The Book of All-Power
by Edgar Wallace
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Best remembered for penning the screenplay for the classic film King Kong, author Edgar Wallace was an astoundingly popular luminary in the action-adventure genre in the early twentieth century. The Book of All-Power is a story packed with intrigue, treachery, assassinations, and machinations, and it highlights Wallace's unmatched skill in setting a pulse-pounding pace..
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I really don't have time to review all the books I've read over the last three months, which I just entered into LT today. However, I will record what extreme impressions I do remember.
Began this book surreptitiously on an airplane. A handful of pages in, my hopes sank, and I put it aside until my trip ended. The book appeared to star a greedy conspiratorial occultist Jew and his daughter the angry atheist Russian revolutianary. After finishing my airport travels, I was able to finish it, to discover that at least the punchline wasn't occult in the slightlest.
Began this book surreptitiously on an airplane. A handful of pages in, my hopes sank, and I put it aside until my trip ended. The book appeared to star a greedy conspiratorial occultist Jew and his daughter the angry atheist Russian revolutianary. After finishing my airport travels, I was able to finish it, to discover that at least the punchline wasn't occult in the slightlest.
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527+ Works 10,134 Members
Among the most prolific of all authors of adventure fiction was the redoubtable Edgar Wallace. Born in London, Wallace received his early education at St. Peter's School and the Board School. Wallace served in the Royal West Kent Regiment in England and later as part of the Medical Staff Corps stationed in South Africa. During World War I, Wallace show more acted as a special interrogator for the War Office. As was the case with a number of successful popular authors, Wallace experienced a rich and diverse life before turning to professional writing. From 1886 to the 1930s, he worked in a printing shop, a shoe shop, and a rubber factory, and served as a merchant sailor and milk deliverer. Beginning in 1899, Wallace became a journalist and wrote variously for the London Daily Mail and the Rand Daily News, among others; he also worked with the racing periodicals, having founded two of them---Bibury's Weekly and R. E. Walton's Weekly. Like Sax Rohmer, Wallace earned a fortune from his writings, yet, because of a lack of business sense and a tendency to overspend, he died in debt. A prodigious writer of fiction, Wallace published, over the course of his professional life, some 173 books and wrote 17 plays. Many of his adventure narratives featured elements of crime or mystery, but they all thrived on action. Although Wallace's handling of plot was superb and he was respected for his ability to blend suspense with humor, he was less successful with his characters, who tended to be two-dimensional and stereotyped. One of his early crime adventures, The Four Just Men (1906), introduced what was to become a trademark for Wallace---lurid sensationalism coupled with dramatic violence. Wallace published in a wide range of genres, including poetry, short fiction, autobiography, and epic political history. Regrettably, much of what he wrote has lapsed into obscurity today. As sometimes is the problem with popular fiction, perhaps it was too hurriedly written---too intimately connected with its contemporary audience---to stand the ultimate test of time. But Wallace's work was highly influential, especially in the American pulp magazine markets of the Great Depression, and stands today, despite its many flaws, as some of the most effective literary adventures ever written. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- The Book of All-Power
- Original title
- The Book of All-Power
- Alternate titles
- The Book of All Power
- Original publication date
- 1921
Classifications
Statistics
- Members
- 52
- Popularity
- 581,914
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (3.44)
- Languages
- 6 — Czech, Dutch, English, French, Italian, Turkish
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 29
- ASINs
- 3
