When I first started looking into the work of Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace beyond The Four Just Men (1905) I was a little overwhelmed by the possibilities. This is a man who, we’re told, wrote over 170 books, so where does one begin to explore such a corpus?

Jump forward six years and I’ve read eight of Wallace’s novels and collections of stories, have about four more that sound intriguing and then I’ll probably be done with the guy. His adventure stories — of which there are, I believe, more than a few — interest me significantly less than does his crime fiction, and, while I should be intrigued by the impossible crimes I’ve not yet read that are mentioned in Adey, Wallace doesn’t always come through in that regard and so I can’t be sure they’re worth the time and effort. From somewhere I have the impression that The Daffodil Mystery (1920), The Face in the Night (1924), The Forger (1927), and The Ringer (1929) might be worth checking out, and the other 158 books can take care of themselves.

For today, though, it is The Clue of the Silver Key (1930) which commands our attention, and it begins in a typically Wallacian fashion with a sort of roving eye and rambling telling as if the author himself is working out the plot in real time. Theatre impresario Washington Wirth is throwing a party at which the minor actress Mary Lane is present (“I suppose if I had been a really important guest I shouldn’t have been invited?”) — Mary is engaged to Dick Allenby, inventor of a compressed-air gun, and Dick Allenby is present when Scotland Yard man Surefoot Smith discovers the murdered body of Horace Tom Tickler…the same Horace Tom Tickler who had unsuccessfully pursued Washington Wirth when he left the aforementioned party early in the morning.

Also mixed up in things is “man about town and wastrel” Jerry Dornford, who was in the same regiment as Allenby in the war and who owes the moneylender Hervey Lyne £3,700 — and martinet Lyne is the disapproving guardian of Mary Lane and uncle of one Dick Allenby. See also Allenby’s friend Leo Moran, bank manager, who handles Lyne’s finances and definitely has something shifty about him (he is referred to as “the man who called himself Moran” early on…). Round and round and round it goes, and quite where it’s stopping not even Wallace knows…

Gradually everyone moves into place: Allenby’s gun is stolen, Lyne puts pressure on Dornford to pay up or face ruin, and Smith sort of bumbles around so that he’s on hand when a second murder occurs. Then a third occurs, and there will be a fourth before the book is out, leaving you to wonder how many of these people will be left alive come the closing credits.

Wallace is clearly enjoying himself, with witticisms aimed at his own lowly craft…

People used to say about Hervey Lyne that he was the sort of character that only Dickens could have drawn, which is discouraging to a lesser chronicler.

…at the Bright Young Things who were having their day…

Mary Lane’s party was a very dull one. She was one of ten young people, and young people can be very boring. Three of the girls had a giggling secret, and throughout the meal made esoteric references to some happening which none but they understood. The young men were vapid and vacuous, after their kind.

…and at pompous social attitudes:

[Smith’s] pleasures were few. Beer was more of a necessity than a dissipation; for how can one sneer at a man who consumes large quantities of malted liquor necessary for his well-being and happiness, and find anything commendable in the physical wreck who seeks, through copious potions of Vichy water, to combat the excesses of his youth?

Surefoot Smith is about the closest we get to an interesting character in the whole thing — witness his mild irritation at encountering another man with the same surname, or the way he leaves a police constable unsure how to respond to being compared to a rabbit — and everyone else largely acts mysteriously, gets threatened, and/or gets murdered in a manner that enable Smith to lament the presence of American-style criminals in Blighty.

It’s not a book that gives the impression of having been through a second draft, given that Smith, at one point in chapter 15, drops a piece of knowledge that there’s no way he has (the reader does, but Smith — no) and one slightly clunky scene sees Mary quizzed on the same point twice in about four lines. But that’s not to say that it’s without moments of some excellent writing…

Faith needs the garnishing of romance as much as hope requires the support of courage.

…and a few era-appropriate points of interest: Moran is looked down upon by Dornford for “probably ha[ving] his education at the State’s expense”, and Wallace laments “the indignity in post-war days, [that] so many other buildings have suffered, of being converted into apartments”. Wallace was clearly writing at speed, but is always able to drop in these accidental asides, which comprise some of the most interest facets of the book.

And the plot? Well, once it gets going we’re then told who the villain is with a quarter of the page-count remaining and so we just sort of watch various other people menace and threaten each other as everything winds to a close, and I’m not sure there’s a really clever idea or moment to hang much of an impression on. It winds up, everything in the garden is rosy once more, and that’s about it. I’m honestly not even sure how this one came to my attention, to be honest, but if it was as an example of Wallace’s stronger writing, then, well, those other four books mentioned up top are looking even less likely to cross my threshold any time soon.

This is a diverting time, but nothing to get excited about. Perhaps emblematic of Wallace as a whole, but ultimately disappointing, having seen him do so much better elsewhere.

~

See also

Sergio @ Tipping My Fedora: The identity of the murderer is revealed seven chapters before the end after a fairly neat double bluff so that Wallace can introduce a thriller element with first Smith and later Mary being consecutively kidnapped by the murderer. With a solution that gleefully sends up one of the hoariest clichés of detective fiction, exhibiting a fine sense of paradox that probably would have appealed to both Doyle and Chesterton, this makes for a highly entertaining late novel.