"The Four Just Men" by Edgar Wallace

Royal Courts of Justice, London

The Four Just Men (actually there are only three of them but they have recruited a fourth for the purposes of this particular novel) are self-appointed judges administering a vigilante justice to those who are above the law, such as "a capitalist controlling the markets of the world, a speculator cornering cotton or wheat whilst mills stand idle and people starve, tyrants and despots with the destinies of nations between their thumb and finger". (Ch 7) They threaten to murder a government minister unless he withdraws a proposed law which will enable the extradition of aliens who, in modern terms, have sought political asylum in the UK. Their code of honour requires that they offer repeated warnings so their designated victim has plenty of opportunity to  comply with their demands. Can they carry out their plans when the whole of Scotland Yard's finest are ranged against them?

It's one of those morally dubious books that has you rooting for the killers, for those outside the law, for what would then be called anarchists and now be called terrorists.

It is a simple and short story told (Wallace doesn't really adhere to 'show don't tell') in very simple prose and sentences and paragraphs that are short and punchy. The plot seesaws: both sides have successes and failures. There is a significant reliance on impenetrable disguises and the FJM are incredibly well-informed about the police, though how they know what they do seems to be a mystery. The three core members of the FJM have private incomes and are extraordinarily well-educated, quoting classical authors, and being wonderful chemists: they're a sort of Marty Stu melange of Sherlock Holmes, Raffles, The Saint, Lord Peter Wimsey and James Bond. The new recruit is a sneak thief, a coward, and a potential Judas recruited solely because he has the skills for this one particular job. In other words, no character is at all well-rounded. I would have said that it would be impossible to recreate Wallace's success because the modern public would not be so naive but the continuing success of thriller fiction proves me wrong.

Wallace was one of the most prolific (over 170 novels) and successful writers of the twentieth century; The Four Just Men, published in 1905 when he was just 30, was his first successful novel. Previously he had been a soldier and a newspaperman and his journalistic experience is clear both from the content of this novel and its style (very tabloid). He went on to write Sanders of the River (distressingly racist and colonialist but with a much more interestingly complex protagonist) and the first draft of King Kong. 

Selected quotes:

• "He sat at a little table, this man, obviously ill at ease, pinching his fat cheeks, smoothing his shaggy eyebrows, fingering the white scar on his unshaven chin, doing all the things that the lower classes do when they sudden;y find themselves placed on terms of equality with their betters." (Ch 1) Wallace was an illegitimate child born to an actress and fostered; he played truant from school; and yet he still swallowed wholesale the English class system.
• "Poiccart was a chemist, a man who found joy in unhealthy precipitates, who mixed evil-smelling drugs and distilled, filtered, carbonated, oxydized [sic], and did all manner of things in glass tubes, to the vegetable, animal, and mineral products of the earth." (Ch 9)

October 2023; 108 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God