The Complete Four Just Men Read online

  The Complete

  Four Just Men

  Edgar Wallace

  with an Introduction by

  David Stuart Davies

  The Complete Four Just Men first published by

  Wordsworth Editions Limited in 2012

  Published as an ePublication 2012

  ISBN 978 1 84870 309 4

  Wordsworth Editions Limited

  8B East Street, Ware, Hertfordshire SG12 9HJ

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  Introduction

  The most lawless of us would hesitate to defend them, but the greater humanitarian could scarcely condemn them.

  Edgar Wallace

  The Four Just Men was one of Edgar Wallace’s most famous novels and even today the title of this dramatic tale featuring the exploits of his four unconventional vigilantes is well known; but I doubt if many modern readers are aware that there were five other books featuring these cunning and reckless heroes. Most of the titles have been out of print from mainstream publishers for years and as far as I know they have not been collected in one bumper volume previously. Now Wordsworth have stepped into this particular breach and present you with The Complete Four Just Men – and what a thrilling rollercoaster collection it is, capturing as it does the air of intrigue, international tensions and conflicts, casual and brutal crime redolent of the early part of the twentieth century.

  Edgar Richard Horatio Wallace (1875–1932) was the most prolific of authors. During his lifetime he wrote at a prodigious pace, producing one hundred and seventy three books and seventeen plays. His area of excellence was mainly crime, thrillers and adventure yarns, including such works as Sanders of the River, The Terror, the Mr J. G. Reeder series and The Dark Eyes of London. It is no wonder that by the time of his death he bore the sobriquet ‘The King of Thrillers’.

  His early life was turbulent and perhaps the bizarre events surrounding his birth and upbringing stimulated the imagination which created the dramatic scenarios of his fiction. He was born in Greenwich, the illegitimate son of penurious actors Marie (Polly) Richards and Richard Horatio Edgar Marriott, who kept him for a mere nine days after his birth. He was adopted by George Freeman, a fish porter, who brought him up with his other ten children. Wallace only learned the truth of his true parentage when he was eleven years old. This discovery came about because he needed a birth certificate in order to get a job. Like most things in his life, he took the shocking news in his stride.

  Wallace had very little formal schooling but he was a quick learner and after a short spell in the army, he served as a correspondent during the Boer War for Reuters and South African and London newspapers. His journalistic work gave him a taste for creative writing. He loved language and the ability to describe scenes and create tension and suspense but he realised that factual reporting restricted his prose. He had a strong desire to formulate his own plots and characters, to let his imagination fly and dabble in the fantastic. In 1906 his fanciful newspaper work got him into trouble. When working on an article about Lever Brothers’ threatened rise in soap prices he had grossly inflated the figures by quoting an ‘unnamed washerwoman’. This was a lady conjured up from his own imagination. The article prompted Lever Brothers to take the newspaper to court.

  With this flair for invention it was only natural that Wallace should try his hand at writing a novel. He knew that it had to be special and promoted in a unique fashion to catch the attention of the public. And so he concocted his first mystery novel featuring four respectable but ruthless vigilantes who find pleasure in administering justice when the law is incapable or unwilling to do so. Like most things in his life, the process of creating Wallace’s first great writing success, The Four Just Men, was remarkably complicated.

  On completing what he believed was a sure-fire bestseller, Wallace was dismayed to discover that publishers were not interested in his novel and so, undaunted by their indifference, he founded the Tallis Press and published the novel himself in 1905. The author intended to advertise The Four Just Men on an unprecedented scale. He ran a vast and successful campaign to promote the novel, which involved a huge publicity gimmick: a £500 reward was offered to any reader who could guess how the murder of the British Foreign Secretary was committed in the novel. At the time, Wallace was working for the Daily Mail newspaper, which was run by Alfred Harmsworth (later Lord Northcliffe), and it was in this paper that the story was first serialised along with the competition.

  The author had advertisements placed on buses, hoardings, flyers, and so forth, running up an incredible bill of £2,000. Although he knew he needed the book to sell sufficient copies to make £2,500 before he saw any profit, Wallace rather foolishly believed that this was possible within three months of the book going on sale. This was not to be the case.

  The gimmick generated tremendous sales, but Wallace had over-estimated his own cleverness in creating an unsolvable murder mystery plot for there were several correct responses and they all had to be paid. Only after the competition had closed and the correct solution printed as part of the final chapter dénouement did Edgar learn that he was legally obliged to pay every person who answered correctly the full prize amount.

  Additionally, though his advertising campaign had worked, making The Four Just Men a runaway bestseller, Wallace discovered that instead of his woefully over-optimistic three months, the novel would have to continue selling consistently with no margin of error for two full years in order for him to recoup the £2,500 he needed to break even. Things were made worse when the number of entrants correctly guessing the right answer continued to rise.

