埃德加·华莱士

理查德·霍雷肖·埃德加·华莱士（英语：Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace，1875年4月1日—1932年2月10日）是一位英国作家，出生于伦敦。

华莱士出身贫困，是一个私生子，12岁时辍学。他于21岁参军，曾在第二次布尔战争期间担任路透社和《每日邮报》的战地记者。因受债务所困，他从南非回到伦敦，靠写惊悚小说维持生计，出版了《四义士》等众多作品。利用他在刚果担任记者期间报道比利时暴行的经历，华莱士还在《温莎杂志》等杂志上连载短篇小说，后来出版了《桑德斯河》(Sanders of the River, 1911年) 等短篇小说集。他于1921年与著名出版社霍德与斯托顿签约，成为了一名在国际上受到认可的作家。

在1931年英国大选竞选布莱克浦的自由党议员失败后，华莱士搬到了好莱坞。在那里他担任雷电华电影公司编剧。在电影《金刚》（1933年）起草阶段，他因糖尿病而突然去世。

华莱士是一位多产的作家，他的一位出版商曾声称当时英国四分之一的书都是由他所写。除了新闻报道外，他还创作了电影剧本、诗歌、非虚构历史小说、18部舞台剧、957部短篇小说和170多部长篇小说。有超过160部电影是基于华莱士的作品创作的。

除了代表作品《金刚》外，他还因为里德先生侦探小说系列与《绿箭侠》系列而被铭记为一名“殖民想象”（colonial imagination）的作家。他作品各版本的总销售量超过5000万册，1997年《经济学人》将称他为“20世纪最多产的惊悚作家之一”。

Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace (1 April 1875 – 10 February 1932) was a British writer of crime and adventure fiction.

Born into poverty as an illegitimate London child, Wallace left school at the age of 12. He joined the army at age 21 and was a war correspondent during the Second Boer War for Reuters and the Daily Mail. Struggling with debt, he left South Africa, returned to London and began writing thrillers to raise income, publishing books including The Four Just Men (1905). Drawing on his time as a reporter in the Congo, covering the Belgian atrocities, Wallace serialised short stories in magazines such as The Windsor Magazine and later published collections such as Sanders of the River (1911). He signed with Hodder & Stoughton in 1921 and became an internationally recognised author.

After an unsuccessful bid to stand as Liberal MP for Blackpool (as one of David Lloyd George's Independent Liberals) in the 1931 general election, Wallace moved to Hollywood, where he worked as a script writer for RKO. He died suddenly from undiagnosed diabetes, during the initial drafting of King Kong (1933).

Wallace was such a prolific writer that one of his publishers claimed that a quarter of all books in England were written by him. As well as journalism, Wallace wrote screen plays, poetry, historical non-fiction, 18 stage plays, 957 short stories and over 170 novels, 12 in 1929 alone. More than 160 films have been made of Wallace's work.

In addition to his work on King Kong, he is remembered as a writer of "the colonial imagination", for the J. G. Reeder detective stories, and for the Green Archer serial. He sold over 50 million copies of his combined works in various editions and The Economist in 1997 describes him as "one of the most prolific thriller writers of [the 20th] century". Although the great majority of his books are out of print in the UK, they are very popular in Germany, with around 50 of his titles still in print. A 50-minute German TV documentary was made in 1963 called The Edgar Wallace Story, which featured his son Bryan Edgar Wallace.

Life and work

Ancestry and birth

Wallace's great-grandfather was entertainer James Henry Marriott, and his grandmother was actress Alice Marriott. Wallace was born at 7 Ashburnham Grove, Greenwich, to actors Richard Horatio Marriott Edgar (1847–1894) and Mary Jane "Polly" Richards, née Blair (born 1843).

Wallace's mother's family had been in show business, and she worked in the theatre as a stagehand, usherette, and bit-part actress until she married in 1867. Her husband, Captain Joseph Richards, was born in 1838; he was from an Irish family. He and his father John Richards were both Merchant Navy captains, and his mother Catherine Richards came from a mariner family. Joseph died at sea in 1868, leaving his pregnant wife destitute. After the birth of Wallace's older sibling, his mother returned to the stage, assuming the stage name "Polly" Richards. In 1872, she met and joined the Marriott family theatre troupe, managed by Alice Marriott, her husband Richard Edgar, and her three adult children (from earlier liaisons), Grace, Adeline and Richard Horatio Marriott Edgar.

Wallace's parents had a "broom cupboard" style sexual encounter during an after-show party. Discovering she was pregnant, his mother invented a fictitious obligation in Greenwich that would last at least half a year and obtained a room in a boarding house where she lived until her son's birth, on 1 April 1875. During her confinement she had asked her midwife to find a couple to foster the child. The midwife introduced Wallace's mother to her close friend, Mrs Freeman, a mother of ten children, whose husband George Freeman was a Billingsgate fishmonger. On 9 April 1875, his mother took Wallace to the semi-literate Freeman family, and made arrangements to visit often.