The Melody of Death (1915) is a crime novel by Edgar Wallace. Written at the height of Wallace’s career as one of England’s leading popular fiction writers, The Melody of Death showcases his effective narrative style and innate sense of the strange in everyday life. Like many of Wallace’s stories and novels, The Melody of Death was adapted into a silent film in 1922 by Stoll Pictures. The year is 1911. Night has fallen in London, and two skilled safecrackers enter a diamond merchant’s office after receiving a tip about a recent delivery. As they work the safe in silence, the pair become aware of a presence behind them. Turning, they find a masked man pointing a gun in their direction. Strangely, however, he wants nothing more than to watch them, to learn their methods for his own unspecified purposes. Meanwhile, Gilbert Standerton discovers, on the day of his wedding, no less, that his new wife Edith has married him for his money alone, and that she has been encouraged by her meddling mother to do so. Disillusioned, disheartened, and filled with rage, Gilbert hears the opening strains of the melancholy “Melody in F,” a strange song that never fails to send him into an even stranger state of emotion. As the story unfolds, and as Gilbert becomes increasingly distant, a life in business becomes a life of crime, revealing the dual nature of one disturbed, desperate man. This edition of Edgar Wallace’s The Melody of Death is a classic work of crime fiction reimagined for modern readers.
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Edgar Wallace (1875-1932) was an English writer born into poverty to a single mother. Wallace’s birth mother found him a foster family that later adopted him, and Wallace grew very close to the family, especially the mother, Clara Freeman. After joining the military at age 21, he started his literary career by writing serialized short stories. His career quickly grew from there, and Wallace went on to write eighteen plays, forty short story collections, and over one hundred novels. After a failed political bid in London, Wallace moved to Hollywood to begin a film career equally impressive to his literary works. Wallace is credited for one-hundred and sixty films. He was working on the film King Kong when he passed away in 1932, leaving five children and his massive collection of work behind.
