The Mind of Mr JG Reeder by Edgar Wallace

The Mind of Mr JG Reeder by Edgar Wallace

collection of short stories, published 1925

 

Margaret hardly knew what to expect when she came into the flamboyant foyer of the Orpheum. What was the evening equivalent to the square-topped derby and the tightly-buttoned frock-coat of ancient design which [Mr Reeder] favoured in the hours of business? She would have passed the somewhat elegantly dressed gentleman in the correct pique waistcoat and the perfectly tied butterfly bow, only he claimed her attention.

‘Mr Reeder!’ she gasped.

It was indeed Mr Reeder: with not so much as a shirt-stud wrong; with a suit of the latest  mode, and shoes glossy and V-toed. For Mr Reeder, like many other men, dressed according to his inclination in business hours, but accepted blindly the instructions of his tailor in the matter of fancy raiment

He took her cloak. He had previously purchased programmes and a large box of chocolates, which he carried by a satin ribbon.

comments: Mr JG Reeder was mentioned in the comments on this recent post:

King of Tosh: E Phillips Oppenheim

And he has popped up a few times before btl, with great enthusiasm from readers, and I knew I should look at the stories again.  I first read them in the early 1970s, when there was a hugely enjoyable TV series based on them.

Wallace and Oppenheim seem to go together – dashing writers, very productive, giving the impression of enjoying their own lives, and the lives of their characters.

Mr JG Reeder is great fun: he looks and acts like a dull dusty senior civil servant, but actually has an investigative connection with the Public Prosecutor’s office, and has ‘the mind of a criminal’.

This means that despite his uninspiring appearance and manner, he has deep knowledge  of criminal history, and an unerring instinct for what the bad guys will do next. Many of the stories consist of a crook thinking he has got the better of Mr JGR, while we know that he will be one step ahead of them.

The tales can be somewhat gruesome, and with a very casual attitude to the death of criminals.

The collection I have has eight stories, and that’s about right for one sitting – I don’t know if there are more, and I would read them, but after a gap. During the course of them, Mr JGR embarks on a slow-moving romance, which we hope will end happily. However a certain kind of modern reader will disapprove, as there is a large age-gap, he is much older than his young lady. [people objecting to age-gaps in fiction, particularly old school novels, is a thing that annoys me very much. The author made it up, it didn’t happen, and who are you to object?]

There are some intriguing moments – a young man is worried about the ‘boudoir atmosphere’ in the office where his girlfriend works, a phrase I liked very much.

There is a lot of what you might call scampering around, weird ideas in people’s heads, and out-and-out melodrama. Some of it reminded me of Agatha Christie’s Parker Pyne mysteries – no bad thing. In one of those, The Case of the Discontented Soldier, there is talk of  a traditional fictional trope of people being trapped in a cellar with water rising and threatening to drown them. Mr Parker Pyne suggets to Ariadne Oliver (an early appearance) that it is a cliched, unoriginal idea, but she is not having it: “People are used to reading about such things as water rising in a cellar….Knowing about it beforehand gives it an extra thrill….The public is conservative, Mr Pyne, it likes the old well-worn gadgets.” On first reading that I literally thought ‘but I’ve never come across that at all’. And here it is! In a Wallace/Reeder story called The Investors.

It’s possible Wallace was better at short stories than novels – he gets slapdash and careless details in long form, more chance of staying on track with short stories.

But even in these stories author or reader can get lost. Mr Reeder and a villainess are on either side of a closed door. This section took ages to parse:

In a second there was a jagged gap [in the door] through which the black muzzle of an automatic was thrust.

‘Put down that jug or I will blow your features into comparative chaos!’ said Mr Reeder pedantically.

I didn’t know which party was holding the automatic, and I wondered how Mr R could see the jug, but also wondered if this was some esoteric slang. ‘Put down that jug…’ has a certain ring.

He sees the woman concerned: ‘in her hand was a huge enamelled iron jug’. Not a metaphor then. I will not trouble you with the means by which the jug becomes a deadly weapon, which must be dropped.

All great fun.

Not much in the way of clothes, I think Wallace didn’t have time to put long descriptions. But there is a Russian Princess, Pauline Dimitroff, small dark and beautiful. But is she a real princess?

And a certain amount of general high life, Mayfair clubs, and the trip to theatre. So some random well-dressed women as well as the 1923 theatre foyer picture.