The Mind of Mr. J G Reeder

The honorable J. G. Reeder of the Public Prosecutor's Office, London, complete with whiskers, a frock coat, and an old unfurled umbrella, was old fashioned, mild mannered, and decidedly dangerous. Bank robbers, forgers, counterfeiters, and murderers paid a severe penalty for underestimating this stuffy character. I enjoyed all eight stories in this Dover Publications reprint of The Murder Book of J. G. Reeder (1925). The plots are sometimes a bit farfetched, the endings perhaps contrived, and the characters, especially members of the criminal class, may seem like stereotypes. And yet, Wallace successfully weaves a delightful humor into these clever stories. Like me, some readers may find Mr. Reeder's uncanny ability to place himself in the mind of the criminal to be reminiscent of G. K. Chesterton's famous Father Brown. Edgar Wallace was an amazingly popular author. It is said that in the 1920s and 1930s, excluding Bibles and textbooks, roughly one in four books read in Great Britain was authored by Edgar Wallace. This king of thrillers published 173 books and 17 plays. As so often happens with extremely successful writers of popular fiction (especially pulp fiction), Edgar Wallace's reputation has faded and he is virtually unknown today. Nonetheless, the short stories in this collection, The Murder Book of J. G. Reeder, are quite entertaining. These amusingly outdated tales can offer a short respite from the more serious, and often more explicitly brutal, detective and mystery novels so popular today.