Orphaned as a baby, Wallace was raised by a fishmonger, and his education was very limited. When he was 11, he was selling newspapers at Ludgate Circus. At 18, he joined the Army and served in the Royal West Kent Regiment until 1896 when he was sent to South Africa to work in the Medical Staff Corps. At this time, Wallace began to contribute his writing to various periodicals. After his discharge in 1899, he became a correspondent for Reuters and the London Daily Mail. After a short period as editor of the Rand Daily Mail, Wallace returned to England in 1903. Wallace covered the Russo-Japanese War for the Daily Mail during 1904-5. In 1905, he published his first novel, The Four Just Men, which was very successful, but his real fame came with the publication of Sanders of the River in 1911. Wallace was an extremely prolific writer who wrote over 175 novels, plus numerous plays, essays and journalistic articles. During the peak of his success during the 1920's, it was said that a quarter of all books read in England were written by him. Many of his novels were made into films and TV dramas. A master detective writer, Wallace usually used police inspectors to solve crime rather than inventing a super-sleuth as did many of his contemporary writers. Wallace was working on the screenplay for the film King Kong when he contracted pneumonia and died in Hollywood. Among his numerous works were The Fourth Plague (1913, The Melody of Death (1915), Bones of the River (1923), Educated Evans (1924), The Mind of Mr. J. G. Reeder (1925), The Avenger (1926), The Feathered Serpent (1927), The Traitor's Gate (1927), The Flying Squad (1928), The Golden Hades (1929), White Face (1930), The Devil Man (1931) and The Ringer Returns (1931). |
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