Edgar Wallace and the Criminal Spaces of London
Most of Wallace's crime novels were written during the interwar period and gained great popularity. Several scholars have suggested that in "1928, an astounding one-fourth of all the books manufactured in the UK (except for The Bible and school text books, obviously) were new Edgar Wallace stories or reprints by the prolific author" (Paul). In Germany, the success was of similar proportions; contemporary advertisements for translations of Wallace's novels boast about circulations of more than 1.5 million. The question that interests me here is what kind of Britain is being presented in these novels that found (and still find) such a wide distribution among the German public. First of all, Britain, here, consists of Country Houses and London only; apart from a few investigative trips into the Home Countries, nothing else seems to matter. In the following, I will leave aside the locked rooms of remote mansions, although a space highly significant and functional for crime novels, but rather concentrate on those texts that feature real-life settings, specifically London. - The analysis is based on detailed readings of eight novels that are all firmly situated within London.
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