Читать книгу Edgar Wallace — Each Way - Robert Curtis - Страница 4

Table of Contents

Edgar Wallace did not write his most thrilling story; he lived it.

From the time when, as a ragged boy, he played truant from school and stood on the kerb outside the Press Club, selling newspapers in an effort to secure financial support for his love of ginger-beer, theatre galleries and "Devona" toffee, up to the time when, as Chairman of the Club, he entertained earls at lunch and drank his champagne from a pint tankard—it was one of the rare occasions when he would drink anything alcoholic—his life was a succession of episodes more thrilling than any serial story that came from his pen. I have often thought that if he had written the true story of his life as a novel, the public would have decided that his imagination had run away with him, and would have refused to swallow it.

"It is impossible not to be thrilled by Edgar Wallace." They print that across the jackets of some of his novels. It is, no doubt, as regards his stories, one of those permissible exaggerations which a publisher may utter without a qualm. There must exist a small number of people who cannot read Edgar Wallace's stories at all; there are doubtless others who read them and are not thrilled; there are, I know, some who devour them in secret and contemptuously decry them in public.

I once met a man—he was a well-known barrister, who must, I think, have been getting into training for a seat on the Bench—who asked me, with a very promising effort at judicial innocence: "Who is Edgar Wallace?"

I told him, with equal innocence, that he was the owner of the Wallace collection, and I am afraid he disbelieved me. But while I had been awaiting him in his chambers, I had counted seven of Wallace's novels among his law books, and I happened to know that on the first night of Wallace's last play the eminent counsel had been in the stalls—with a complimentary ticket. There are many like him.

But though there may be people who find it possible not to be thrilled by reading Wallace's stories, I do not believe there exists a person so phlegmatic, or so blasé, or so completely insulated against the shocks of this mortal coil as to be in close contact with Wallace, for a few days, as I was for many years, without coming to realise the full meaning of the word "thrill." Life within the orbit of Edgar Wallace was a rapid succession of high-powered thrills. During the years of my association with him I did many things—most things—with Wallace. I worked with him, lazed with him, went racing with him, travelled with him, spent money, lost money, made money with him; was broke with him and racked my brains for a likely means of raising the next five pounds; succeeded, failed, laughed, grieved, even grew stout with him—to our common sorrow. But in all the years of our friendship there was one experience which, though I sometimes sighed for it, never came my way: I was never dull with him.

Life to Wallace was all thrills. He loved living. I have heard him say that he never awoke in the morning without thanking God that he was alive. Everything that was happening in the world was of intense interest to him. He saw drama all around him, revelled in being in the midst of it, and was grateful for the chance which each fresh day gave him of plunging into it anew.

Everything which he did, he did intensely, and had little patience with those who lived at low pressure. "If you can't get a kick out of what you're doing, Bob," he once said to me, "you've already got one foot in the grave."

When I was crossing from America a few days after Wallace's sudden death in Hollywood, one of the ship's officers approached me on the Sunday morning and asked me whether, since Edgar Wallace's body was on board, there was any special hymn which I would like sung at the service.

"Yes," I said, "there is. I should like 'Praise to the Holiest in the Height!'"

The officer looked doubtful.

"It's hardly the sort of hymn—" he began.

"It's the right hymn," I assured him. "I have chosen it because, if Edgar Wallace is anywhere now and doing anything, I know he is thanking God for it."

My first meeting with Wallace was in 1913. I was working in those days for the Dictaphone Company, transcribing on a typewriter the matter dictated on to the cylinders; and from time to time there were delivered to me large batches of cylinders containing literary and journalistic matter from someone who, for some reason or other, never divulged his name. All that I knew of the mysterious author was that his voice had a curiously husky quality, that his mispronunciation of various words made me shudder, and that he was always in a desperate hurry for the typescript.

As time went on, I became curious and made inquiries, only to discover that all that was known in the office was that the client in question lived at an address in the Haymarket, and that the manager was as mystified and as curious about his identity as I. It was, I believe, the manager's suggestion that I should personally deliver the next lot of manuscript and see what I could discover. At any rate, I have always given him credit for the suggestion and been duly grateful to him.

