SOURCE: "Edgar Wallace: The Passing of a Great Personality," in The Bookman, London, Vol. LXXXI, No. 486, March, 1932, pp. 3101.

Grierson was an English-born author best known for his crime novels and nonfiction works on crime detection. In the following excerpt, he praises Wallace as a pioneer of the thriller genre and highlights the novelist's accurate depiction of the London underworld.

Edgar Wallace is dead.

The world has lost a great man.

For Wallace was great—not merely because he wrote some one hundred and fifty novels and thirty plays, and film scenarios, pen-pictures and newspaper articles by the score; but because of the indomitable spirit that made a little newsboy into one of the most amazing figures of his generation, and a very fine gentleman withal.

Fifty-six years ago Wallace came into the world, a workhouse child, and his first job was to sell newspapers in the Fleet Street...