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The Terror
Martin Edwards
Edgar Wallace
The sensational novel which launched Collins’ Detective Story Club in 1929 was by Edgar Wallace, who wrote more crime stories in the 1920s, and more films, than any other author. This new edition of The Terror, with its original jacket artwork, also includes another classic Wallace text, White Face.A dangerous gang of criminals is imprisoned after a daring robbery, although the ringleader who masterminded the crime disappears with the loot. Finally released after ten years behind bars, they are out for vengeance on the man who betrayed them, and the trail leads to a lonely house haunted by organ music and the spectre of a hooded figure who prowls its dark corridors.The Terror began life as a stage play, then a film, and finally the book that began Collins’ Detective Story Club in July 1929.This new edition also includes White Face, the other crime novel Wallace adapted from one of his own plays. A doctor finds a man murdered in a seedy part of London. The police suspect a notorious master of disguise known as ‘White Face’, and the doctor enlists a reporter to help him track down and unmask the elusive killer.This Detective Story Club classic is introduced by award-winning crime novelist and mystery genre expert Martin Edwards, author of the acclaimed The Golden Age of Murder.
Published by COLLINS CRIME CLUB
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
The Terror first published in Great Britain by The Detective Story Club Ltd for Wm Collins Sons & Co. Ltd 1929
White Face first published in Great Britain by Hodder & Stoughton 1930
Introduction © Martin Edwards 2016
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1929, 2016
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008137571
Ebook Edition © February 2016 ISBN: 9780008137588
Version: 2015-11-24
Contents
Cover (#u1ab1bde5-2890-504a-9af8-bd942045250b)
Title Page (#uf916cf2a-4088-5759-aca6-ff3a311ba1d9)
Copyright (#u87caf20b-99b6-580c-8967-6f73dbdcfb8e)
Introduction (#u6b085c4a-1256-567b-80a5-315d4b9331c2)
The Terror (#uf116165c-973e-5331-962a-e8a7e5f6a2f7)
Editor’s Preface (#u18178c46-ffc5-59bb-83f9-17c1282f967b)
Chapter I (#ub0f3948e-c315-59df-a9d8-78a9748527d7)
Chapter II (#u18465cfc-e9e9-51a0-b971-bfaa10b52f16)
Chapter III (#u6d4be480-572e-5626-8be5-0216bb453d81)
Chapter IV (#u752f6d08-7d13-5c13-bdbc-55898bddeb03)
Chapter V (#udc2afc17-4713-5983-9446-a0a5def253fd)
Chapter VI (#ud2f0fca1-1be0-5adf-b988-186df9526099)
Chapter VII (#u93137b79-e18f-543b-86d7-a2c4feb11a8c)
Chapter VIII (#ud5d6b8d6-79d6-5f79-8783-0b5e312ddb64)
Chapter IX (#ubfe5e3d1-85f1-560f-a853-c6eec8ec5bf4)
Chapter X (#u897f17c3-4958-5cf7-8ba5-1dfd7d9d8f87)
Chapter XI (#u67b2bcc4-341e-551a-b38e-0455412a142d)
Chapter XII (#ufcc7b061-e5ec-57c2-ae95-3c024b6d2e2b)
Chapter XIII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XIV (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XV (#litres_trial_promo)
White Face (#litres_trial_promo)
Dedication (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter I (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter II (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter III (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter IV (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter V (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter VI (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter VII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter VIII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter IX (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter X (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XI (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XIII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XIV (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XV (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XVI (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XVII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XVIII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XIX (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XX (#litres_trial_promo)
The Detective Story Club (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
INTRODUCTION (#u10637c19-557c-5c6b-a219-32a97fe2369e)
IN July 1929, Edgar Wallace’s The Terror headed the list of the first half dozen titles published by Collins in their Detective Story Club, the only one which was not a reissue. This lively, melodramatic thriller does not outstay its welcome—its brevity is such that some bibliographies describe it as a short story, although in fact it is a novella with an unusual history. On its first appearance, The Terror was published on its own, its modest length bulked out to 192 pages thanks to the cunning use of a conspicuously large type-face. Rather than resort to the same tactic to achieve its page count, this reissued edition includes the bonus of a second Wallace book published in the following year, and White Face is rather more than twice as long as The Terror.
