The Edgar Wallace pub in Essex Street, London, is a homage to a towering journalist, playwright, film maker and author who wrote more than 170 books – 28 of them for a flat fee of around £70. It was at one time claimed by his agent that one in four books read in Britain were written by Wallace. Many editions of his novels line a bookcase behind the pub's upstairs bar, where there are photographs and newspaper cuttings. In one article, titled “I could have been a successful crook,” Wallace expands on his knowledge of the criminal mind.
Adopted at birth
Born out of wedlock in London in 1875, Edgar was given up for adoption by his actress mother to be raised by a lively family in Billingsgate. Recalling his childhood in his autobiography, Wallace says that his stepbrothers were often in Wandsworth Prison for “taking up the hobby” of hitting policemen.
Aged 11, he started his career selling newspapers at Ludgate Circus, not far from the pub, where there is a plaque to him, inscribed: “He knew wealth & poverty, yet had walked with kings & kept his bearing. Of his talents he gave lavishly to authorship – but to Fleet Street he gave his heart.”
Wallace became a war correspondent in South Africa, where he met Rudyard Kipling, No publisher wanted his first book, The Four Just Men, so he published it himself in 1905. Subsequent thrillers, such as Sanders of the River and crime novels made him a household name. Long after his death, in 1960-65, a series of around 160 low-budget thrillers called The Edgar Wallace Mysteries was made from adaptations of his stories. In Germany a spate of Edgar Wallace krimi (crime films) was also popular, and the landlord of the London pub says he has many German visitors today.
A diabetic, Wallace died in Hollywood in 1932, aged 56, while working on the film script of King Kong. As prolific a gambler as he was a writer, he left debts of more than £140,000.
Graham Greene Compares Wallace to Charlie Chaplin
Graham Greene saw a comparison between Wallace and another orphaned Londoner, four years younger, who found fame. “There is a curious likeness between Wallace and [Charlie] Chaplin,” he wrote in a review of Margaret Lane’s 1938 biography, Edgar Wallace, Portrait of a Phenomenon. “East London and South London were not so far apart. The mothers of both men were small figures in the theatrical world who never made good. Chaplin was abandoned for periods to the workhouse, Wallace was abandoned altogether. Chaplin remained, even in his success, rooted to Kennington: Wallace seems to have been concerned only to forget.”
His biographer notes that Wallace despised his roots, writing to his wife: “I hate the British working man; I have no sympathy with him; whether he lives or dies, feeds or starves, is not of the slightest to me.”
The pub, formerly the Essex, has stood on the site since 1775. It was renamed the Edgar Wallace on the centenary of his birth, and meetings of the Edgar Wallace Society, founded by his youngest daughter Penelope in 1969, have been held here.
See also: Fleet Street pubs
Join the Conversation