Edgar Wallace and his Four Just Men stories were unfamiliar to me before stumbling across this reprint in a flea market stall. A quick scan of the jacket suggested some penny dreadful fun, perhaps even some insights into the origins of crime thriller / noir / espionage genres, and that's pretty much what I got.

There had grown into being systems which defied correction; corporations beyond chastisement; individuals protected by cunningly drawn legislation and others who knew to an inch the scope of toleration. In the name of justice, these [four just] men struck swiftly, dispassionately, mercilessly. The great swindler, the procureur, the suborner of witnesses, the briber of juries -- they died.

There was no gradation of punishment: a warning, a second warning -- then death. [234-35]

It's notable that from the beginning, there are actually three Just Men, the titular fourth having died in a prior adventure. A new "fourth" seemingly rotates through the first two and perhaps later stories. Though Wallace endeavours to distinguish his three protagonists, I could never remember the names of any of them, and their characteristics resembled more than anything the skills of the prototypical heist crew. (Is Wallace perhaps the originator of that trope?)

A quick online search reveals the stories were adapted first as a silent film and later a B movie, before an updated treatment as an ITV series in 1959. The series featured a post-WWII setting and characters typically appearing solo in separate episodes, only keeping in contact by telephone between adventures. Interestingly, the ITV series came less than a decade after the appearance of Ian Fleming's first Bond novel, and just two years before the first Bond film.

The psychohistory surrounding both the stories's broad premise, and the popular reception given these stories and so many like them, is as compelling as anything Wallace writes.

THE FOUR JUST MEN (1905) | read 2023-07

Four vigilantes have been operating in Europe for some time (we are treated to a list of eighteen murders dating 1899-1904), but until recently went undetected. Their crimes were public and sensational, but were not linked together -- until the vigilantes themselves announce their next target, a British MP and Foreign Secretary. The Foreign Secretary is intent upon introducing a bill which the vigilantes are convinced will undermine the country. And so, they undertake an open letter promising assassination should he not desist, sincerely hoping this will dislodge the right honourable (but equally misguided) public servant from his course, and very much prepared to carry through with their own plan should he prove unequal to the moral task they set for him.

Interesting that this mission is so unlike the breathless descriptions of their prior adventures, each inspired to serve justice in cases of personal crimes done knowingly, deliberately, and for personal gain -- while here, the Foreign Secretary is doing only what he believes is best for the nation. But of course, none of those adventures were worthy of a novel, they are shared now only by way of establishing our heroes' bona fides. In a similar vein, even the current mission's rationale isn't persuasive: the entire objective is easily thwarted should another MP re-introduce the same bill later; alternately, the objective could be achieved more simply by assassinating the Carlist leader directly, though this would occasion less public moralising. Wallace's premise boils down to an exotic locked room mystery, the international and political intrigue more-or-less trappings, and he seems well aware of that. The perennial favour granted his formula proves he was onto something in the Zeitgeist.

THE COUNCIL OF JUSTICE (1908) | read 2023-08

The story is actually two. The first two-thirds of the novel is a story of the Red Hundred, an anarchist organisation and their dismantling by the Four. The novel's final third depicts one of the Just Men "captured", thereby rendering the Four no longer completely anonymous -- though his co-conspirators remain unknown, working toward the prisoner's escape. Across these two very different stories the reader is regaled with the extremely unlikely and the inexplicable.

The ending is the fun bit, the prisoner's bid for escape. The side plot with the Woman of Gratz being a rival to one of the Men, but ending up swooning for him is ... regrettable. Following on from my observations of the first novel, I can't help but wonder how much this served as a template for James Bond, up to and including the Red Hundred as inspiration for SPECTRE. Not having read any but one of Fleming's novels, the inspiration if any may be more for the films than the books.

to read:
THE JUST MEN OF CORDOVA (1918)
THE LAW OF THE FOUR JUST MEN (1921)
THE THREE JUST MEN (1924)
AGAIN THE THREE (1928) ( )