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 his generation than did any other author.

The first of the Wallace rules, as listed by Miss Lane, was subordination of everything to action. Nothing was to be what it seemed; confusion and suspense were to be maintained to the end, with none of the two-dimensional characters allowed a static moment. There was not a floor, not a wall, that might not suddenly go into motion. Even in the realm of crime fiction, there have been very few writers so constantly suggestive of restlessness.

All this, however, had to be resolved to satisfy the second convention: that the world be seen as an essentially safe place, a sunny garden at the end of the secret passage. No serious harm could be allowed to befall any of the 'good' characters, however horrifying the means of dispatch that the 'bad' ones might prepare for them. It was permissible for criminals temporarily to thwart the law, but never in a way that might shake the reader's confidence in it. (Wallace's policemen were sometimes baffled; they were never ridiculous).

The third convention was the banishment of anything that might produce genuine emotional reaction, anything capable of upsetting standard assumptions. Margaret Lane defined the objects of this rule as 'excitement without anxiety, suspense without fear, violence without pain and horror without disgust'. She could have added crime without sin and sentiment without sex.

Trying to assess Wallace's work in literary terms would be as pointless as applying sculptural evaluation to a load of gravel. He wrote as well as he needed to write in satisfaction of a voracious but uninstructed public appetite. At least he spared his readers the pages of portentous padding which less brisk operators saw fit to inflict upon theirs, while here and there, one even detects a spark of original and lively characterization. It is a pleasant surprise, for instance, to receive this piece of information about his detective, Mr J. G. Reeder:

All his life he had had a suspicion of milk. He had calculated that a nimble homicide, working on systematic lines, could decimate London in a month.

For most of the time, though, Wallace's story-telling was fast, facile and careless. A man who habitually planned six and more novels simultaneously and who once completed a book of 80,000 words in a single week-end could not afford to linger over the fashioning of phrases. He had to snatch them out of stock. The following are but a few of those he used in one typical sequence of events in the story of Terror Keep (1927):

She had hardly done so when she heard a sound which brought her heart to her mouth … slipping off her shoes, she sped along in the darkness … plucking up courage, after a few minutes she retraced her steps… when, to her horror, she felt it moving aways from her and had just time to shrink back when … hoping and praying that she would find a niche into which she could shrink … with a gasp of horror she realized that in the confusion of the moment she had taken the wrong direction … as she stood motionless with fear … for a second he stared at her as though she were some ghastly apparition of his mad dreams … in a second she was flying up the awful staircase… not for a fortune would she have looked behind…her breath was coming in long sobs; her heart beat as though it would burst… and then there came a sound which froze the marrow of his bones … the scream of a human soul in agony … suddenly Margaret saw something which made her breath come faster … in terror she struggled madly, but the man held her in a grip of iron, and then her senses left her and she sank limply into his arms … it seemed almost an eternity before she came to the surface. Fortunately, she was a good swimmer …

The plots of the Wallace books were simply hastily contrived vessels into which could be poured a stream of cliche of the above order. Here, by way of general illustration, is that of the Tbree Oak Mystery.

Detective Socrates Smith, retired from Scotland Yard with the help of a legacy of £6,000 a year, is invited to stay with a former colleague, John Mandle, at his country house near London. Mandle has a pretty step-daughter, Molly Templeton, and two near neighbours. One is Bob Stone, yet another ex-Yard man; the other is a Mr Jetheroe, soon to be identified as a former convict. Smith's fellow guest at Mandle's house is his brother, Lexington Smith, who falls in love with Molly.

One morning the brothers find Mandle shot dead. Stone is discovered trussed up at his home. The police are informed but they hand over the entire investigation to Smith. Smith hopes that a clue to the reason for the murder may be found in a secret drawer of the dead man's desk. Before he can search, somebody fires the house and it burns to the ground. Undeterred, Smith buys a hatchet in the nearest village and chops up the charred remnants of the desk. He finds two keys, labelled 'Pool-in-the …' and succeeds in connecting this partial address with a deserted house on Dartmoor. Meanwhile Jetheroe has been shot and his body has disappeared.

Smith travels with his brother to Devon, finds 'Pool-in-the-Moor' and cuts his way through the overgrown garden with another hatchet, this one bought at Exeter. Inside the house, which no one has entered for twenty years, Smith finds bloodstains and a spent bullet. A scorched fragment of a thousand-franc bank-note lies in the fireplace. It looks to Smith as though he has discovered the scene of the murder of Deveroux, the Lyons Bank robber, who was supposed to have escaped abroad in 1902 after eluding Mandle and Stone, both at that time policemen officially on his trail.

The brothers return to the house of Bob Stone, where they had left Molly Templeton after the fire. She has disappeared. False messages send them to London in search of her. On their return, Socrates confronts Stone and accuses him of Mandle's murder and the abduction of Molly. Stone admits his guilt, produces a gun and locks Smith in a cupboard.

At the house of mystery, 'Pool-in-the-Moor', Molly is in the custody of a woman with a criminal record earned while she kept a private lunatic asylum. During the night, Molly descends to the cellar and with a pick that has been left lying about she demolishes a brick wall, disclosing the skeleton of Deveroux, the Lyons bank robber. This upsets her, as does the sight of the face of a mysterious stranger at an attic window.

