(The Davis is worth finding just for the beautiful color illustrations by American Sherlock Holmes illustrator Frederic Dorr Steele). The plot involves what I call ‘the great vote,’ a particularly British invention wherein for some reason a Minister, MP, or member of the House of Lords must be stopped from introducing a bill (usually involving defense funds) or making a key vote.Īs far as I know, it first showed up in a story by Lord Dunsany, and its most famous incarnation before Wallace may have been in American Richard Harding Davis’s novel In the Fog (really a collection of related novellas in the mode of Stevenson’s Arabian Nights or Andrew Lang’s The Disentanglers), both well known and popular. But whatever the circumstance, The Four Just Men was a sensation, and Edgar Wallace was off to his own literary races. Money always went through his fingers like that - often at the racetrack. Unfortunately for Wallace, too many came up with the solution, and he had to swiftly change his ending and even then he ended up losing money, but by then his name was made. Wikipedia has a good account of the mess this led to. The Four Just Men is the book that put Edgar Wallace name on the front page, and kept it there, thanks to an ingenious news paper promotion in the Daily Mail in which he challenged the readers to solve the mystery for a big reward. –We have not placed either detonator or fuse in the machine, which may therefore be handled with impunity. There you will find a machine sufficiently charged to destroy the greater portion of this building.

Were we common murderers or clumsy anarchists we could with ease wreak a blind and indiscriminate vengeance on the members of this assembly, and in proof thereof, and as an earnest that our threat is no idle one, we beg you to search beneath the table near the recess in this room. We are loath to take this extreme step, knowing that otherwise he is an honest and brave gentleman, and it is with a desire to avoid fulfilling our promise that we ask the members of the Mother of Parliaments to use their every influence to force the withdrawal of this Bill.

We have informed the Minister in charge of this measure, the title of which appears in the margin, that unless he withdraws this Bill we will surely slay him. The Government is about to pass into law a measure which will place in the hands of the most evil Government of modern times men who are patriots and who are destined to be the saviours of their countries.

The four just men book