  As 1906 began and continued without any list of prize winners being printed, more and more suspicions were being voiced about the honesty of the competition. Friction already existed between the autocratic Harmsworth and his errant journalist and now the publisher was placed in the position of having to lend Wallace over £5,000 to protect the newspaper’s reputation. Harmsworth’s irritation simmered as, instead of receiving appropriate gratitude and contrition, Wallace recovered his ebullience and confidence, and appeared not to be in any hurry to repay the loan.

  And so while the publication of The Four Just Men was financially disastrous, the novel made Edgar Wallace’s name as a popular author.

  Although the mystery surrounding the method of murder in the novel is clever and intricate, the plot itself is fairly straightforward. The Four Just Men, Leon Gonsalez, George Manfred, Raymond Poiccart, and Thery, are vigilantes, avengers who operate outside the law for the public good. Their name derives from th
e Jewish tradition that to each generation forty just gentiles are born who treat the Jewish people fairly and with justice. In this instance the Just Men announce that if Cabinet Minister Sir Philip Ramon doesn’t withdraw his upcoming bill that will send many honest revolutionaries to certain death at the hands of their homeland’s dictator, they will be forced to kill him. It is possible that Wallace was influenced by earlier works of fiction which used a similar vigilante concept as the cornerstone of their plot – books such as Eugène Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris - which deal with heroes who set up their own underworld court systems to hand down justice to those whom the law could not touch.

  In Wallace’s novel, a brief summary of the career of the Just Men is compiled by the police:

  ‘ . . . The ‘Four Just Men’, as they sign themselves, are known collectively in almost every country under the sun. Who they are individually we should all very much like to know. Rightly or wrongly, they consider that justice as meted out here on earth is inadequate, and have set themselves about correcting the law. They were the people who assassinated General Trelovitch, the leader of the Servian Regicides: they hanged the French Army Contractor, Conrad, in the Place de la Concorde — with a hundred policemen within call. They shot Hermon le Blois, the poet-philosopher, in his study for corrupting the youth of the world with his reasoning.’

  The morals and attitudes embedded in the book are typical of the time in which it was written when anarchists, nihilists, and the Fenians were very active, and it was still possible to romanticise figures seeking social justice such as the Just Men. Today we would judge them as terrorists. Like so much adventure fiction written in the early part of the Twentieth Century, the Bulldog Drummond stories for example, one must quell one’s modern sensibilities and view these tales from a historical perspective and they emerge as exciting and engaging fun. As William Vivian Butler observes in his splendid book The Durable Desperados (1973), ‘It is not the cleverness of the solution . . . that makes The Four Just Men such a fascinating subject for the student of thriller heroes . . . It is the staggering fact that so many thousands of readers eagerly, and never with the slightest scruple, accepted Wallace’s invitation to align themselves with his quartet of high-handed political murderers.’

  At the end of the book, the Just Men were down to three, but this did not deter Wallace from returning to the characters a few years later in 1908 with the second in the series, The Council of Justice. The remaining three Just Men are joined in the early part of the novel by their new partner ‘a young man who calls himself Courlander’, but who is really of noble birth. It is hinted by Wallace that he is a member of the Hapsburg dynasty. This time the vigilantes pit themselves against The Red Hundred, an organisation dedicated to international anarchy led by the charismatic and beautiful assassin, Maria, the Woman of Gratz, who forms a romantic attachment to George Manfred. The second outing for the Four Just Men is more extravagant in scope than the tightly focused first novel. The hand at the typewriter is more assured and indeed more expansive. This time we have international intrigue, prison breakouts, Zeppelin attacks, purpose built execution sheds in the mountains of Spain and a race across precipitous terrain as the Four Just Men attempt to defeat the villains. Admittedly the plot has many holes in it – where, for example do the Just Men obtain their information and how do they manage to track down people that even Scotland Yard cannot? However, the story moves at a thrilling pace, presenting the reader with so many exciting set pieces of drama and action that these questions do not seem to matter.

  This novel sees the beginning of the Just Men’s gradual rehabilitation with the establishment or, as Wallace himself put it, they gain ‘a sort of unofficial approval’. While they were seen as enemies by the forces of law and order in the first book, in this exploit they receive reluctant cooperation from Scotland Yard. It was a deliberate move on the author’s part to make the Just Men into international crime fighters rather than political vigilantes. Wallace hinted that these stories were easier to write and in shifting the focus of their operations, ‘the public . . . can more readily appreciate the full significance of the Council’s work.’

  One of the criticisms of these novels and The Council of Justice in particular, is that the four heroes are fairly indistinguishable from each other. They are presented as mere ciphers and do not convince as living breathing characters. This is a fair observation. In many ways they are like chess pieces to be moved across the plot board to enliven the game. These are adventures stories of thrill and fantasy where the action is the most important element and certainly in this department they score highly.

