By: James Aitchison

Two men, both Edgars, born in the same year — 1875 — would become the most prolific authors of the twentieth century, creating two fictional characters that have never ceased to capture the world’s imagination — King Kong and Tarzan.

The first Edgar first: Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace, born into poverty on 1 April 1875 in England.  However, being born on April Fool’s Day would not prove a bad omen.  It was estimated that once a quarter of all books sold in England were written by him.  His credits include screen plays, poetry, historical non-fiction, 18 West End stage plays, 957 short stories and over 170 novels, 12 written in 1929 alone!

More than 160 films have been made based on his work.

The child of two actors, he was fostered to the family of a Billingsgate fishmonger.  When Wallace’s mother could no longer afford the small sum she had been paying for his upkeep, the family adopted him rather than placing him in a workhouse.  Leaving school at 12, Wallace worked as a milk delivery boy, a shoe shop assistant and a newspaper seller at Ludgate Circus.

He joined the British Army at 21, taking the name Edgar Wallace, after the author of Ben-Hur, Lew Wallace.  Later he was a war correspondent for Reuters and the Daily Mail.  Burdened by debt, Wallace returned to London and began writing thrillers to increase his income.  Yet when his birth mother, aged 60 and terminally ill, approached him for money, Wallace turned her away.

His most prolific years (1908 to 1932) saw the launch of his most popular series: The Four Just Men, Sanders of the River and Mr J. G. Reeder.  A seemingly endless stream of bestsellers dominated the market: The Ringer, The Clue of the Twisted Candle, The Crimson Circle, The Face in the Night, The Black Abbot, The Squeaker and The Terrible People.  He was the first British crime novelist to use policemen as his protagonists, rather than amateur sleuths common to most writers of the time.

Despite selling over 50 million copies of his work, Wallace was always plagued by gambling debts, owning racehorses and a lifestyle he could not afford.  Until 1915 he had sold his work in a haphazard fashion, literally to pay pressing debts.  Acquiring an agent, he signed with the famous publishing company Hodder & Stoughton.  From then on he managed to earn royalties and advances on his output.

By 1929 Wallace’s earnings were £50,000 a year (about £2 million in today’s equivalent).  As the “King of Thrillers”, he was famous for his trademark trilby, cigarette holder and yellow Rolls-Royce.  He was equally famous for turning out books at lightning speed, writing a 70,000-word novel in three days, and even writing three novels at once.  Locked away for 72 hours at a time, he dictated his words onto wax cylinders, bolstered by countless cigarettes and cups of sweet tea.  He filled cylinder after cylinder with novels, and hired a young man named Robert Curtis, a fast and accurate typist, as his secretary.  Curtis was happy to work through the night to keep pace with his boss.  Wallace rarely edited his own work.  And Hodder & Stoughton were happy to publish everything he wrote as fast he wrote it!

Wallace wrote sensational novels for a loyal public.  Critics loathed him; even Trotsky called his work “mediocre and contemptible”.

At 56, owing £20,000 in income tax, Wallace was offered the chance to go to Hollywood: RKO Studios would pay him £600 a week to write horror films.  Seriously overweight and lethargic, he rented a house on North Maple Drive, Beverly Hills, where he drafted a story of a prehistoric monster named Kong.  Working with RKO producer Merion Cooper, he conceived the story with its memorable end scene of King Kong atop the Empire State Building.  Sadly, he did not live to see the final production.

In February 1932, Wallace slipped into a coma with sugar diabetes, fed by years of drinking huge quantities of sweet tea.  Among those who gathered to say farewell were Robert Curtis and Wallace’s old friend, actor Walter Huston.

Flags flew at half-mast in Southampton when Wallace’s coffin arrived.  The bells of Fleet Street tolled and the Wyndham Theatre was in darkness.  He died owing his creditors £140,000, while his assets were virtually nil.

….

The second Edgar — Edgar Rice Burroughs — was born on 1 September 1875.  He could trace his ancestry back to the Pilgrims who settled Massachusetts Bay in the early seventeenth century. 

He failed entry to West Point, and his heart problem ruled him out for military service.  After a failed mining venture, he became a wholesaler of pencil-sharpeners.  With time on his hands, he began reading pulp fiction magazines.  He famously said, “If people are paid for writing such rot such as I read in some of those magazines, I could write stories just as rotten…”

Burroughs earned his first audience writing science fiction.  His Martian series includes best-sellers such as The Gods of Mars, The Warlord of Mars and Swords of Mars. 

October 1912 saw the launch of a cultural sensation: Tarzan of the Apes was published to universal acclaim.  Unlike Wallace, Burroughs was determined to exploit his character through tightly controlled copyrights and royalties, a syndicated comic strip, a radio serial, movies and merchandise.  Arguably he was the first author to pioneer “Subsidiary Rights” in his work.  In silent movies, Elmo Lincoln portrayed Tarzan; in twelve films from 1932, Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller played the Ape Man, delivering such lines as “Me Tarzan, you Jane.”

Tarzan soon became a family affair.  His third son John illustrated his father’s books, while his daughter Joan became the voice of Jane in the Tarzan radio series.

However, unbeknownst to his legions of fans, Tarzan had a darker side.  Burroughs supported eugenics and scientific racism.  He held that English nobles were an elite among Anglo-Saxons.  Thus, Tarzan (born Viscount Greystoke) was adopted by talking apes who also express eugenicist views.  In the books, Tarzan is highly literate and articulate; only in the movies does he speak in broken English.  Tarzan’s noble qualities endowed him with speed, stamina, agility, superb swimming skills and the ability to swing through the jungle on vines.  Tarzan could wrestle gorillas, lions, tigers, rhinos and leopards.  And being intellectually superior, he could learn any new language in days — including French, Finnish, Dutch, German, Swahili and various Bantu tongues.  When he is eighteen, Tarzan meets a young American woman Jane Porter and, in the books, Tarzan follows her to America.  Contemptuous of civilisation, Tarzan returns to Africa with Jane, where they live in a remote estate in the jungle for more adventures.

Like Edgar Wallace, Burroughs received his share of criticism.  Even the great Rudyard Kipling commented that his Jungle Books had begat many imitators, naming Tarzan as the work of a “genius”.  Referring to Burroughs, Kipling said: “He was reported to have said that he wanted to find out how bad a book he could write and ‘get away with it’, which is a legitimate ambition.” Gore Vidal, on the other hand, praised Burroughs for creating a compelling “daydream figure”.

In 1919 the author purchased a large ranch north of Los Angeles which he named Tarzana.  Today, Tarzana has transformed into a suburb.  (There is also Tarzan, Texas!)

Burroughs, in his late 60s, was in Honolulu when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour.  He became a war correspondent despite his age.  He died in 1950, having written almost 80 novels.

Tarzan remains an iconic character, unique in global popular culture.