SOURCE: "The Bookman Gallery: Edgar Wallace," in The Bookman, London, Vol. LXIX, No. 414, March, 1926, pp. 301-04.

In the following essay, McQuilland discusses Wallace's writing process and gives an overall assessment of his books.

Big sales in novels are viewed with contempt by many writers and readers outside the range of the lucky publisher and the almost equally lucky author and his personal friends. So far has this contempt progressed that it is now generally assumed that because a novel sells in considerable quantities, it must be a piece of bad art. I recently heard a clever woman, herself a novelist of capacity, declare that The Constant Nymph, because of its general popularity, placed Miss Margaret Kennedy amongst the Philistines of fiction.

Of course this is complete nonsense. Dickens and Thackeray had, and still have, enormous sales. Joseph Conrad in his later years was a best-seller. There are quite...