Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace (1 April 1875 – 10 February 1932) was a British writer of sensational detective, gangster, adventure, and sci-fi novels, plays and stories.

Struggling with debt, he left South Africa, returned to London and began writing thrillers to raise income, publishing books including The Four Just Men (1905).

[2] In addition to his work on King Kong, he is remembered as a writer of "the colonial imagination", for the J. G. Reeder detective stories, and for the Green Archer serial.

Discovering she was pregnant, his mother invented a fictitious obligation in Greenwich that would last at least half a year and obtained a room in a boarding house where she lived until her son's birth, on 1 April 1875.

[6] By his early teens, Wallace had held down numerous jobs such as newspaper-seller at Ludgate Circus near Fleet Street, milk-delivery boy, rubber factory worker, shoe shop assistant, and ship's cook.

[12] Unable to find any backer for his first book, Wallace set up his own publishing company, Tallis Press, which issued the sensational thriller The Four Just Men (1905).

They were tales of exotic adventure and local tribal rites, set on an African river, mostly without love interest as this held no appeal for Wallace.

[15] Wallace began to take his fiction writing career more seriously and signed with publishers Hodder and Stoughton in 1921, organising his contracts, instead of selling rights to his work piecemeal in order to raise funds.

Violet booked passage to California on a liner out of Southampton, but received word that Edgar had slipped into a coma and died of the disease, combined with double pneumonia, on 10 February 1932 in North Maple Drive, Beverly Hills.

[10] His body was returned to England and he was buried at Little Marlow Cemetery, Fern Lane, Buckinghamshire, not far from his UK country home, Chalklands, in Bourne End.

Each issue contained original works of short crime or mystery fiction as well as reprints by authors like Wallace, Chekhov, Steinbeck, and Agatha Christie.

Many of Wallace's successful books were dictated like this over two or three days, locked away with cartons of cigarettes and endless pots of sweet tea, often working pretty much uninterrupted in 72 hours.

[27] Wallace faced widespread accusations that he used ghost writers to churn out books, though there is no evidence of this, and his prolificness became something of a joke, the subject of cartoons and sketches.

His "three day books", reeled off to keep the loan sharks from the door, were unlikely to garner great critical praise and Wallace claimed not to find literary value in his own works.

[28] Wallace characters such as District Commissioner Sanders can be taken to represent the values of colonial white supremacy in Africa, and now viewed by many critics as deeply racist and paternalistic.

Q. D. Leavis, Arnold Bennett and Dorothy L Sayers led the attack on Wallace, suggesting he offered no social critique or subversive agenda at all and distracting the reading public from better things.

[30] Trotsky, reading a Wallace novel whilst recuperating on his sickbed in 1935, found it to be "mediocre, contemptible and crude ... [with no] shade of perception, talent or imagination.

"[31] Critics Steinbrunner and Penzler stated that Wallace's writing is "slapdash and cliché-ridden, [with] characterization that is two dimensional and situations [that] are frequently trite, relying on intuition, coincidence, and much pointless, confusing movement to convey a sense of action.

"[32] The Oxford Companion to the Theatre asserts, however, that "In all his works [Wallace] showed unusual precision of detail, narrative skill, and inside knowledge of police methods and criminal psychology, the fruits of his apprenticeship as a crime reporter".

The critic Wheeler Winston Dixon maintains that Wallace covered a wide variety of perspectives and characterisations, exploring themes such as feminist self-determination (Barbara on her Own 1926, Four-Square Jane 1929, The Girl from Scotland Yard 1926), upsetting peerage hierarchies (Chick, 1923), science fiction (The Day of Uniting, 1926), schizophrenia (The Man Who Knew, 1919) and autobiography (People, 1926).

The fragmentary nature of Wallace's script meant that the main dialogue-free action of the film (the jungle sequences) would have to be shot first, both as insurance and as a showreel for the board of RKO.

In My Hollywood Diary, Edgar Wallace wrote about the reception of his screenplay: "Cooper called me up last night and told me that everybody who had read 'Kong' was enthusiastic.

Danby G. Denham is a promoter and a P. T. Barnum type showman who is looking for a giant ape to bring back to Madison Square Garden or the Polo Grounds to exhibit as a sideshow.

James Ashmore Creelman, who worked on the screenplay for The Most Dangerous Game, a film that Wallace was in discussions to write for at the time of his death, was also brought in to tidy up the script.

The original Wallace screenplay was published in the 2013 book Ray Harryhausen – The Master of the Majicks, Volume 1: Beginnings and Endings by Mike Hankin.

[40] That original screenplay is analysed and discussed in The Girl in the Hairy Paw (1976), edited by Ronald Gottesman and Harry Geduld, and by Mark Cotta Vaz, in the preface to the Modern Library reissue of King Kong (2005).

The book was reissued in 2005 by the Modern Library, a division of Random House, with an introduction by Greg Bear and a preface by Mark Cotta Vaz, and by Penguin in the US.

On 28 October 1933, Cinema Weekly published the short story "King Kong", credited to Edgar Wallace and Draycott Montagu Dell (1888–1940).

Walter F. Ripperger also wrote a two-part serialization of the Wallace and Cooper story in Mystery magazine titled "King Kong" in the February and March issues in 1933.

The initial success prompted Rialto Film to establish a German subsidiary, securing the rights to most of Wallace's novels, and producing an additional 38 movies until 1972.