The Four Just Men Transcript

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Caroline: Welcome to Shedunnit. I’m Caroline Crampton.

And welcome back to Green Penguin Book Club, a series within Shedunnit that documents my journey of reading and discussing every crime or green title from the main Penguin series, in order. Our book today is The Four Just Men by Edgar Wallace, Penguin 64.

Before we get into that, though, I just want to draw your attention for the last time to the Shedunnit listener survey, which will be closing for submissions at midnight UK time on the 27th of May. If you would like to give your feedback on the show before then, please use the link in the episode description or head to shedunnitshow.com/survey to do that.

The Four Just Men already had a long and convoluted publishing history by the time it first appeared as a paperback with that famous green and white triband livery in July 1936. Wallace's thriller about a quartet of mysterious vigilantes crusading for justice first appeared in print in 1905, an early work of fiction in what was to be a highly prolific career. At this point, Wallace had recently returned from several years in South Africa, where he had initially been a medical orderly in the military, and then latterly a journalist and a war correspondent.

When he arrived back in Britain he still had plenty of unpaid debts in the southern hemisphere, and he also quickly embarked on a fairly extravagant lifestyle given his fairly modest earnings on Fleet Street. Casting around for a means of raising extra money beyond his salary, he came up with the idea of writing a sensational thriller with a financial twist — the final chapter of the book would be withheld from the first edition and the reading public would be invited to write in with the solution for a chance of winning a cash prize. The novel would be based on a short story that he had already written and had rejected by "every magazine in London", he later recalled. This competition would be advertised through the Daily Mail, the newspaper where Wallace worked as a journalist. A second edition would then be published the following year giving the answer.

No conventional publisher was interested in partnering with Wallace on this venture, so he decided to do it all himself, issuing the books from his own company that he called The Tallis Press, and financing the prizes and all the advertising of the book himself. Given that the impetus behind the project was making money, he invested an extraordinary sum in promoting it, spending £1,000 that he had borrowed against the book's prospects on billboards and posters. That's a sum equivalent to around £80,000 today. And his budget for prizes was also high: he offered £500 for the correct solution to his mystery, broken down as a £250 first prize, a £200 second prize and a £50 third prize.

Wallace was highly successful with The Four Just Men, in a way. His competition idea and his advertising campaign worked: it became a bestseller and sold a lot of copies — 38,000, he recorded, in his 1926 autobiography People. Readers really enjoyed the story. But he had made one crucial mistake when sharing the terms of the competition in the newspaper. He did not restrict the prize money to one entrant in each category – one first, one second, one third. Instead, the offer was worded in such a way that it sounded like everybody who sent in the right answer would get £250, rather than just one lucky winner. A lot of correct entries were sent in — Wallace's solution perhaps wasn't quite as mysterious as he thought — and a lawyer confirmed that he was now obligated to award a prize to everybody who had got it right. Some readers were even running side businesses offering to sell the correct solution to other hopefuls for a fee, so they too could claim money from Wallace.

The Four Just Men caused Edgar Wallace a lot of trouble. The longer he went without paying out the competition prizes, the more rumours began to circulate that it had all been a fraud from the start. Finally, in 1906 the proprietor of the Daily Mail, Alfred Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe, put up the £5,000 necessary to clear The Four Just Men's debts — no doubt because of the reputational damage that was building for one of his most prominent writers. Harmsworth, incidentally, had refused to invest in the project at the start, so I'm sure he was not happy about having to rescue it later on. Wallace declared bankruptcy and sold the rights of The Four Just Men for the tiny sum of £75 in order to be free of any future obligations around it. That did also mean, however, that he didn't benefit at all from the book's enduring success, nor its adaptations. It became a silent film in 1921, an Ealing Studios movie in 1939, and then an early ITV drama series in 1959. Wallace did go on to write five sequels using some of the original characters from The Four Just Men, but none of those books ever rose to quite the same level of fame or notoriety as the original. The novel was also published in America as a magazine serial in 1915 and then a book in 1920, no doubt to the benefit of The Four Just Men's new owner, Sir George Newnes, who was also the proprietor of the Strand magazine, among many other literary properties. This experience certainly didn't put Edgar Wallace off writing fiction, though. By the time he died in 1932 at the age of just 56, he had written over 170 books and nearly 1000 short stories. It is said that for a period in the 1920s, one out of every four fiction books sold in the UK was by him.

