Wednesday, August 12, 2015

Edgar Wallace: Stranger Than Fiction

King Kong was originally a novel. I never knew. From The Guardian:
There is a plaque on Ludgate Circus, at the end of Fleet Street, that says of its dedicatee: “He knew wealth and poverty, yet had walked with Kings and kept his bearings. Of his talents, he gave lavishly to authorship – but to Fleet Street he gave his heart.” How many of the thousands of people who scurry past it each day know that Edgar Wallace, the man commemorated, was once the most widely read author in the world and had also been a newspaper seller, medical orderly, poet, war correspondent, crime reporter, editor, playwright, racehorse owner, director, parliamentary candidate and Hollywood screenwriter responsible for one of the most famous scenes in cinema history? While Wallace’s overlapping contemporaries, Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, both remain in the public eye, their creations constantly on our screens, who is now familiar with Wallace or has heard of his detective inspector Elk? (Read more.)
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