The stranger proves to be a policeman, assigned on Smith's instructions to keep an eye on Molly. When Stone arrives and tries to extort from Molly a promise of marriage, the policeman appears in the doorway and announces: 'My name is Sub-Inspector Frank Weldon from Scotland Yard. I shall take you into custody on a charge…' A shot rings out and Weldon pitches forward. Stone has fired from the hip. He bundles the body into a car and dumps it in a nearby lake. He then enters the cellar armed with two automatic pistols and awaits developments.

Socrates and his brother are not long in making an appearance. Another arrival is Mr Jetheroe, recovered from his wound so fully that he has been able to scale the fourteen-feet-high garden wall, set with broken glass. He proves to be none other than Molly's father, who has been awaiting a chance to clear his name. Sub-Inspector Weldon also has revived, thanks to the coldness of the water in the lake, and reports for further duty.

Stone dies in the shooting that ensues. Molly accepts Lexington Smith's offer of marriage. She says she cannot take a penny of Mandle's ill-gotten fortune (his share of the loot of Deveroux, the Lyons bank robber). Socrates says: 'Anyway, Lex has got quite a lot.' Jetheroe adds, fondly: 'And so has Lexington's future father-in-law.'

Lexington's eyes meet the girl's. 'Money!' he says, contemptuously.

It may readily be judged that the readers of the 150 or so novels which Edgar Wallace turned out on essentially similar lines to The Three Oak Mystery were in no great danger of philosophical, moral or political derangement. They were treated to nothing worse (provided they were not stylistically sensitive) than a vicarious dash from one unlikely situation to another. How exciting this was felt to be depended on the individual reader's degree of ignorance of real life; alternatively, on the extent to which he was ready and able to disregard the voice of experience and reason in the interest of his own entertainment. Practice, it seems, can make the suspension of intelligence a progressively easier matter. Wallace's books would never have achieved the astonishing sales that ultimately they did if they had been rejected by all sensible and educated people. The author Clemence Dane wrote in 1933: 'There is a joyous crowd of story-tellers which frankly accepts the fact that good stories and money-making go together. Edgar Wallace is their king… And though he may sneer, the highbrow generally reads the low-brow's Blood-stained Cabbage-stalk avidly …' She was right: in or around that year, it was estimated that of every four books being read in Britain one was an Edgar Wallace.

Such a situation indicated something more than casual, undiscriminating acceptance. Wallace was demanded. Censorious critics of the time used the word 'drug' repeatedly in connection with his work. The epithet was appropriate enough, no doubt, but it did not explain why this deluge of superficial, silly, slipshod fiction found addicts at every social level. Clemence Dane's reference was to 'good' stories but if by that she meant to connote convincing characterization, ingenuity of plot, credible conflict and logically satisfying resolution, Wallace was a nonstarter. Orwell accused Wallace of intellectual sadism. It seems unlikely, though, that anything so subtle would have won readers by the million. Wallace never created a scene of cruelty comparable with those that were to be commonplaces of crime fiction twenty years after his death. Nor did any of his novels portray sexual behaviour beyond the stage of chaste enfoldment in arms. He himself declared more than once that there was 'too much nastiness in modern literature'.

From these facts emerges the strong possibility that Wallace's success was, in large measure if not completely, due to those very characteristics of his writing which a critic believing himself to be sophisticated would consider deficiencies.

Taking his last-mentioned attribute first—the disinclination to treat of sex save in the most perfunctory, unreal terms—might not this in fact have matched a widespread public attitude? Britain in the 1920s was not populated exclusively by Bright Young Things, nor had Suffragettism and the Black Bottom seduced a war-sickened generation to the delights of free love. The solid majority was still bound by Victorian inhibition, the result of sexual ignorance and fear. It was tolerant of titillation at the level of 'bathing belle' pictures in newspapers and the regimented leg waving of revue choruses, but regarded Marie Stopes as a filthy-minded eccentric and poor D. H. Lawrence as a menace to society. To these people's self-defensive puritanism, Edgar Wallace offered nothing offensive, nothing disquieting. Negative virtues commend themselves to negatory minds.

Perhaps it also holds true that there is a quality in the contrivances of a lazy mind that appeals to people whose mood is one of reluctance to think. A Wallace book, like any other piece of escapist literature, was bought or borrowed as a means of temporary withdrawal from the demanding, worrying, disappointing world in which the reader normally lived. In that world, there were as many three-dimensional characters as he could cope with; it was a welcome change to be among a two-dimensional variety that required no effort to understand. All the cardboard figures were labelled—hero, heroine, villain, comic manservant, policeman—and so sympathy could be simply and accurately apportioned until the time came at the book's end for it to be collected up again like so much play-money.

As for silliness of plot: its heavy reliance on coincidence, pseudo-scientific devices, unidentified foreign powers, miraculous survival, intuition, and all the other intelligence-defying tricks of the pot-boiling trade—here again, it may be that Wallace offered not an affront but solace of a kind. People were aware in their hearts that the 1914-18 war had solved nothing and that the public optimism of the politicians masked their impotence and perplexity. There was as yet no question of impending catastrophe, but something seemed to have gone sadly wrong with the process of perpetual improvement that had been assumed to be natural law not only by the Victorians but by many of their successors. To read of events reaching a happy conclusion by manifestly unnatural and illogical means provided relief from the unpleasant feeling of having been let down.