As with the previous green penguin book club episode about Raffles by E.W. Hornung, the editors of the Penguin series were looking back thirty years in choosing The Four Just Men for publication in 1936. But those of you eagerly looking ahead at what is coming up in the Penguin series might be interested to know that this trend did not persist: with one notable exception, the next few books are more firmly of the golden age of detective fiction itself.

The Four Just Men is a book that feels very of the early twentieth century, with links to the sensational serials and penny dreadfuls that Edgar Wallace grew up loving as a boy in south London who left school at 12 to go to work. It centres around the four men of the title, a quartet of shadowy figures with a reputation for committing daring and impossible international assassinations of people who have committed crimes for which the ordinary judicial process cannot, or will not, touch them. This story sees them come to London to bring pressure to bear on a British politician who is on the point of passing a law that would see a Spanish revolutionary deported to his home country, where he will surely be arrested by an authoritarian government before his movement can effect regime change. The four threaten to kill the minister by a certain date if he doesn't rescind the bill, and the rest of the story is taken up with the cat and mouse game between the Four Just Men and the Scotland Yard officers who are charged with the minister's protection. And of course, there is the famous ending, which proved so costly to Edgar Wallace, but we'll get into that later.

Joining me to discuss The Four Just Men is Tom Mead, a golden age detective fiction fan and the author of several bestselling locked room mysteries, including Death and the Conjuror and The Murder Wheel. His next book The House at Devil's Neck is published in August and sees his magician-sleuth Joseph Spector travelling deep into the English countryside to solve another impossible crime. I know Tom is an Edgar Wallace fan and I'm keen to hear how The Four Just Men fits into his personal crime fiction canon.

Before we get into the book, though, I'll give my usual spoiler warning here. Until you hear me say that we are "entering the spoiler zone", you can safely listen without hearing major plot details. The timestamp for that point will also be in the episode description. After that, you can expect to hear major spoilers, up to and including the full solution to the mystery. And at the end of every episode, I ask my guest to award the book a rating, so stay tuned to the end to hear how many green penguins out of five Tom gives this one and why.

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Caroline: Welcome, Tom, to Shedunnit. How did you first come to read Edgar Wallace? Do you remember?

Tom: Well, I first came across Edgar Wallace, thanks to his short stories, The Mind of Mr. J. G Reeder. That is a series featuring a very unassuming, an archetypal humdrum detective. He looks like a kind of drab businessman with his bowler hat and his umbrella and his anorak, but he's got this very intuitive and very sharp mind. He appears in a couple of novels but my introduction to the character was this collection of short stories, particularly the opening story in the collection, which is called "The Poetical Policeman" and it involves a robbery in which a night watchman is found killed.

And it's got a very fun twist in it, which I won't say too much about in the early part of your podcast, but it made me think this guy, he's got a certain knack for even in a space of a very few words contriving a plot that is actually quite sophisticated, even for a comparatively short piece.

And for somebody who predates the golden age really, but is operating with that kind of puzzle focused approach, which is what appeals to me. So I thought, yeah, he's somebody who bears further investigation.

Caroline: Mm. And coming onto our book for today, at what point in your Edgar Wallace journey did you pick up The Four Just Men?

Tom: So that was actually my next Edgar Wallace title after Mr. J. G. Reeder, because when you start to read about Edgar Wallace, the things that you find out are that he co-created King Kong, you find out about his astronomical popularity during his lifetime, and then his comparative slip into obscurity, and you read that his most popular titles are the Mr. Reeder stories and The Four Just Men. So it seemed like a kind of natural next step when I was tentatively dipping into his work. And, it made me into a full blown convert, to Edgar Wallace's style. He was a great storyteller, and it's a book which I was astonished to find that it was published in 1905, because it felt at least 20 or 30 years ahead of its time. It felt more like something from the golden age, but of course, it's also got those elements of adventure and derring do, which are the hallmarks of Edwardian and Victorian adventure fiction.