A few days later I called at a flat in the Haymarket, and, on the pretext of having various queries to raise in connection with the manuscript, penetrated to the study, where I was received by a short, slim, decidedly good-looking man, with a rather pallid face and a neat upturned moustache.

I told him who I was, but my confidence was not reciprocated; so while we discussed as many points about the manuscript as my ingenuity could invent, my eyes were busy in search of a clue. I noticed that on the bookshelves there was a preponderance of novels by Edgar Wallace, and a number of them lying about the room, and before I left I had a shrewd idea that it was Edgar Wallace to whom I had been talking.

A few days later came the confirmation. Our anonymous client sent in some handwritten manuscript to be copied, and I promptly turned up the Edgar Wallace file in the office, compared the writing of the manuscript with that of several letters which bore his signature, found the handwriting unmistakably the same, and congratulated myself on having solved the mystery in a manner of which even an Edgar Wallace sleuth need not have been ashamed.

Wallace in those days, though he was, of course, well known in Fleet Street, was only just beginning to loom on the horizon of the general public as a writer of fiction, and I was puzzled to see why he should be at such pains to conceal his identity. Later, I discovered that there had been method in his mystery. He had acquired his Dictaphone on the gradual-payment plan, instalments were in arrears, and to reveal himself as the author of the manuscripts would have been to invite a peremptory invitation to pay up—which, since he was in the middle of one of his hard-up patches, he could not do—or return the Dictaphone, which, since he was also in the middle of one of his patches of high-speed writing, was unthinkable. Wallace had found himself in a predicament and had tackled his temporary difficulty in a manner with which I was later to become all too familiar.

The discovery of his identity—I casually addressed him as "Mr. Wallace" at our next meeting, and he only smiled—placed me in a quandary. I had to decide whether, out of loyalty to my firm, I should reveal his identity, or yield to the promptings of the friendship which had already sprung up between us—fostered, I fancy, by our common love of horse-racing, and the fact that we both considered ourselves to be among the cognoscenti of the turf—and allow Wallace to retain the Dictaphone.

Fortunately, I was spared making the decision.

"How much do you earn at your job, Bob?" asked Wallace a few days later.

I told hm.

"You're worth more than that."

I agreed—heartily.

"Have you got a typewriter of your own?"

I rapidly decided that the contraption in my possession might, with a little effort of imagination, be truthfully designated a typewriter, and said that I had.

"Then why don't you work for yourself?" said Wallace. "I've got no money, but I'll guarantee you a quid a week more than you're getting now, and you can do all my typing for me. Is it a bet?"

It was. I acquired a Dictaphone. It was, even when it came into my possession, a very ancient model, as different from the modern electric machine as is the modern aeroplane from the boneshaker. It was worked by clockwork, and the spring was so weak that I was lucky to get through a cylinder with less than three windings. But it served its purpose. With my dilapidated typewriter and my debilitated Dictaphone I transcribed hundreds of thousands of words for Wallace.

I shall never forget my first introduction to what I later came to accept, more or less philosophically, as the genuine Wallace method of writing a story. I had been transcribing his Dictaphone dictation for some little time, and was congratulating myself on the fact that I was earning a pound a week more and doing far less work than previously. But any dreams I had of a calm and leisurely fortune were soon to be shattered. I had occasion to call at Wallace's flat one Friday morning. Wallace, Dictaphone mouthpiece in hand, was seated at his desk.

"Hullo, Bob! Know anything?"

Throughout my long association with him that was invariably his first question when we met each morning. Wallace was always eager for a tip, and I have spent many an hour, while editors fumed for overdue contributions, arguing with him over the merits of our respective fancies for a race. If we agreed on the probable winner, it was backed by Wallace as a matter of course; if we did not agree—and as I have a liking for an occasional win I am glad to say that Wallace's selection was not always mine—he would prove to me conclusively that his horse was bound to finish first, that mine had not a dog's chance; after which he would ring up his bookmaker and back them both.

