Any reader of this blog who harbours secret longings to be a writer of best-sellers will do well to consider the meteoric career of Edgar Wallace. It is a tale of unrelenting hard work, huge debts and a prodigious output, of which over 170 novels were the backbone. Well does he deserve a bronze plaque in Ludgate Circus, where he set about earning a living at the age of 11 by selling newspapers.
Born illegitimate and adopted at nine days’ old by Dick Freeman, a Billingsgate fish-porter, he fitted happily into his new family. When he got into his stride, he was known as a writer of short stories, a script of ‘King Kong’ and a massive flood of novels, plays, reporting and other copy. Sweet tea and cigarettes kept him going for 72 hours at a time. He became a household name. He knew his stuff when it came to the crime scene and police procedure. Like Kipling his hero he had ink in his veins and relied on the same six honest serving-men. He was a man of his time and shared his contemporaries’ colonialist and paternalist outlook. If any of my readers are tempted to consider writing as a career, they could do worse than be encouraged by this tale of a Londoner who got to the top of the crime-writing tree. There are easier ways of earning a living—herding wild horses as one wag put it, for example – but there is no way of getting to own a yellow Rolls-Royce without a certain amount of effort.
Two very different men made their names as Wallace did. C.S. Lewis was an academic through and through. He is remembered not for his ‘Preface to Paradise Lost’ but for his winning and sustained presentation of the Christian Gospel. George Orwell reached imaginative heights with his ‘Animal Farm’ and his detestation of linguistic betrayal serving the interest of political power.
Here were two men with an aptitude like that of Wallace. They had backgrounds far removed from the hand-to-mouth experience of the Londoner who scrambled to the top in the days when Fleet Street was king and whose works then endured into the television age. Both left brief notes on the business of writing that deserve the attention of would-be practitioners. They can be found on the internet. Whatever it is that drives such people, the same techniques have to be learned.
Lewis and Orwell have more important things to teach us than literary dexterity and readiness to grind away remorselessly, but without that skill and that application much of their work would be in vain. Is there another Edgar Wallace out there preparing to charm the reading public?
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