An enthusiastic preface to the Detective Story Club edition hailed The Terror as ‘a masterpiece of its kind’, and, nearly ninety years later, there is no denying that it displays the characteristics that made Edgar Wallace a literary phenomenon. Margaret Lane, his first major biographer, summarised the lurid plot ingredients: ‘an old mysterious house built over hidden dungeons…hidden treasure…the hooded figure appearing on moonlit nights and leaving a trail of murder in its wake, the shrieking heroine trapped in the dungeon with a sinister madman’. Add to that both a master criminal and ace detective masquerading as someone else, and you have a classic slice of Twenties popular culture.
Just like the early whodunits of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, The Terror belongs to an age when people craved escapism at least as much as they had ever done. Memories of the First World War, which in one way or another touched almost every family in the land, were still raw. Edgar Wallace’s thrillers met a particular need, and met it better than any of his peers. He was, G. K. Chesterton said, ‘a huge furnace and factory of fiction’, and the popularity of his books made him a fortune, which he spent as quickly as he earned it.
An intriguing facet of The Terror is the story’s genesis in the theatre. The idea for the story came during the course of an extravagant holiday in Caux in late 1926. Wallace met Bertie Meyer, a theatrical manager, who suggested that Wallace write a play for two prominent actors, Mary Glynne and Dennis Nielsen-Terry. It took Wallace a mere ‘five nervous and preoccupied days’, as Margaret Lane perhaps euphemistically described them, to rise to the challenge. Even more impressive was the result of his frantic labours: the play ran for almost seven months at the Lyceum, and having cost just £1,000 to stage, made £35,000 in profits.
Success in the theatre led to The Terror being filmed; it became Warner Brothers’ second ‘all-talking picture’ before Wallace produced this book version. A more notable screen adaptation came in 1938; the cast included such luminaries as Alastair Sim, in characteristic scene-stealing form as Soapy Marks, and Bernard Lee, best remembered today as ‘M’ in Dr No and ten subsequent James Bond films, as Freddy Fane.
White Face appears to be the only other example of an original book that Wallace based on an earlier stage play, Persons Unknown, although his productivity was so astonishing that his bibiliography is as convoluted as a thriller plot, and it is hard to be sure about such things: The British Bibliography of Edgar Wallace by W. O. G. Lofts and Derek Adley is a full-length work, yet even its industrious authors admitted that, after four years’ research, they were far from confident they had traced all his stories published in Britain, let alone anywhere else. In 1932, White Face was turned into a film, but like the original film version of The Terror, it is now considered officially to be lost, unless any prints turn up in archives or the hands of private collectors.
This tale of a white-masked villain who terrorises London boasts a neat ‘least likely person’ twist, and also some snappy snatches of dialogue, as when a detective opines: ‘Policemen and reporters get their living out of other people’s misfortunes.’ Another police officer expresses the view: ‘The jury is a body or institution which gives everybody the benefit of the doubt except the police.’ A later passage, which has something of a timeless quality, notes: ‘Parliament had been playing too interfering a part in the police force lately…The Home Office had issued new instructions which, if they were faithfully carried out, would prevent the police from asking vital questions. Every step that the crank and the busybody could devise to interfere with the administration of justice had assumed official shape.’
