Edgar Wallace Books In Order
Book links take you to Amazon. As an Amazon Associate I earn money from qualifying purchases.Publication Order of The Four Just Men Books
The Four Just Men | (1905) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Council of Justice | (1908) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Just Men of Cordova | (1917) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Law of the Four Just Men / Again the Three Just Men | (1921) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Three Just Men | (1929) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Publication Order of T.B. Smith Books
The Nine Bears / The Other Man / The Cheaters / Silinski, Master Criminal | (1910) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Admirable Carfew | (1914) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Publication Order of Commissioner Sanders Books
Sanders of the River | (1911) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The People of the River | (1912) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The River of Stars | (1913) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Bosambo of the River | (1914) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Sandi the King-Maker | (1922) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Sanders / Mr. Commissioner Sanders | (1926) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Again Sanders | (1928) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Keepers of the King's Peace | (1930) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Publication Order of Lieutenant Bones Books
Bones | (1915) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Bones in London | (1921) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Bones of the River | (1923) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Publication Order of J.G. Reeder Books
Room 13 | (1924) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Mind of Mr. J G Reeder / The Murder Book of J.G. Reeder | (1925) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Casefiles of Mr. J.G. Reeder | (1927) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Terror Keep | (1927) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Guv'nor / Mr. Reeder Returns | (1932) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Mr J G Reeder Returns | (1932) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Red Aces | (1932) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Publication Order of Elk Books
The Fellowship of the Frog | (1925) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Joker / The Colossus | (1926) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Twister | (1928) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
White Face | (1930) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Publication Order of Educated Evans Books
More Educated Evans | (1926) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Good Evans / The Educated Man | (1927) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Publication Order of Supt. Minter Books
Big Foot | (1927) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Lone House Mystery | (1929) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Publication Order of The Ringer Books
The Ringer | (1925) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Again the Ringer / The Ringer Returns | (1929) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Publication Order of Smithy Books
Smithy, Nobby and Co. | (2016) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Publication Order of Mystery League Books
The Day of Uniting | (1926) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Hand of Power | (1927) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Hardway Diamonds Mystery | (1930) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The House Of Terror | (2007) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Bungalow on the Roof | (2008) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Publication Order of Standalone Novels
The African Millionaire | (1904) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Angel Esquire | (1908) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Duke In The Suburbs | (1909) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Eve's Island | (1909) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Fourth Plague | (1913) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Grey Timothy | (1913) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Man Who Bought London | (1915) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Clue of the Twisted Candle | (1916) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Secret House | (1917) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Kate Plus Ten | (1917) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Man Who Knew | (1918) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Adventures of Heine | (1919) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Green Rust | (1919) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Jack O' Judgment | (1920) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Daffodil Mystery / The Daffodil Murder | (1920) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Book of All-Power | (1921) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Angel of Terror / The Destroying Angel | (1922) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Mr Justice Maxell | (1922) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Flying Fifty-Five | (1922) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Crimson Circle | (1922) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Clue of the New Pin | (1923) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Missing Million | (1923) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Captains of Souls | (1923) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Green Archer | (1923) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Face in the Night | (1924) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Three Oak Mystery | (1924) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Dark Eyes Of London | (1924) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Sinister Man | (1924) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Double Dan aka Diana of Kara-Kara | (1924) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Daughters of the Night | (1925) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Strange Countess | (1925) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Black Avons / How They Feared in the Times of the Tudors | (1925) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
A King by Night | (1925) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Blue Hand | (1925) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Hairy Arm / The Avenger | (1925) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Traitor's Gate | (1926) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Barbara on Her Own | (1926) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Black Abbot | (1926) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Door with Seven Locks | (1926) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Yellow Snake | (1926) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Square Emerald / The Girl from Scotland Yard | (1926) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
A Debt Discharged | (1926) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
We Shall See! / The Gaol Breaker | (1926) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Northing Tramp / The Tramp | (1926) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Feathered Serpent | (1927) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Flat 2 | (1927) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Blue Hand | (1927) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Forger / The Clever One | (1927) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Four Square Jane | (1927) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Man Who Was Nobody | (1927) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Squeaker / The Squealer | (1927) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Flying Squad | (1928) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Gunner / Gunman's Bluff | (1928) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Terrible People | (1928) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Double | (1928) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Green Ribbon | (1929) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Iron Grip | (1929) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Terror | (1929) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The India-Rubber Men | (1929) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Golden Hades | (1929) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Planetoid 127 | (1929) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Ghost of Down Hill | (1929) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Clue of The Silver Key / The Silver Key | (1930) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Down Under Donovan | (1930) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Thief in the Night | (1930) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
John Flack | (1930) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Devil Man | (1931) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
On the Spot | (1931) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Coat Of Arms | (1931) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
When the Gangs Came to London | (1932) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Sergeant Sir Peter / Sergeant Dunn, C.I.D. | (1932) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Frightened Lady / The Mystery of the Frightened Lady | (1932) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Frightened Lady | (1932) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
King Kong | (1933) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Green Pack | (1933) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Calendar | (1963) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Death Packs a Suitcase | (1964) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Brigand | (1964) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Man from Morocco | (1970) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Mission That Failed | (1970) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Mixer | (1973) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Road to London | (1986) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Publication Order of Collections
Writ In Barracks | (1900) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Heroes All Gallant Deeds of the War | (1914) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Trial of the Seddons | (1924) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Circumstantial Evidence and Other Stories | (1929) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Humorous Stories | (1934) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Fighting Snub Reilly and Other Stories | (1934) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Sooper and Others | (1984) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Death Room | (1986) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Vampire of Wembley | (2020) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Publication Order of Chapbooks
The Orator | (1928) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
Famous Scottish Regiments | (1914) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Standard History of the War | (1916) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
People: A Short Autobiography | (1926) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
This England | (1927) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Kitchener's Army | (2015) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Publication Order of Anthologies
The Pocket Book of Mystery Stories | (1941) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
World's Great Mystery Stories | (1943) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Fifty Famous Detectives of Fiction | (1948) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
City Sleuths and Tough Guys | (1989) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
100 Crooked Little Crime Stories | (1994) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Short Stories: After Dark Classics | (2012) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Edgar Wallace was a British writer and one of the most popular and prolific writers of the 20th century. Doubling up as a crime writer, playwright, and journalist, he wrote over 175 novels, 40 short story collections, 24 plays, and numerous articles in journals and newspapers in less than 3 decades of writing. At the height of his powers, a popular claim was that he penned a quarter of all the books read in England. Over 85 years after his death, his name is often invoked as he still towers like a colossus in the mystery genre. Wallace was born a bastard in Greenwich, London in 1875, the product of a union between two actors. His mother christened him Richard Horatio Edgar Freeman and put him in foster care when he was just a week old. Despite living with a foster family, his extrovert nature meant he had a relatively enjoyable childhood. He worked a number of odd jobs in his youth before joining up with the army that sent him to South Africa. He soon found out that soldiering was not for him and was soon back in London, where he got a job as a crime reporter for the newly established Daily Mail. It was as a reporter that he shortened his name to “Edgar Wallace”, a last name that he took from the author of “Ben Hur”, General Lew Wallace.