On this occasion we did not agree, and Wallace was in the middle of a most unconvincing demonstration that his horse could not avoid winning by three lengths, when he suddenly broke off.

"By the way," he said placidly, "I've a serial to do—seventy-five thousand words—and I'm going to turn it in by Monday morning. I'm broke and must have the money."

"Monday morning?" It was already midday on Friday and I had an uneasy feeling that Wallace was not being humorous. "Perhaps—by midday on Monday—if you've a good lot ready for me to get to work on—"

"I'm just going to start," said Wallace calmly. "But we'll do it—easily. You live at Hammersmith, don't you?"

I did. But I could not see that living at Hammersmith appreciably brightened the prospect of getting a 75,000-word serial dictated, typed, delivered and paid for by Monday morning. But Wallace saw.

"I'll start dictating right away," he said. "We'll get a corps of district messengers to carry the cylinders to you at Hammersmith as fast as I can dictate them, and we'll work all day and night. You're on a pony."

I was living in those days in furnished apartments, and I am afraid my landlady had three rather disturbed nights. All night long my typewriter clattered—I was in constant dread that either it or my feeble Dictaphone spring might collapse beneath the strain imposed on them—and the arrival every two hours of a district messenger to hand me a fresh batch of cylinders for transcription and take back the typescript to Wallace, must have sadly interfered with her night's rest. Wallace read the first ten pages of my typescript, and by the next messenger came a note:

Dear Bob,

I don't want to read any more of this. Do the fair copy straight away.

Edgar W.

P.S.—Know anything for to-morrow?

I suppose I did sleep some time and eat now and then between the Friday and the Monday; but the only impression of those seventy-two hours that remains with me is of a dilapidated typewriter ceaselessly clattering and of wrists and arms aching abominably. But the story was finished according to plan, and by midday on Monday the manuscript was in the publisher's hands, the payment for it in Wallace's, and my "pony" in mine. We had both earned it.

In this manner were written many of his subsequent stories, and I soon came to recognise in the early stages the symptoms of an impending spasm of high-speed work. While Wallace had money, he could rarely bring himself to settle down to writing, and at the first signs of financial tightness I came to realise that it would not be long before I heard the inevitable "Bob, I'm broke," and we should be plunging again into a whirl of furious activity.

How familiar that "Bob, I'm broke!" was to become! The calm smile with which Wallace invariably said it revealed the nonchalant temperament of the born gambler. Wallace, in everything that he did, was a gambler. Big risks had an irresistible attraction for him; big money lured him; but it was after the thrill of a big adventure that he hankered more than after the money. Money as such did not really interest him very much. It was just something which came along and was spent, but was not of any real importance. Money could always be made with a little effort, and, that being so, it was absurd to hoard it up. If there was money in the bank, Wallace would spend it, gamble with it, lend it, give it away—anything rather than save it. There was no thrill for Wallace in a money-box.

Most authors, I believe, find it impossible to do good work when they are worried, particularly if the cause of their worry is a financial one. If they sit down to plan a story, the vision of a Final Notice from the Gas Company floats before their eyes, and the prospect of the meter being borne away in a handcart effectually banishes inspiration. Truth is stronger than fiction, at least until some means has been found of preserving the continuance of the gas supply.

Fortunately, Wallace did not suffer from that disability. "Fortunately" because, had overdrafts, bills, threats of summonses and such-like prevented his working, many of his stories would never have been written. It seems that most creative workers are innately lazy and can rarely bring themselves to settle down to work until the bank manager becomes recalcitrant or at any rate shows signs of incipient restiveness. Wallace was no exception; and as he was blessed with a bank manager whose views on the matter of overdrafts coincided—almost—with his own, there were sometimes lengthy periods when no stories were written.

He rarely worked until stern necessity in some unpleasant guise was knocking at the door; and then he worked at tremendous pressure and was not in the least disturbed by the knocking. His incurable optimism always persuaded him that the story would be finished and payment for it received before stern necessity kicked the door down.

