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) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Council of Justice | (1908) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Just Men of Cordova | (1917) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Law of the Four Just Men / Again the Three Just Men | (1921) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Three Just Men | (1929) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Publication Order of T.B. Smith Books
The Nine Bears / The Other Man / The Cheaters / Silinski, Master Criminal | (1910) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Admirable Carfew | (1914) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Publication Order of Commissioner Sanders Books
Sanders of the River | (1911) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The People of the River | (1912) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The River of Stars | (1913) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Bosambo of the River | (1914) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Sandi the King-Maker | (1922) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Sanders / Mr. Commissioner Sanders | (1926) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Again Sanders | (1928) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Keepers of the King's Peace | (1930) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Publication Order of Lieutenant Bones Books
Bones | (1915) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Bones in London | (1921) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Bones of the River | (1923) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Publication Order of J.G. Reeder Books
Room 13 | (1924) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Mind of Mr. J G Reeder / The Murder Book of J.G. Reeder | (1925) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Casefiles of Mr. J.G. Reeder | (1927) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Terror Keep | (1927) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Guv'nor / Mr. Reeder Returns | (1932) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Mr J G Reeder Returns | (1932) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Red Aces | (1932) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Publication Order of Elk Books
The Fellowship of the Frog | (1925) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Joker / The Colossus | (1926) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Twister | (1928) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
White Face | (1930) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Publication Order of Educated Evans Books
More Educated Evans | (1926) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Good Evans / The Educated Man | (1927) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Publication Order of Supt. Minter Books
Publication Order of The Ringer Books
The Ringer | (1925) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Again the Ringer / The Ringer Returns | (1929) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Publication Order of Smithy Books
Publication Order of Mystery League Books
The Day of Uniting | (1926) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Hand of Power | (1927) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Hardway Diamonds Mystery | (1930) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The House Of Terror | (2007) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Bungalow on the Roof | (2008) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Publication Order of Standalone Novels
The African Millionaire | (1904) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Angel Esquire | (1908) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Duke In The Suburbs | (1909) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Eve's Island | (1909) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Fourth Plague | (1913) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Grey Timothy | (1913) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Man Who Bought London | (1915) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Clue of the Twisted Candle | (1916) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Secret House | (1917) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Kate Plus Ten | (1917) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Man Who Knew | (1918) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Adventures of Heine | (1919) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Green Rust | (1919) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Jack O' Judgment | (1920) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Daffodil Mystery / The Daffodil Murder | (1920) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Book of All-Power | (1921) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Angel of Terror / The Destroying Angel | (1922) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Mr Justice Maxell | (1922) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Flying Fifty-Five | (1922) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Crimson Circle | (1922) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Clue of the New Pin | (1923) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Missing Million | (1923) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Captains of Souls | (1923) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Green Archer | (1923) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Face in the Night | (1924) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Three Oak Mystery | (1924) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Dark Eyes Of London | (1924) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Sinister Man | (1924) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Double Dan aka Diana of Kara-Kara | (1924) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Daughters of the Night | (1925) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Strange Countess | (1925) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Black Avons / How They Feared in the Times of the Tudors | (1925) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
A King by Night | (1925) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Blue Hand | (1925) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Hairy Arm / The Avenger | (1925) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Traitor's Gate | (1926) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Barbara on Her Own | (1926) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Black Abbot | (1926) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Door with Seven Locks | (1926) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Yellow Snake | (1926) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Square Emerald / The Girl from Scotland Yard | (1926) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
A Debt Discharged | (1926) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
We Shall See! / The Gaol Breaker | (1926) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Northing Tramp / The Tramp | (1926) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Feathered Serpent | (1927) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Flat 2 | (1927) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Blue Hand | (1927) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Forger / The Clever One | (1927) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Four Square Jane | (1927) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Man Who Was Nobody | (1927) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Squeaker / The Squealer | (1927) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Flying Squad | (1928) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Gunner / Gunman's Bluff | (1928) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Terrible People | (1928) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Double | (1928) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Green Ribbon | (1929) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Iron Grip | (1929) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Terror | (1929) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The India-Rubber Men | (1929) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Golden Hades | (1929) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Planetoid 127 | (1929) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Ghost of Down Hill | (1929) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Clue of The Silver Key / The Silver Key | (1930) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Down Under Donovan | (1930) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Thief in the Night | (1930) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
John Flack | (1930) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Devil Man | (1931) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
On the Spot | (1931) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Coat Of Arms | (1931) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
When the Gangs Came to London | (1932) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Sergeant Sir Peter / Sergeant Dunn, C.I.D. | (1932) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Frightened Lady / The Mystery of the Frightened Lady | (1932) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Frightened Lady | (1932) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
King Kong | (1933) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Green Pack | (1933) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Calendar | (1963) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Death Packs a Suitcase | (1964) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Brigand | (1964) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Man from Morocco | (1970) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Mission That Failed | (1970) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Mixer | (1973) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Road to London | (1986) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Publication Order of Collections
Writ In Barracks | (1900) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Heroes All Gallant Deeds of the War | (1914) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Trial of the Seddons | (1924) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Circumstantial Evidence and Other Stories | (1929) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Humorous Stories | (1934) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Fighting Snub Reilly and Other Stories | (1934) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Sooper and Others | (1984) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Death Room | (1986) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Vampire of Wembley | (2020) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Publication Order of Chapbooks
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
Famous Scottish Regiments | (1914) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Standard History of the War | (1916) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
People: A Short Autobiography | (1926) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
This England | (1927) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Kitchener's Army | (2015) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Publication Order of Anthologies
The Pocket Book of Mystery Stories | (1941) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
World's Great Mystery Stories | (1943) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Fifty Famous Detectives of Fiction | (1948) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
City Sleuths and Tough Guys | (1989) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
100 Crooked Little Crime Stories | (1994) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Short Stories: After Dark Classics | (2012) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Black Cat Weekly #47 | (2022) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
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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