PART ONE

In the first of a two-part feature our own Man of Mystery John Llewellyn Probert looks back at the Edgar Wallace Mysteries, a TV and cinema staple back in the late 1950s and early 1960s...

When the British writer Edgar Wallace died in 1932 at the age of 56 he left behind him a remarkable and immense legacy of fiction, including over 170 novels and 950 short stories. While he wrote adventure and science-fiction, and pretty much his last work was the original story for the 1933 King Kong, Wallace remains most famous for his mystery and detective stories.

So popular were these that in his heyday, and for many years after, Wallace was a household name in the same way as Agatha Christie or Arthur Conan-Doyle and, like those authors, reprint editions of his books are still selling today. His work was adapted for both the big and small screen, but what may be surprising to some is just how many films were made.

We’re not going to talk about all of them this time, suffice to say his novel The Terror became one of the very first talking pictures in 1928, Bela Lugosi starred in his Dark Eyes of London in 1939, and even the infamous Harry Alan Towers made four Wallace pictures (including Circus of Fear with Christopher Lee and Leo Genn) in the mid 1960s.

Wallace’s stories found their true cinematic home, however, in two distinct series of films made in two different European countries. In 1959 Danish company Rialto film acquired the rights to a number of Wallace stories, formed a German subsidiary and ended up making nearly 40 movies based on the author’s work, all ostensibly set in the UK but actually filmed in Germany. These, and other German crime films that were made off the back of their success, are what have now become collectively termed the ‘Krimis’ (short for the German ‘Kriminalfilm’ or ‘Kriminalroman’).

Very different from that film series, and what we are concerning ourselves with this time, is the series of Edgar Wallace adaptations made by Britain’s Merton Park Studios for Nat Cohen and Stuart Ley’s Anglo Amalgamated company. Cohen and Levy acquired the rights to most of Wallace’s books and stories in 1960 and over the next five years 47 films were made, all with running times of around an hour and designed to play as second features, mainly on the ABC circuit but with some going to Rank instead.

The adaptations play fast and loose with their source material, and, also like the German series, there’s no attempt at period authenticity. The low budgets (around £22,000 per film) necessitated contemporary settings and lots of location shooting, all of which makes these films even more fascinating and/or nostalgic to watch now. They receive regular showings on television’s Talking Pictures TV channel, and a twenty DVD box set of the entire series is still available on the now sadly defunct Network label. When the films were sold to US television more episodes were needed than were available. Anglo Amalgamated solved the problem by adding a number of other films to the package. Therefore the ‘Edgar Wallace Mysteries,’ as the series was called, wasn’t strictly all Edgar Wallace, but as those extra films were part of the package and are included in Network’s set, we’re going to talk about those here as well.

MAN OF MYSTERY

Each Merton Park Edgar Wallace film began with bust of the author which would rotate in silhouette while the series’ theme played. The title of the track was ‘Man of Mystery’ and it was written by Michael Carr, a composer who was also famous during that era for songs like ‘The Little Boy that Santa Claus Forgot’ and the theme to the popular TV show White Horses, sung by Jackie Lee.