The turn of the 20th century was not a very good period for Wallace, who was a newly married man and a father who had developed a taste for the finer things in life. Edgar Wallace was of the belief that any attempt at controlling spending was a bad omen, as it meant that his fortunes would one day diminish. He would head back to South Africa in 1902 as a newspaper editor only to come back to England when Eleanor his daughter fell ill and died. In 1904, he took a job for a newspaper covering the Russo-Japanese War, which took him and his wife to continental Europe. It was in Europe that made acquaintance with a group of spies. His encounter became the basis for his first mystery novel; the 1905 published “The Four Just Men”. The novel was to be just the first of the author’s collection of secret organization series. The novel is a narrative of a group of super-rich vigilantes that played their part in making the world a better place through assassinating people responsible for unpunishable wrongs. His decision to promote and publish the novel without any help from the major publishing houses proved a disaster, as he ran out of funds forcing him to declare bankruptcy.
Undeterred with his failure Wallace buckled up and began churning out novel after novel until he hit a home run with the 1911 published title “Sanders of the River” that was a chronicle of his time in South Africa. He would follow the novel with the Just Men Adventures that featured Scotland Yard’s Inspector Elk as the chief protagonist. By the 20s, his literary career had picked up steam as he averaged 18 novels a year by 1926, and was up to 34 by 1929. At the time, only John Creasey and Georges Simenon could have been said to be more prolific. Wallace’s legendary concentration and work ethic was notoriously fueled by smoking between 80 to 100 cigarettes a day and between 30 to 40 cups of sweetened tea. In fact, a dramatically elongated cigarette holder was his most famous trademark. Despite the workload that he put on himself, he was known to never make notes and to keep the plots of his novels in his head. He would typically write out the first page of a novel in his own hand, before dictating the rest of the novel into a machine or to a secretary.
Edgar Wallace’s fictional worlds are full of innovatively named criminal organizations such as the “Crimson Circle”, the “Red Hand”, and the “Fellowship of the Frog”. They are also peopled with colorful super villains that include gangsters, crooks, plucky heroines, intrepid amateur sleuths and seemingly respectable men living double lives. Going against the conventions of the time, Wallace was the first to make a police officer the lead protagonist in his novels as opposed to an amateur sleuth. In 1925, he created his most famous series “The Four Just Men”. The lead protagonists in the novels are four rich men that believe that it is up to them to mete out punishment for crimes, for which the law gives, inadequate or no punishment. They style themselves as the Council of Justice that is indifferent to the opinions of men preferring passionless intellect. They constantly pit their intellect against the most powerful and cunning underworld organizations that have minds that are just as smart. To anyone that violates the sacred conventions, their answer is swift death. Away from his writing, he also worked in Hollywood with his most important contributions being the script for the movie King Kong and the Hound of Baskervilles. Many movies on the script of King Kong as well as several of his other novels have been made over the years. He died of pneumonia in his Beverly Hills home in 1932 aged 56.
“The Four Just Men” is one of Edgar Wallace’s most popular novels that introduce the four self-styled men of the Council of Justice. The group of men is composed of psychopaths who use their psychopathy to murder people who have done grievous wrong to others and would get away with it were it left to the law. At the beginning of the novel, the four just men have been reduced to three after one of their own is caught in a shootout forcing them to hire a fourth – a highly skilled but more common serial killer. The group’s first target is Sir Phillip Ramon, the Secretary of State of Foreign Affairs ,who has riled the four with his plans to push through a bill that would put Spanish rebels fighting against repression in Spain at risk in the UK. The council delivers a warning to the secretary warning him of dire consequences if he continues on his path. With a locked room mystery and serialization in the Daily Mail, the novel is a hair-raising classic from Wallace.
“The Council of Justice” is the fast paced, suspenseful, and thrilling sequel to the first novel in the Four Just Men series of novels. The council of four has considerably toned down on their vigilante stance, even though they still work outside the law. They go after The Red 100 a terrorist organization led by The Woman of Graz. Despite a softened vigilante streak, they still go in hard against the terrorists with strategic assassinations and decisive strikes. Following a high stakes coup, one of the four is taken into police custody and is subsequently held in a maximum-security prison. Never known for sitting on their laurels, the four announce that they will get him off – illegally of course. What follows is an exceptional tale full of suspense that will get the heart of many a thriller fan racing.
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