"in all the detective stories I've read there is usually a good-looking and highly educated young officer who falls in love with a rich and beautiful girl and, after rescuing her every ten pages from a fate which is popularly supposed to be worse than death, marries her on page 366 and lives happily right up to the end cover."
— Edgar Wallace
"The House Of The Candles
Its Raining Again…
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Cannot abide crime literature, but I'm hooked on the TV series "Luther" at the moment. Gritty crime drama at its best. It doesn't hurt to have a hunk as the principal detective, either.
Daphne: my younger son tries to get me to watch that. P'raps I'll give it a go.
The series with two women detectives is excellent.
Wallander. The Killing. The Wire. Luther. All fantastic. Not forgetting Rumpole....not a detective as such .. but what a man.
To be fair Edgar Wallace lived until 1932 so would not have had the opportunity to change his viewpoint after reading and seeing the films for such classics as The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon but I can imagine that in the era that he lived he might have been jaded by the way the genre had developed to that point.
So he'd have given Dan Brown a drubbing?
Hmm, but I'm suprised that Wallace didn't give at least a nod to the Sherlock Holmes architype: overly tall and boney, smack-head, and probably batting for the other side.
I think I prefer a spy. =)
Kane
One of the reasons why I like reading Edgar Wallace is his deadpan delivery of some outrageous mickey-taking. He quite happily continued to write stories in this vein well after letting his character "The Sooper" write these words.
What about the doughty Scottish character of either sex? Usually provides comic relief and a perfect foil to the hero. I am available for auditions.
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