Unlike most authors, he did his best work under the stress of financial stringency. When he was in funds, work was postponed to that distant date when money would be short again. Having survived one financial crisis, he always seemed to imagine that the next was only a vague possibility of the distant future, and promptly proceeded to do everything most calculated to expedite its arrival. At such times editors might be screaming for stories, but if the voice of the bank manager was silent or not too reproachful, the siren whisper of Epsom or Newmarket would always drown the editorial clamour, and only a very bad day on the racecourse would persuade him to give a sympathetic ear to the outcry.

I have often felt grateful to the providence which ordained that Wallace should not win the Irish Sweepstake. Whatever the state of his finances, he always contrived somehow to have about £40 worth of tickets, but luck never came his way. Had it done so, I am sure that I should have had no work to do for months. Even Wallace, I imagine, would have needed a month or two to dispose of the first prize in the Irish Sweep.

It is not surprising that Wallace, who honestly believed, as I have often heard him say, that money is one of the things in life which do not matter in the least, was frequently in financial difficulties. His temperament made it inevitable that his life should be punctuated at fairly regular intervals by financial crises of varying acuteness, and a graph of his bank balance during almost any selected period of his life would have been a zigzag affair of sudden ups and downs no less erratic than a meteorological chart of an English summer.

Often in my days with him I watched him carelessly wandering deeper and deeper into a jungle of debt from which I could see no hope that he would ever extricate himself and was convinced that Wallace at last had come to the end of his financial tether and that a crash was inevitable.

But that was before I had got to know Wallace and his methods. He was by nature a fighter, and he fought best when the boats had been burnt behind him and he must go forward or surrender, and I never knew him—not, at least, until the last few years, when he began to show unmistakable signs of overwork and nerviness—get rattled or even seriously worried over money matters. There was always a way out of the most bewildering financial maze, and the ingenuity he displayed in discovering the solution, the coolness with which he carried out the hair-raising expedients to which he was sometimes forced, were qualities which, had he chosen to turn his attention to Throgmorton Street instead of Fleet Street, could hardly have failed to win him a place among the world's financial magnates.

Wallace, I am sure, would not have been content to be less than a magnate.

He was incurably generous. It was one of the most lovable traits in the character of the most lovable man I have ever known. He scattered his benevolence with as lavish a hand as he scattered money on any other object. He was lovably and lamentably sentimental. Almost any story of hard luck and poverty, no matter how blatantly untrue, was enough to send his hand groping for his wallet, and there was no lack of unscrupulous spongers to take advantage of his unselfish generosity. It became a by-word with the indigent parasites who always hovered around him, as well as among those who were in genuine need of help, that Wallace was always "good for a fiver."

Edgar Wallace with his Wife and Elder Daughter Pat.

I was in his study on one occasion when an old friend of his came in with an all too familiar request.

"Can you lend me a tenner, Edgar?"

Wallace, I knew, was at the moment in sore need of money himself, and I expected a regretful refusal.

"Tenner?" said Wallace. "I really don't know, old man. Wait a minute and I'll see how the Pals Account stands."

The friend left with a cheque for fifteen pounds.

It was only then, though I had been closely associated with Wallace for some time, that I discovered about the Pals Account. It was a special account into which, in his periods of affluence, he paid such money as he could spare for the specific purpose of meeting requests of this kind. His quixotic generosity was charming but ruinous. He would have been a much wealthier man if he could have found it in his heart to say "No" to a request for money. But an Edgar Wallace who could refuse a helping hand to one who asked for it would not have been Edgar Wallace.

I think he was fully aware of this improvident streak in his character. I remember the first occasion on which I asked him for a loan. It was only a fiver that I needed to help me through my financial morass, but I approached him very diffidently. I need not have felt any qualms.

"Sure, Bob," said Wallace promptly. "Never be hard up for a fiver. I used to be, so I know what it's like. I'm hard up nowadays for fifties and hundreds. I suppose one day I'll be hard up for thousands."

He was.

