The Fellowship of the Frog
By Edgar Wallace
A dry radiator coincided with a burst tyre. The second coincidence was the proximity of Maytree Cottage on Horsham Road. The cottage was more significant than most, with a timbered front and a thatched roof. Standing at the gate, Richard Gordon stopped to admire. The house dated back to the days of Elizabeth, but his interest and admiration were not those of the antiquary.
Nor, though he loved the horticulturist’s flowers, the broad garden was a patchwork of colour, and the fragrance of cabbage roses delighted his senses. Nor was it the air of comfort and cleanliness that pervaded the place, the scrubbed red-brick pathway that led to the door, the spotless curtains behind leaded panes. It was the girl in the red-lined basket chair that arrested his gaze.
She sat on a lawn in the shade of a mulberry tree with her shapely young limbs stiffly extended, a book in her hand, and a large box of chocolates by her side. Her hair was the colour of old gold, an old gold that held life and sheen; a flawless complexion, and, when she turned her head in his direction, a pair of grave, questioning eyes, more profound than grey, yet greyer than blue… She drew up her feet hurriedly and rose.
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Edgar Wallace
Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace (1 April 1875 – 10 February 1932) was a British writer of sensational detective, gangster, adventure and sci-fi novels, plays and stories.
Biography.
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 for Reuters and the Daily Mail during the Second Boer War. 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 serialized short stories in magazines such as The Windsor Magazine and later published collections such as Sanders of the River (1911).
He signed with Hodder and Stoughton in 1921 and became an internationally recognized 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 scriptwriter 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 he wrote a quarter of all books in England.
As well as journalism, Wallace wrote screenplays, 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 using 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 described him as “one of the most prolific thriller writers of [the 20th] century”. However, most of his books are out of print in the UK but are still read in Germany. A 50-minute German TV documentary 1963 called The Edgar Wallace Story featured his son Bryan Edgar Wallace.
Edgar Wallace