  Readers had to wait ten years for the third book in the series, The Just Men of Cordova (1918) and again there were more changes to the nature of the Just Men’s work. What begins as an exotic thriller, in the style of the previous novel, soon settles down to be more of a detective story. It opens in Spain but very quickly the action moves to and stays in London. The plot includes a wide range of extra characters, including a young resourceful policeman, who often takes centre stage, thus side-lining the Just Men, who function mainly on the periphery of events. The central villain, the crooked financier Colonel Black, is a splendid creation, a creepy Bond-type mastermind who eliminates anyone who stands in his way, usually by means of an esoteric occult poison that kills the victim instantly. So dangerous is this poison that Wallace adds a footnote to say that it would be inappropriate and dangerous to publish the real name of this fatal drug. It’s a case of the old sensationalist at work again. The Just Men, maintaining their strange – and unexplained – omnipotence triumph in the end and get their man, but Scotland Yard are not far behind them.

  The change in the Four Just Men stories was greatest in the next book, The Law of the Four Just Men, which contained a series of short stories in which only two of the avengers were operative, Leon Gonsalez and George Manfred, since one of the others has retired and the one who was killed has not been replaced in this book. Because the focus is only on two of the Four, there is much more scope for showing their individual characters. They operate mainly in London and can now be considered as ‘alternative detectives’.

  Wallace is perhaps at his best in the short-story format and in these well-constructed and often whimsical stories he presents the two heroes taking on a wide range of corrupt individuals such as cruel blackmailers, conscienceless money-lenders, owners of gambling houses and opium-dens, a mad scientist who has an irrational hatred of earthworms and common-or-garden murderers who kill for gain. Typical of the approach Wallace now takes is demonstrated in the first story in the collection, ‘The Man Who Lived at Clapham’, in which the Just Men set out to prove the innocence of a wrongly imprisoned man and bring the real culprit to justice. This is much more the territory of Sherlock Holmes, Lord Peter Wimsey or, indeed, another of Wallace’s heroes Mr J. G. Reeder, than the old Just Men of the first book.

  While the plot construction in these stories is sound and the suspense and excitement are well executed, the old weakness still pertains: Edgar Wallace conveniently fails to explain the modus operandi of the Just Men in achieving their ends and how they overcome formidable difficulties, content with just showing them at work and getting away with outrageous acts of vigilantism unscathed and with impunity.

  The detective element is strengthened even further in the next and penultimate volume, The Three Just Men (1924). In this novel Manfred is running a detective agency in Curzon Street, with Gonsalez assuming the role of his chauffeur and Poiccart (inexplicably returned from retirement) that of his butler. This strange division of labour is never explained but it does not seem to interfere with their activities in tackling the nefarious activities of the villain of the piece, Doktor Oberzohn. As suggested, Wallace had moved the Just Men into the territory of the detective thriller, but there is also a dash of the Bulldog Drummonds in a plot that includes poisonous snakes, an elixir of life, a secret boathouse, a kidnapped beauty and
a climactic police siege. For sheer excitement and bravado, this is one of the best entries in the Just Men canon.

  Wallace reverted to the short story format for his heroes’ final volume, Again the Three (1928). In the first story, ‘The Rebus’, Wallace explained by means of a newspaper cutting from the Megaphone, how far the Just Men had moved from being desperate and dangerous criminal vigilantes to respectable crimefighters:

  Even the Four Just Men have become a respectable institution. Not more than fifteen years ago we spoke of them as ‘a criminal organization’; rewards were offered for their arrest . . . today you may turn into Curzon Street and find a single triangle affixed to the sedate door which marks their professional headquarters . . . The hunted and reviled have become a most exclusive detective agency . . . We can only hope that their somewhat drastic methods of other times have been considerably modified.

  Certainly these stories are more conventional in their scope. A client calls for help and they supply it, solving the mystery and handing out justice. The tales are entertaining and even amusing at times rather than thrilling.

  No doubt there would have been more stories, more problems for the Just Men to tackle if Wallace had not died of diabetes in 1932. Nevertheless six books is quite a legacy for the Just Men, who have been unfairly neglected over the years. Here are all their yarns, scrapes, plots and thrilling exploits collected together for your entertainment. Of course we would regard some of the attitudes and characterisations as presented in the stories as politically incorrect these days, but they do accurately reflect the times in which they were written.

  There have been two film versions, in 1921 and 1939, both loosely based on the first novel; and a TV series in 1959 which used the title and the basic idea of vigilante crimefighters but little else from Wallace’s work. But for the real McCoy, you must read the stories – and here they all are ready and waiting to thrill you.