  Unable to find any backer for his first book, Wallace set up his own publishing company, Tallis Press, which issued the thriller The Four Just Men (1905). Despite promotion in the Mail and good sales, the project was financially mismanaged, and Wallace had to be bailed out by the Mail's proprietor Alfred Harmsworth, who was anxious that the farrago might reflect badly on his newspaper. Problems were compounded when inaccuracies in Wallace's reporting led to libel cases being brought against the Mail. Wallace was dismissed in 1907, the first reporter ever to be fired from the paper, and he found no other paper would employ him, given his reputation. The family lived continuously in a state of near-bankruptcy, Ivy having to sell her jewellery for food.
  During 1907, Edgar travelled to the Congo Free State, to report on atrocities committed against the Congolese under King Leopold II of Belgium and the Belgian rubber companies, in which up to 15 million Congolese were killed. Isabel Thorne, of the Weekly Tale-Teller penny magazine, invited Wallace to serialise stories inspired by his experiences. These were published as his first collection Sanders of the River (1911), a best seller, and in 1935 it was adapted into an eponymous film, starring Paul Robeson. Wallace went on to publish 11 more similar collections (102 stories). They were tales of exotic adventure and local tribal rites, set on an African river, mostly without love interest as this held no appeal for Wallace. His first 28 books and their film rights he sold outright, with no royalties, for quick money. Critic David Pringle noted in 1987: "The Sanders Books are not frequently reprinted nowadays, perhaps because of their overt racism".
  The period from 1908 to 1932 was the most prolific of Wallace's life. Initially, he wrote mainly in order to satisfy creditors in the UK and South Africa. However, his books' success began to rehabilitate his reputation as a journalist, and he began reporting from horse racing circles. He wrote for the Week-End and the Evening News, became an editor for Week-End Racing Supplement, started his own racing papers Bibury's  and R. E. Walton's Weekly, and bought many racehorses of his own. He lost many thousands gambling, and despite his success, spent large sums on an extravagant lifestyle he could not afford.
  During 1916, Ivy had her last child, Michael Blair Wallace by Edgar and filed for divorce in 1918.
caption: Edgar Wallace c. 1898–1902
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