That, I suppose, was the secret of his inexhaustible generosity: he could never forget the days when he had been poor. Throughout his romantic journey from a courtyard in Deptford to a suite of rooms at the Carlton, the poor and unfortunate were always with him. He used to say humorously that it was the literary fare provided for him at Sunday School in his days of childhood that was chiefly responsible for his inability to say "No" to a request for help. It included a story called "Christie's Old Organ," over which he used to ponder and weep. The moral of the story was that one ought to be kind to people less fortunate than oneself, and Wallace reckoned that the complex introduced into his mental system by that Sunday School reading had cost him many thousands of pounds in the course of his life. How thoroughly he had taken the moral to heart!

With the best will in the world it was not always possible to produce the needed cash for charitable purposes, but I never knew Wallace fail to do something for a friend who was in genuine distress. His name was good security for a bank overdraft, if all else failed, and whatever the state of his own account he would lightheartedly put his signature to the guarantee form. After all, signing one's name was a delightfully simple way of getting fifty pounds for one's friend, and one could not let a pal down, anyway. I wonder how many such forms bearing Wallace's signature there were scattered about the country at the time of his death!

I remember once venturing a mild protest when, in the midst of one of his most perplexing financial tangles, he had casually guaranteed an overdraft of £60 for a man who was a regular applicant for his charity, and who, as Wallace had admitted to me, had never been known to repay a loan.

"He's hard up, Bob," was Wallace's excuse.

"So are you," I reminded him.

He shrugged.

"And it's a thousand to one," I added, "that So-and-So will let you down."

Another shrug.

"Being let down doesn't matter."

That was always Wallace's attitude. Anyone might let him down—hundreds did—and it was accepted with a shrug and a smile. It was all part of the great gamble, and the true gambler does not squeal when he loses. I never knew Wallace bitter or resentful at being let down by someone whom he had trusted and helped, and the all too frequent experience never hardened his heart.

When he wanted to lend a helping hand he had a charmingly tactful way of doing it. It was he who, when I had been working for him only a month or two, suggested that, instead of working in my lodgings at Hammersmith, I should take an office in the West End and start a typewriting agency of my own. I agreed that it was an excellent plan, but with the small clientele which I then had, renting an office was a risk which I did not dare to take.

"Take the office, Bob," said Wallace, "and I'll pay half the rent."

Protest was useless. It was to suit his own convenience, he assured me, that he wanted me to do it. Hammersmith was a long way from the Haymarket, and he wanted to have me close at hand, so that a telephone call would bring me to his flat within a few minutes. If I wouldn't agree to his suggestion, he would rent an office himself and let me work there.

I took the office, and Wallace paid half the rent, and I pretended to believe that it was entirely for his own benefit that he did so. But I have never forgotten that it was to his generosity that I owed my first start in a business of my own. I did all Wallace's work, and, with that solid foundation on which to build, the business grew apace.

And then came the war. This parted us. One morning in April, 1915, after worrying over the question for months, I suddenly decided to join up, packed away my typewriter and Dictaphone, and, without telling anyone of my intention, put myself at the service of His Majesty. I think I took it for granted that Wallace expected me to go sooner or later, and I did not mention the matter to him until my enlistment was an accomplished fact. Then, in all the glory of my new khaki kit, I called at his flat, confidently expecting his whole-hearted approval both of what I had done and of my soldierly bearing.

I was sadly disappointed. Whatever he may have thought of me as a specimen of England's fighting forces, Wallace certainly did not approve of what I had done. He was hurt and angry. He took the view that I was basely deserting him when he badly needed me, that I should have consulted him before enlisting, that I had shown an utter lack of consideration for him, and that I should make a rotten soldier anyway. He said he would see what he could do to get me out of the Army again immediately, and we would start to work on his new serial on the following Monday. Our relations, when I left him that morning, were decidedly strained.

A few days later, having been warned that I was sailing for Egypt almost immediately, I called again to bid Edgar good-bye—and found a very different Wallace from the one I had last seen. He was all anxiety to do everything possible to enable me to go with an easy mind. My whole family, he assured me, would be under his wing until I returned, and I was to worry over nothing. He was terribly sorry that I should be missing the best part of the flat-racing season.

I shall always remember his words to me as he shook my hand on parting.

"After all, Bob," he said, "you'll be helping to write history, and I only write popular fiction."