cimorene

Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace (1 April 1875 – 10 February 1932) was an English writer. [...] Wallace was such a prolific writer that one of his publishers claimed that a quarter of all books in England were written by him.[1] As well as journalism, Wallace wrote screen plays, poetry, historical non-fiction, 18 stage plays, 957 short stories, and over 170 novels, 12 in 1929 alone. More than 160 films have been made of Wallace's work. 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. He sold over 50 million copies of his combined works in various editions, and The Economist describes him as "one of the most prolific thriller writers of [the 20th] century", although the great majority of his books are out of print in the UK, but are still read in Germany.[2][3]

I discovered the JG Reeder works by chance in my search for early detective fiction: found a couple of short story collections at Roy Glashan's library and enjoyed them, in spite of some flaws, mainly because the sleuth is deliberately a very weird little character, an old man with enormous side burns who is fussy and fuddy-duddy and dressed in a determinedly old-fashioned but shabby manner, and who seems to solve mysteries through a combination of just magical deductions in the style of Holmes or Poirot and going off on his own to investigate things, and being unexpectedly ruthless when physical danger threatens even though everyone thought he looked harmless. This is probably not a completely thorough encapsulation of what makes him both weird and interesting, but the Funny Little Old Man thing is probably the core of the draw (that and his surprising efficacy, much like with Miss marple for example). Obviously a fair amount of inspiration from Holmes, but attempts have been made to bring him to a more plausible level of realism in the material world of the 1920s. The novels Red Aces and The Crook in Crimson were also fun reads, although I think the strain already shows in attempting to make these stories novel-length, but the short story collections were my favorites.