Virtually a one-man fiction factory, the British writer Edgar Wallace perpetuated many of the melodramatic conventions that can still be found in popular entertainment, among them the mysterious avenger or “justice figure.”
“Principled vigilantism is an eternal theme and works because we all know that some people, whether through their wealth or connections or legal technicalities, can evade answering for their crimes in a court of law,” observed Wallace’s biographer Neil Clark.
One such justice figure was the mysterious Ringer. Wallace spared no melodrama in his description of this mysterious and deadly master of disguise. “Who had not heard of the Ringer?” he wrote. “His exploits had terrified London. … Men who had good reason to hate and fear him had gone to bed, hale and hearty, snapping their fingers at the menace, safe in the consciousness that their houses were surrounded by watchful policemen. In the morning, they had been found stark and dead. The Ringer, like the dark angel of death, had passed and withered them in their prime.”
The character had a convoluted and somewhat circular history. In 1924, Wallace wrote The Three Just Men, another tale of vigilantes, as a serial for the American magazine Short Stories. “At the end of the story, the heroes follow a man where they see a real murder done in front of them at the theatre, while a ‘stage’ murder is occurring at the same time in a play called The Ringer,” Clark noted.
That prompted Wallace to write The Ringer as a serial for American Detective Story magazine, and that became a novel called The Gaunt Stranger in 1925. Then Wallace worked with actor-manager Sir Gerald du Maurier to turn The Gaunt Stranger into a West End play. A smash hit, the play premièred at Wyndham’s Theatre on May 4, 1926, and had a run of 410 performances.
“It was a thrilling plot,” observed Wallace biographer Neil Clark. “The Ringer — a/k/a Henry Arthur Milton — is a master of disguise and a ruthless destroyer of his enemies. He has sworn revenge on the crooked lawyer Maurice Meister, whom he blames (correctly) for the death of his sister. Meister seeks police protection, but will it be enough to save him?”
The police know the Ringer’s name, but he remains a phantom to them because of his ability to completely change his appearance. The character’s nom de guerre is meant to suggest that he is a “ringer of changes” (In a folk tradition going back to the 1600s, change bell ringers work to ring weaving patterns that never repeat themselves).
“Despite his popularity with an avid readership, the Ringer only appeared in two books, The Ringer and its sequel Again the Ringer which is a short story collection in which, of course, the Ringer brings a diverse number of deserving reprobates to their just desserts,” noted the publisher Leonaur.
A descendant of Fantômas, the Ringer was a direct ancestor to characters such as Leslie Charteris’ The Saint, Walter Gibson’s The Shadow, and Radio’s Green Hornet.
The Ringer seems to anticipate the Shadow here at the climax of his first adventure: “Alan stared, then his eyes, traveling along the wall, were arrested by a sight that froze his blood.
“Pinned to the wall by his swordstick drooped Maurice Meister, and he was dead!
“From somewhere outside the room came a laugh: a long, continuous, raucous laugh, as at a good joke, and the men listened and shivered…”
“The fictional world of Edgar Wallace is populated with colorfully named criminal organizations—the ‘Fellowship of the Frog,’ the ‘Red Hand,’ and the ‘Crimson Circle,’ to name a few—supervillains, outwardly respectable men with secret lives, intrepid young amateur sleuths (often reporters), plucky heroines, and assorted hoods, crooks, and gangsters,” observed Michael Mallory. “Back in the 1920s, there was an oft-repeated joke about the British thriller writer Edgar Wallace. A friend was said to have telephoned him one day, only to be told that Wallace was writing a new novel.
“‘That’s okay,’ the caller remarked, ‘I’ll wait.’”
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