Читать книгу The Terror - Edgar Wallace, Martin Edwards - Страница 7

POST-WAR fiction has produced hundreds of clever detective novels and not a few really first-class writers, but there is only one Edgar Wallace. His supremacy we feel sure cannot be challenged. His name has become a household word throughout the English-speaking world, and many of his ‘thrillers’ have already found their way in translations into the libraries of every country in Europe.

While we make a superlative statement about the man without any fear of criticism, we hesitate to say which of the novels of his very prolific pen is the best! Perhaps, taking popularity as a guide, we may put The Terror in the place of honour. This wonderful story has thrilled the London theatre world in its dramatised form; it has been made into a super film, which was one of the first ‘talkies’ shown to the public, and which will long be pronounced one of the best, and now in book form the Detective Story Club presents it to the world.

The Terror is a masterpiece of its kind, and the Edgar Wallace enthusiast will delight in tracing a hundred and one clever devices from subtleties in plot to fine consistency in the characters. The plot speaks for itself, but as an example of a cleverly drawn character take Soapy Marks, a man of secondary importance in the story. In the opening scene we see him chided by his confederate, Connor: (‘Don’t try swank on me, Soapy—use words I can understand’) but this characteristic does not obtrude—in fact, it is only well on in the book that we see Soapy in his true light, spoken of by Scotland Yard as ‘so clever that one of these days we’ll find him in Oxford or Cambridge’. And so with each and every one of the characters.

The atmosphere of terror suggested by the very title of the book is handled with that care which makes real melodrama—a word, by the way, which should not have become degraded in meaning, had all the novels and plays so called been of the Edgar Wallace standard! He never overdoes it. His thrills are relieved by flashes of real humour and the love element introduced with Mary Redmayne and the drunken Ferdie Fane is so slightly suggested that when she admits in the closing chapter, ‘Yes—I—I’m awfully fond of—of Mr Fane,’ we only then realise that the unknown something which gave the story its charm was indeed love!