Wed 11 Jun 2008
KEITH CHAPMAN on Edgar Wallace Mystery Magazine.
Posted by Steve under Authors , Covers , Editors & Anthologies , Magazines , Pulp Fiction1 Comment
A fascinating thread! As has been observed, Edgar Wallace was a very big name in thriller fiction in the 1920s and ’30s, but he was not, of course, part of the Golden Age of Detection, which makes comparisons with Christie — even Symons — in many ways inappropriate. Wallace was still a big name after the Second World War and right up to the 1960s, when I founded and edited the Edgar Wallace Mystery Magazine. At that time, his books and stories were already regarded as having a quaint flavor, which a daughter, Penelope Wallace, was largely responsible for trying to remove by supplying publishers with revised versions.
Such revisions are, of course, an ultimately futile exercise and may even remove future points of appeal — something I realized even then though I was only 21 years of age. For the short time I ran the magazine, I concentrated on the “action” end of the mystery field, running the kind of stories Americans would have called “pulp fiction” and which I believe were written by authors who were worthy successors of Wallace himself. I also used full-color, vigorous pictorial covers that reflected this content.
Ultimately, the publishing company running the magazine — and employing me as the editor of it and a raft of digest-size “pocket libraries” — ran into financial difficulties and the Wallace family took over the magazine. I was replaced by a “more experienced” editor: elderly writer Nigel Morland who was said to be a family friend, and as a contributor to the magazine had previously flattered me with consistently favorable comment on my editorial work and policies.
The illustrated covers were replaced by wholly typographical, two-color covers that at best were a poor imitation of Ellery Queen’s. The content changed, too, certainly abandoning what I considered the true Wallace tradition in preference for material that had more of a “whodunit,” intellectual slant.
From the online FictionMags Index:
Edgar Wallace Mystery Magazine
Publishers
Aug-1964 – Nov-1964: Micron Publications, Micron House, Gorringe Park Avenue, Mitcham
Dec-1964 – Jun-1967: Edgar Wallace Magazines Ltd., 4 Bradmore Road, Oxford
1969? – 1970?: Edgar Wallace Magazines Ltd., 50 Alexandra Road, London SW19
Editors
Aug-1964 – Nov-1964: Keith Chapman
Dec-1964 – Jun-1967: Nigel Morland
1969? – 1970?: Leonard Holdsworth, Kurt Mueller & James Hughes
June 12th, 2016 at 7:07 am
I am trying to find out what issue of EDGAR WALLACE MYSTERY MAGAZINE the short story “His Worst Enemy” by Colin Robertson was printed in. It was reprinted in Herbert Harris’s anthology JOHN CREASEY’S MYSTERY BEDSIDE BOOK 1974 (London, 1973), but no information about this short story seems to be available on the Internet.
Thanks for any help you can provide me with.