Wallace never pretended to be a literary stylist, but the energy of his writing and the slickness of his plot twists earned him countless readers. At one time, his publishers claimed that he was responsible for one in every four British novels read. If this was an exaggeration, it did at least have the merit of seeming plausible. A Detective Story Club advertisement for The Terror said the tale proved once again ‘that there are many imitators, but only one Edgar Wallace’. This was perfectly true. Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace (1875–1932) was extraordinary among authors in that his life was as extraordinary as his books. He was one of a kind, and the latest biography, written by Neil Clark and published in 2014, is called fittingly Stranger than Fiction.
Wallace’s work had a universal appeal. As Clark says, ‘Among his millions of fans were King George V…Stanley Baldwin, a president of the United States, and a certain Adolf Hitler.’ Writing in 1969, Penelope Wallace, his daughter, suggested that an underlying reason for his popularity was ‘his lack of bitterness’:
‘There are occasions when he is angry, particularly on such subjects as “baby farming” but none where hatred…obscures the text. His villains are usually English and on the rare occasions when they are not home-grown they are imported impartially…There is no trace of racial or religious prejudice and it is rare for the villain to be completely bad. Those who say that his characters are either black or white can never have read his books. Few of his bad men are disallowed a redeeming feature or two.’
Reading tastes fluctuate as time passes, and the world has changed a great deal since Wallace adapted The Terror and White Face from his plays. Fortunately, good story-telling never goes completely out of fashion. Edgar Wallace was a gifted story-teller, and it is a pleasure to introduce these two lively tales to a new generation of readers.
MARTIN EDWARDS
May 2015
www.martinedwardsbooks.com
THE TERROR (#u10637c19-557c-5c6b-a219-32a97fe2369e)
EDITOR’S PREFACE (#u10637c19-557c-5c6b-a219-32a97fe2369e)
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!
CHAPTER I (#u10637c19-557c-5c6b-a219-32a97fe2369e)
O’SHEA was in his maddest mood, had been like it all night. Stalking up and down the grassy slope, muttering to himself, waving his hands at some invisible audience, cackling with laughter at his own mysterious jokes; and at dawn he had fallen upon little Lipski, who had dared light a cigarette in defiance of instructions, and had beaten him with savage brutality, and the other two men had not dared interfere.
Joe Connor sprawled on the ground, chewing a blade of grass, and watching with sombre eyes the restless figure. Marks, who sat cross-legged by his side, watched too, but there was a twisted and sneering smile on his thin lips.
‘Mad as a coot,’ said Joe Connor in a low voice. ‘If he pulls this job off without getting us in gaol for the rest of our lives we’ll be lucky.’
Soapy Marks licked his dry lips.
‘He’s cleverest when he’s mad.’ He spoke like a man of culture. Some said that Soapy was intended for the church before a desire for an easier and more illicit method of living made him one of the most skilful, and nearly the most dangerous, gangster in England.
‘Lunacy, my dear fellow, does not mean stupidity. Can’t you stop that fellow blubbering?’
Joe Connor did not rise; he turned his eyes in the direction of the prostrate figure of Lipski, who was groaning and swearing sobbingly.
‘He’ll get over it,’ he said indifferently. ‘The bigger beating he gets the more he respects O’Shea.’
He wriggled a little closer to his confederate.
‘Have you ever seen O’Shea—his face, I mean?’ he asked, dropping his voice a note lower. ‘I never have, and I’ve done two—’ he thought ‘—three,’ he corrected, ‘jobs with him. He’s always had that coat on he’s got now, with the collar right up to his nose, the same old hat over his eyes. I never used to believe there was that kind of crook—thought they were only seen on the stage. First time I ever heard of him was when he sent for me—met him on the St Albans Road about twelve o’clock, but never saw his face. He knew all about me; told me how many convictions I’d had, and the kind of work he wanted me for—’
‘And paid you well,’ said Marks lazily, when the other paused. ‘He always pays well; he always picks up his ‘staff’ in the same way.’
He pursed his lips as though he were going to whistle, examined the restless figure of the master thoughtfully.
‘He’s mad—and he pays well. He will pay better this time.’
Connor looked up sharply.
