In 1905, a little-known journalist named Edgar Wallace was determined to make his first novel impossible to ignore. The book was The Four Just Men, a thriller about a group of vigilantes who take justice into their own hands when the law proves inadequate. The novel would eventually become one of Wallace's most famous works and launch a long-running series. Yet its initial publication is remembered less for its literary success than for one of the most spectacular marketing disasters in publishing history.
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Edgar Wallace was born in London in 1875, the illegitimate son of actors Richard Horatio Marriott Edgar and Mary Jane "Polly" Richards. Unable to afford to raise him, his mother placed him in a workhouse when he was just three years old. He was later adopted by the Freeman family, and under the care of his foster parents received a good education. However, Wallace had little interest in formal schooling and left school at the age of twelve. His early teens were spent working a variety of odd jobs, including newspaper seller, milk-delivery boy, rubber factory worker, shoe-shop assistant, and ship's cook.
Wallace later enlisted in the British Army, but soon became disillusioned with military life and transferred to the Press Corps. There he discovered his talent for writing and began publishing poems and songs, eventually producing a book of ballads. While serving in Africa, he became a war correspondent, first for Reuters and later for the Daily Mail during the Boer War.
In 1903, Wallace, now married, returned to London and joined the staff of the Daily Mail. At the same time, he began writing detective stories. He founded a small publishing company called The Tallis Press and launched a periodical named Smithy. Priced at one shilling per copy, the publication sold around 30,000 copies.
Edgar Wallace
“Emboldened by this success, I sat down to turn a short story I had written, and which had been rejected by every magazine in London, into a longer one,” Edgar Wallace later wrote in his autobiography. The result was The Four Just Men, his first novel, published by the London-based Tallis Press in 1905. Convinced that the book could become a sensation, Wallace resolved to launch it on a grand scale.
The novel opens with four mysterious men meeting in a café in the Spanish city of Cadiz. Over the course of their conversation, they recount the various ways in which they have dispensed their own brand of justice to individuals who had escaped punishment under the law. The group then resolves to assassinate a British government minister, Sir Philip Ramon, whom they hold responsible for legislation that would allow political exiles living in Britain to be extradited to countries where they could face execution for opposing dictatorial regimes.
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The four men ultimately succeed in killing their target. However, Wallace withheld one crucial detail: the book never explained how the murder had been carried out. Instead, the story concluded as a classic locked-room mystery, leaving readers to puzzle over the seemingly impossible crime. They were then invited to submit their own solutions.
Transforming the novel's ending into a competition was the centrepiece of Wallace's ambitious marketing strategy. He offered prizes of £250 for first place, £200 for second, and £50 for third—a total prize fund of £500, equivalent to well over £100,000 today. Wallace had originally hoped to offer £1,000 and even sought a loan to finance the scheme, but his request was refused. Colleagues persuaded him to halve the prize money instead.
To publicise the competition, Wallace launched an advertising campaign of extraordinary scale. Advertisements appeared in newspapers, on buses, on billboards, and on countless handbills and flyers. In total, he spent roughly £2,000 promoting the novel, an astonishing sum for a first-time author. Confident in both his book and his publicity campaign, Wallace believed he would recover the entire investment within three months.
Wallace, however, made a critical mistake when he drafted the competition rules, which specified the prizes but failed to state that only one entrant would receive each prize. Legally, this meant that every person who submitted a correct answer was entitled to the prize for that category. Wallace had assumed that only a handful of readers would solve the mystery. He was wrong. Large numbers of entrants correctly identified the solution.
As the entries accumulated, the scale of the problem became apparent. Instead of paying a single first-prize winner, a single second-prize winner, and a single third-prize winner, Wallace faced the prospect of paying dozens of successful contestants. What he had imagined would cost £500 suddenly threatened to cost many times that amount.
Although the novel sold tens of thousands of copies, the profits were nowhere near enough to cover both the promotional expenses and the ballooning competition liabilities. Wallace later admitted that he had badly underestimated the costs involved and had fallen victim to what he called "over-advertising." According to his own recollection, despite selling approximately 38,000 copies, he lost about £1,400 on the venture.
For months, the competition winners remained unpaid while Wallace struggled to find a solution. Public suspicion began to grow and people began to question about the honesty of the competition. Eventually, the newspaper proprietor Alfred Harmsworth was forced to bail out Wallace in order to protect the reputation of the Daily Mail, which had helped publicize the competition.
Wallace was declared bankrupt. To raise cash for his creditors, he sold the rights to The Four Just Men for a mere £75.
Fortunately for Wallace, the bankruptcy did not end his career. He recovered and went on to become one of the most prolific and commercially successful thriller writers of the early 20th century. Eventually, he produced more than 170 novels and a staggering 957 short stories. More than 160 films and several radio adaptations have been made based on Wallace's work. He also contributed to the screenplay of the classic film King Kong shortly before his death.
References:
# The Four Just Men. Wikipedia
# How a Book Marketing Ploy Almost Ruined Edgar Wallace, Literature’s “King of Thrillers”. Mental Floss
# Edgar Wallace and the case of the Four Just Men. Letterpress Project
# The Four Just Men. Edgar Wallace
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