I suppose it appealed to me on different levels, really. It was such an entertaining read, but it was also fascinating to see as a kind of prototype for so many of the themes and ideas which would crop up in more overtly mystery focused crime fiction of subsequent years.

Caroline: I know exactly what you mean. It made a lot of sense to me when I was skim reading a biography of Edgar Wallace as preparation for this, and I learned that as a child, he was obsessed with Penny Dreadfuls and newspaper serials and so on. And I feel like you really get that from The Four Just Men.

He does love a dark and stormy night with someone abroad doing something they shouldn't. But then he also, as you say, has this incredible facility for quite a clinically constructed puzzle in a way.

Tom: Absolutely. And one of the things that I like about him is that he's so freewheeling with his imagination and he will contrive the most brilliant, meticulously constructed puzzle in one chapter, and then he'll explain it away in the next chapter. He does that in a few novels, but the one that springs to mind is The Crimson Circle, which is in a similar sort of vein to The Four Just Men.

It deals with clandestine societies and organised crime networks and all that sort of thing, and it has such a great impossible crime in it, which is set up brilliantly and then explained away straight away in the next chapter. And you think, wow, he could have built a whole novel around that premise. But he's clearly just so overflowing with ideas, and that is something that I really admire about him as a storyteller.

Caroline: Yes. I also picked up on that from looking at his bibliography even. He wrote so many books, so many stories, and he had his huge hits and he also had his reversals of fortune, The Four Just Men was arguably both because it was hugely successful and he had his bankruptcy problems around its competition, but it just doesn't seem to have bothered him, like things that would've stopped a different kind of person in their tracks, he very much seems to have been, oh, well, onto the next one because he just, as you say, had so many ideas. He always had another thing to get onto.

Tom: Absolutely. And to me that is the very essence of professional writing really. You keep doing it, whatever happens. And I suppose that if anything is the lesson of Edgar Wallace, really. He was somebody whose career had, well, he enjoyed astronomical career highs and then very dramatic lows. And then highs again. He died very young, well, comparatively young at the age of 56 in 1932, whilst he was working on what would become his biggest, most popular intellectual property, King Kong, so he didn't live to see its success. His personal life was tumultuous. His professional life was incredibly so. Obviously you've talked about the various issues surrounding The Four Just Men, including the infamous competition that he ran, which worked brilliantly for publicity purposes, but which was somewhat naive to say the least, in his approach to it as a businessman.

He was somebody whose ambition was untrammeled, but whose circumstances would often get in the way. But he made the best of it, I think. He enjoyed the high life as a celebrity, from probably the 1910s through to his death in 1932. He was very much a household name and he really capitalised on that.

Caroline: Mm. And The Four Just Men is in a way a book about infamy, because we've got these, well, three plus one coerced member of the quartet who are famous all over the world we are led to believe, but nobody knows who they are, which is a very interesting take on fame, from someone who hadn't quite attained it yet himself.

And then that blends into, I think, one of the book's major themes, which is extrajudicial justice and justice as perpetrated by the system versus what you might call, I don't know, universal justice or cosmic justice. And I found that unexpectedly moving almost when I was reading it. I don't know whether it's because of the political times we're living through or whatever, but the idea that there are powerful people doing things that the law cannot touch them for really resonated with me in a way that I wasn't expecting from an Edgar Wallace novel. How do you feel about those things?

Tom: I agree with you completely. It had a similar impact on me in that it felt so current and contemporary and topical for a book that was written in 1905. This is something that crops up throughout the subsequent golden age of crime fiction, an idea of what is justice, and I think as a book, which is written as an entertainment, which it succeeds at. I think it's got a, a real rollicking plot and lots of fun twists and reveals and what have you. But I think you are right that it is underpinned by a very interesting philosophical question about the notion of justice.

