Tue 14 Apr 2015
Reviewed by William F. Deeck: EDGAR WALLACE – The Green Archer.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[11] Comments
William F. Deeck
EDGAR WALLACE – The Green Archer. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1923. Small, US, hardcover, 1924. Reprint editions include: W. W. Norton, US, hardcover, 1965, revised edition for The Seagull Library of Mystery and Suspense. Serialized in 14 parts in The Detective Magazine, UK, 20 July 1923 through 18 January 1924. Silent film: Pathe, 1926. Sound film: Columbia, 1940 (Victor Jory, Iris Meredith).
Briefly, which is the kindest way to treat this work, The Daily Globe receives word that the Green Archer of Garre Castle, hanged in 1487, is back again haunting the castle. The castle’s owner, Abe Bellamy, late of Chicago and one of the world’s worst (in more senses than one) villains, wants no investigation of the haunt’s return.
Bellamy, the author says, never has spent a night away from the castle since he bought it. This is contradicted in the first part of the book, but never mind. The first victim of the Archer, killed by an arrow somewhere in his waistcoat, is a man who had recently had a quarrel with Bellamy. The body is found by Spike Holland, an American reporter who is working for The Daily Globe:
“Spike knelt down at the dead man’s side and sought for some sign of life…” Sure. Spike turns over to the police a second green arrow that he finds at the scene of the crime, although the author doesn’t tell us how or where he found it. But don’t worry; it has nothing to do with anything.
James Lamotte Featherstone is the Scotland Yard man — a captain, if the Yard has such things — who investigates Bellamy. He becomes involved after he is hired by a millionaire to keep an eye on his daughter. If that strikes you as odd, you’re definitely not going to enjoy this book, because it is replete with such oddities.
Bellamy gets his just desserts, but not because of Featherstone, who, you will not be surprised to hear, gets the girl whose body he was guarding. Featherstone is vigorous but lack-witted. The same can be said for the heroine. They deserve each other.
The purpose of the Seagull Library of Mystery and Suspense was to “restore to print hardcover editions of famous favorites and classics regarded by connoisseurs as indispensable collectors’ items… P.G. Wodehouse once said that nine hundred of every thousand books by Wallace were worth the money. Why did the publishers have to select one of the other hundred to reprint?
April 14th, 2015 at 1:24 pm
This is one of Wallace’s better known titles, and while I’ve never read it, I’ve always meant to. After reading Bill’s review, though, maybe I hadn’t bother. On the other hand, I’ve always found Wallace’s work extremely variable, maybe even person to person. What one reader likes, another won’t. At the moment, though, I’m leaning toward won’t for me also on this one.
April 14th, 2015 at 3:33 pm
Why did the publishers choose this one? Maybe because of what Bill refers to as the 1940 “Sound film” starring Victor Jory and Iris Meredith. This production was in fact a classic movie serial that ran over 15 parts, a vehicle giving the title prolonged exposure in times when film going was perhaps more common than TV watching. I’ve sat through the 300 minutes of the serial, which is available on DVD. I think Bill would find it ten times worse than the book, although it is good for some laughs! The scriptwriters of the “original screenplay”, Morgan Cox and John Cutting, played scant attention to Edgar Wallace’s novel incidentally.
April 14th, 2015 at 3:50 pm
I only got a few chapters into the serial. You have to be willing to make that suspension of disbelief and accept Victor Jory as a 2-fisted man of action. Try as I would, it just couldn’t be.
April 14th, 2015 at 3:51 pm
Another of Bill’s wonderfully witty reviews. Wish I’d known of the line he quotes, “Spike knelt down at the dead man’s side and sought for some sign of life…” when I was writing one or the other of the GUN IN CHEEK books. An alternative classic!
April 14th, 2015 at 4:33 pm
Graham Greene, who admired Edgar Wallace, once quoted him changing a characters description in mid paragraph as the downside of his speed.
Noting the American character, I assume here and in a couple of books (WHEN THE GANGS CAME TO LONDON, THE FLYING SQUAD)he was hoping to gain American readers.
I found this one standard Wallace, not his best, but far from his worst. I enjoyed it but wasn’t blown away by it. The serial is pretty laughable though it tries to do a bit of atmosphere. This one was also remade by the German’s in their series of Wallace films and more atmospheric than the serial though this may not have been released in English thus the title might not pop up under THE GREEN ARCHER.
As for Bill’s question the highest military sounding rank in the London Metropolitan Police (which Scotland Yard is part of)is Commander (as in Gideon and Dalgliesh), however men with former military ranks often retained them in civilian life, especially if they were in the Voluntary Reserve, thus James Bond is Commander Bond though not active in the Royal Navy, Richard Hannay General Hannay, and of course John Dickson Carr’s Colonel March. I suspect to Wallace and most British readers Captain would only suggest Featherstone had been a Captain in the British army or RAF and not his rank in the MET (Scotland Yard is only the detective branch of the MET).
Poor Wallace, that’s one of those sentences that sound okay until you pause and look at it, and since he never rewrote he never paused to look. With these kind of flubs perhaps Bill P needs to think about volume III of GUN IN CHEEK.
April 14th, 2015 at 4:37 pm
Something strikes me looking at that cover. I wonder if this book inspired the creation of DC comics The Green Arrow? The time period of the serial isn’t all that far off.
April 14th, 2015 at 6:29 pm
I believe I once read that The Green Archer inspired The Green Arrow (now simply “Arrow” on the TV series). I can’t swear to the veracity of the claim, or even recall now where I heard/read it. IMDB indicates that THE GREEN ARCHER was remade in Germany in 1961, one of the then-popular series of German thrillers based on Edgar Wallace novels, starring Gert Frobe and the lovely Karin Dor.
April 15th, 2015 at 11:24 am
When I was stationed in Germany in the mid-1960s, the English-speaking section in any bookstall was top heavy with then-current Edgar Wallace British reprints. So I read a bunch of ’em and a few since. I love Sax Rohmer but have always found Wallace, word for word, to be just too clunky a stylist to be enjoyable. His most interesting work is his Sanders of the River stories.
April 15th, 2015 at 2:13 pm
Stephen,
I agree to a large extent on Wallace, certainly his best work is about Sanders. I do like the Just Men and Mr.J.G. Reeder books though, and some books are better than others. DARK EYES OF LONDON, THE BRIGAND, SGT. SIR PETER, THE CRIMSON CIRCLE, THE NORTHING TRAMP, INDIA RUBBER MEN, THE RINGER, THE DOOR WITH SEVEN LOCKS and a few others do hold up for me though.
Like Sapper, whose work was taken over by Gerard Fairlie, the author who took over the Wallace mantle officially at Wallace own behest (Sydney Horler only claimed the mantle), Francis Gerard, is actually a better writer than the original. I’ll take one of Gerard’s Sir John Meredith titles any day over Wallace, and his Sanders stories are just as good and a bit better written.
April 15th, 2015 at 5:18 pm
Thanks for the tip! I’d never heard of Francis Gerard, and will now search him out and give his Sanders work a try.
April 18th, 2015 at 10:01 am
Green Arrow made his comic book debut in 1941, the serial version of “The Green Archer” was released in 1940…that would seem to suggest that the former is an imitation of the latter. However, I think it more reasonable to assume that both were responses to a much bigger hit, 1938’s “The Adventures of Robin Hood” (remember, Errol Flynn was dressed in green for most of this film).
Certainly, Green Arrow is much more accurately described as Batman crossed with Robin Hood than as a copy of the Green Archer.