Old Bestseller Review: The Feathered Serpent, by Edgar Wallace

Old Bestseller Review: The Feathered Serpent, by Edgar Wallace

by Rich Horton

Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace was born in 1875 in London. He was illegitimate, and grew up in poverty. He left school at age 12, joined the Army at 21, and acted as a war correspondent in the second Boer War. He turned to writing in 1905, beginning with stories based on his journalistic work (among other things, he investigated Belgian atrocities in the Congo.) His writing proved very successful, and he was very prolific, writing over 150 novels, and nearly a thousand short stories, as well as plays, poetry, non-fiction and screenplays. He moved to the US in 1931 to write screen plays for RKO, and he wrote the first draft of the screenplay for King Kong, but died rather suddenly in 1932. (Perhaps he could be called the "Leigh Brackett" of King Kong!)

He is not widely read now, and I had not read anything by him. But I found a copy of The Feathered Serpent at an estate sale, and figured I'd give it a try. The novel was serialized in the Weekly Telegraph in 1926 and 1927, and published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1927, with a US edition from Doubleday Doran. My copy is from Grossett and Dunlap in 1928. 

Many sources claim that the novel was later reprinted as Inspector Wade and the Feathered Serpent. This is not really true. There was a comic strip based (very loosely) on the stories of Wallace, some time after his death. They seem to have decided to unify the different stories by using the same name for the Inspector character in each story, so for The Feathered Serpent, the character Inspector Clarke (a somewhat minor character in the original book) became Inspector Wade. The comic strips seem to have been "renovelized" for republication as a Big Little Book. Three Inspector Wade books were published beginning in 1939. Inspector Wade and the Feathered Serpent came out in 1940. Based on snippets of that book I could find, the plot was radically changed from the original novel, and the book completely rewritten (in much worse style.) It seems to have been much shorter -- and after all Big Little Books were for children.

Back to the actual novel. It's fairly good fun -- no lasting masterpiece, but a nice readable novel with an interesting if implausible central mystery. The two central characters -- the "detectives" if you will -- are Peter Dewin, a reporter, and Daphne Olroyd, a young woman trying to make her way in London -- at first she is an assistant to the very wealthy Leicester Crewe, but when he decides to go overseas she gets a new job with another wealthy man, the scientist and philanthropist Geoffrey Beale. A side plot, of course, is the quickly developing relationship between Dewin and Olroyd.

The primary mystery concerns some threatening messages that some people receive featuring an illustration of a "Feathered Serpent" -- a Central American quasi-religious figure. The vulgar but popular actress Ella Creed gets one, Leicester Crewe, who seems to be perhaps her sugar daddy. And then there is a murder, of a man named Joe Farmer, who seemed to have some connection to both Creed and Crewe. There are rumors that a criminal named William Lane, thought to be dead, has been seen alive. Daphne Olroyd is briefly kidnapped at one point, while Peter Dewin keeps figuring out bits and pieces of the mystery without quite understanding it. And Geoffrey Beale's scientific knowledge -- he had been doing anthropological studies in Central America -- offers some hints. A past counterfeiting scheme, involving at least the mysterious William Lane as well as Joe Farmer, and a woman named Paula Staines, might have some bearing on things ...

The conclusion involves yet another murder, sort of an "impossible" crime, and a convoluted but reasonably interesting explanation for just what has been going on. All in all, as I said, by no means a great mystery, but not bad -- worth your time if you like classical mysteries with a soupçon of sensationalism. I don't think I'll actively seek out more of Edgar Wallace's work, but if another novel comes my way I might go ahead and read it.