And it's there in the title. The title is, I think quite brilliant in several ways, The Four Just Men, because as you say there aren't even four of them. There are three of them. So the title is a kind of sleigh of hand and then just this idea of justice, which it's their kind of self-appointed role as the arbiter of justice. They administer this very brutal justice on their perceived enemies. But it's a sort of wish fulfillment, this idea that they are there as guardians and saviours of the downtrodden by eradicating the people in high places who are, figures of social discord and things like that. I think it's more complex perhaps than you might get from a first reading of it. It's something that bears a reread and bears further thinking about really as to what role these characters actually play in the narrative.

Caroline: Yes. I think I read it once when I was a teenager, and then this was my first reread. This time I felt like the book on its surface seems to be setting up this dichotomy between the illiberal politician who is trying to pass this evil law that's to effect this revolutionary and ruin everything, and the brilliant vigilantes who are going to save the day. That is the surface read of it. And I think that's how I read it as a teenager. This time, I think what Wallace is saying or showing you is that these are both bad options, we've got bad politicians and then we've also got these probably mad men going around killing people.

Tom: Yes.

Caroline: Neither of these options are good for a harmonious future society, but how are they? Are they bad in different ways? Let's have a look, I think is what he's doing.

Tom: Yes, I think it's a lot more sophisticated than it appears on a first reading perhaps, and particularly for the time in which it was written, because as you say, we have got these three protagonists, the "four just men" who are, as you say, they're homicidal maniacs who are dispensing their own idea of justice in very elaborate, colourful and gruesome ways.

They are our heroes. They are the characters that we are encouraged to empathise with. But really it comes down to who is the most entertaining. And I think Edgar Wallace as an author, that was always his primary concern. He was not, I don't think, particularly concerned with issues of justice and morality and this kind of thing in his fiction as much as he was concerned with contriving an entertainment and The Four Just Men, it succeeds on so many different levels as a work of fiction because, like you say, it raises these interesting ethical and moral questions about the society that he's talking about in the book. But also, it gives you these kind of gleefully, homicidal heroes to latch onto who you wouldn't want to meet on a dark night, but who nonetheless, that they will get the job done. It becomes an interesting howdunnit really, because I think it is ultimately a mystery novel, even though it's not a conventional one.

It is built around mainly the question of how are they going to get to this politician, this despised politician that they're targeting. With each chapter we see the wall being built up around him, almost that kind of impenetrable wall of protection, and you know that they are going to get to him eventually, but the satisfaction is in sussing out how. In terms of the morality that underpins it, it's an entirely amoral phenomenon, but it is very satisfying to the reader to know that that's going to happen.

Caroline: You're right. I hadn't even thought of that, but this is a very early howdunnit. R. Austin Freeman is mistakenly getting the credit for the inverted mystery. I think Edgar Wallace did it decades before because also his whole competition was predicated on this is a howdunnit, tell me how, that was the question he was asking. How was this done?

So yes, I think that's a really interesting way to look at it.

We are now going to be entering the spoiler zone.

And thinking about the different moves that The Four Just Men make in order to counter the protections around the politician and so on. Do you have a favorite moment from their actions that you'd like to highlight?

Tom: Well, I'm a big fan of disguise and impersonation, which crops up at several points in the plot and throughout The Four Just Men series. They are masters of disguise and of languages and they have all these superhuman skills and knowledge of very particular technical information.

They're three polymaths really. To me, it all comes down to the locked room murder, which is the culmination of all their efforts, murder of Sir Philip, the politician. That is what the competition was built around.

The howdunnit, how did they get him in this sealed room that was supposedly entirely inaccessible. And I think, as much as I love the book as a whole, it's that seeming impossibility, which is what keeps drawing me to the golden age and to the works of Edgar Wallace that creating a scenario which seems to be physically impossible and yet it comes to pass anyway.

So, it's the second half of chapter 10, and then through chapter 11 you get this locked room set up. And then of course it's explained away in almost a throwaway fashion, but it's still very satisfying, I think.

