SOURCE: "King Edgar, and How He Got His Crown," in his Snobbery with Violence: Crime Stories and Their Audience, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1971, pp. 73-84.

Watson was an English journalist and novelist who was known for his detective novels. In the following essay, he speculates that the wide popularity of Wallace's novels was due to predictable plots and characters, as well as the author's refusal to question middle-class tastes and morality.

From the analysis of the method and content of Wallace's work which Margaret Lane has offered in her book, Edgar Wallace: Biography of a Phenomenon, the picture emerges of a writer supremely adept in an 'off-the-cuff' technique but observant all the time of a set of strict conventions. The nature of these conventions cannot be unrelated to what must have been the mental and emotional climate of forty years ago, for Wallace came nearer to being universally read by...