Edgar Wallace - Fleet Street, London, UK
N 51° 30.854 W 000° 06.281
30U E 700890 N 5710986
This bronze plaque, to the memory of Edgar Wallace, is on the wall of Ludgate House in Fleet Street close to Ludgate Circus where, as a boy, he used to sell newspapers..
Waymark Code: WMEHYZ
Location: London, United Kingdom
Date Posted: 06/02/2012
Views: 3
The bronze plaque contains a relief, right side
profile of Edgar Wallace and was created in 1934 by F W Doyle-Jones. The
sculptor's signature can be seen on the neck in the relief. The plaque ia a
little over 100cm high and 70cm wide.
The relief profile is at the top of the plaque
and beneath that is inscribed:
Edgar Wallace
Reporter
Born London 1875
Died Hollywood 1932
Founder member of the
Company of Newspaper Makers
He knew wealth & poverty, yet had
walked with kings & kept his bearing.
Of his talents he gave lavishly
to authorship - but to Fleet Street
he gave his heart
The BFI Screen on Line website (visit
link) tells of Wallace's life:
"Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace was born on 1
April 1875 in Greenwich. After working for many years as a journalist, Wallace
came to prominence with his first mystery novel The Four Just Men (1905), which
was published with the ending removed as part of an advertising campaign which
offered a £500 prize to readers who submitted the right conclusion. As many
readers guessed correctly, this nearly bankrupted Wallace, but he made up for it
subsequently with his prodigious output, producing over 170 books and two-dozen
plays.
In 1915 Wallace wrote his first script, Nurse and Martyr (d. Percy Moran), a
privately financed film on the life of Edith Cavell. In 1927 he joined the board
of British Lion to whom he sold the rights to all his works. Starting with The
Ringer (d. Arthur Maude, 1928), the company released eight silent films from his
stories at the rate of one a month. Wallace directed Red Aces (1929), which
features his popular character J.G. Reeder, as a silent film, and followed it
with The Squeaker (1930) after the conversion to sound. A prototypical Wallace
thriller with the identities of both policeman and villain only being revealed
at the end, it features Gordon Harker, who had starred in Wallace's stage hits
The Ringer, The Case of the Frightened Lady and The Calendar. Wallace died in
Hollywood on 10 February 1932 while working on the screenplay of King Kong (US,
d. Merian C. Cooper, 1933)."