This may be a coincidence, but the fact that Wallace’s thriller The Fellowship of the Frog had been adapted to film in 1937, and then given an original sequel The Return of the Frog the year after, may have been on Tolkien’s mind at the time.Īs a child in school I was confused by a teacher referring to the three boys in the front row as “The Three Just Men”. Another example I already mentioned in the article “ Lord of the Reams” was that J.R.R Tolkien, when forced at short notice to come up with titles for the unplanned trilogy division of The Lord of the Rings, settled on The Fellowship of the Ring and The Return of the King for the first and third. We already covered one such example with the Super Mario series in that earlier article, but now let’s look at some others. Because of this, it is easy to forget the impact and influence that Wallace had on others. In Germany, on the other hand, he is well remembered for film adaptations of his works made in the 1960s, which have kept his writings alive. Despite this seemingly enduring image, Wallace is now relatively little known today in the English-speaking world, not least due to selling the rights to his books for little in order to pay his debts.

Wallace and his publishers created a celebrity image of him, with his trademark trilby hat, cigarette holder and yellow Rolls Royce. Wallace began writing detective stories and thrillers as a means of paying his debts. Throughout his life he had problems with debt, driven by both a thirst for gambling and (according to his biographer and secretary) being overly generous with loans and donations to grifters, remembering his own childhood poverty.

He became a war correspondent for the Daily Mail, writing about the Boer War and later the Belgian atrocities in the Congo. Wallace met Rudyard Kipling in South Africa in 1898 and was inspired to write poetry. All of this experience would go into his later writings. Originally, he used this alias to enlist in the British Army in 1896, after serving in diverse jobs such as delivering milk, selling newspapers, being a ship’s cook and working in a rubber factory. He was inspired by the writings of Lew Wallace and derived his own alias, Edgar Wallace, from the Ben-Hur author’s surname. An illegitimate child, he was raised in part by the Freeman family and took their name. As noted in that previous article, Wallace (1875-1932) was born Richard Horatio Edgar Freeman to a poor background in London.

The Unreformed Kingdom by Tom Anderson