Caroline: And I want to get more into that in a moment, but I also just wanted to mention an earlier moment in the book that I really enjoyed as someone who used to work in and around the House of Commons and the UK Parliament. The little setup where a bomb that isn't programmed to go off but is just still a bomb, is placed in among a room where members of Parliament are having tea and chatting, just so that The Four Just Men can show what they're capable of.

And so we're not actually going to blow you up, we're just showing that we can get in here without you noticing. And the way that they've done it, again, appeals to my nerdy parliamentary estate brain where by an MP who everyone thought was paired is the phrase, which is a parliamentary convention whereby if a member knows they're not going to be able to attend a vote, someone who was on the other side who was going to vote the other way is paired with them and then they also don't vote so that their absence doesn't affect the ultimate outcome. Someone says, oh, I thought so and so was paired today, but I've just seen him come in. No, you didn't. You saw one of the four just men in disguise and he's left a bomb. I love that bit.

Tom: Yes, that is great as well. But yeah, the idea of these three anti-heroes as essentially performers, they put on a great show, and that is really what Edgar Wallace was about as an author, he was unafraid of showboating with his plots and with his outrageous machinations.

And I think, yeah, in that little sequence, you get all of it really. We are sort of in the corridors of power, but like you say, no one is safe. The Four Just Men will get you.

Caroline: Mm. And you're right, actually, it is a great spectacle. The story of this book, all the way through we're told that crowds are gathering here, or policemen are coming from every quarter of London to protect this politician. It's very theatrical. And I think there's even a passage that I really liked where he says, if you were to go out on the Embankment today and say to a passer by like, why are you all here?

He would say we are here to see a man be murdered, and that would be completely normal. That would be just what London's doing today. So yes, I do like the idea of it's a drama being played out on the city as a stage. But I want to ask you more about the locked room ending of this book because you've written several locked room mysteries yourself, so you know what goes into constructing a problem like this. With that expertise in mind, how do you rate what Edgar Wallace did in this book?

Tom: Well. Of course reading it in the 21st century and having a particular interest in locked room mysteries, I actively seek them out and I have a lot of fun trying to guess them. Will I get it right? Trying to play a game with the author? Can I beat Edgar Wallace to the solution?

It is not a particularly sophisticated slight of hand. It works, it does the job. But I tend to think of it in the context of when the book was written. This was two years before Gaston Leroux's The Mystery of the Yellow Room. So this was a very early example of a locked room mystery scenario.

The whole book really is a buildup to this locked room scenario. And for the time it relies on technology, which would've seemed very sophisticated and advanced. And so I suppose Edgar Wallace's ideal reader would be somebody who was not familiar with well, electricity, telephone wires and all these kinds of things which were comparatively new technology and which would seem capable of almost a kind of magic, really. And capable of pulling off these strange and wondrous feats using this mysterious new technology. So, as a locked room, it doesn't hold up in terms of an ingenious contrivance because of course we know now from having read so many books that when a character is introduced as having a weak heart, we get the idea that, oh, they will get electrocuted or frightened or both in this instance. When dead birds turn up, it usually means that there's been electric wires somewhere. So we kind of know how to spot the signs of this type of puzzle premise. But when you look at it in terms of the the time in which it was written, it would have seemed cutting edge and clever and sophisticated.

But of course people saw through it as inevitably they will. People will always see through the most ingenious plot, no matter how great it is. There'll be somebody who sees through it. You know, Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr, Ellery Queen, they were always assailed by readers pointing out flaws in their plots and where they got bits wrong and all this kind of thing.

So no writer is infallible in that regard. It's just that Edgar Wallace fell foul of that in such a public way. But really, I don't want to speak ill of his abilities as a locked room mystery contriver because I think he was very good at it and he did some really good ones.

I mentioned The Crimson Circle, which has a great kind of impossible crime premise. And then there were books, favorites of mine, like The Clue of the New Pin, which again, it's a device which now feels quite quite hoary and familiar, but at the time it was new and ingenious and deceptively simple, which is what you want from a locked mystery solution.

So yeah, the murder of Sir Philip, it reads brilliantly within the framework of the novel and within the kind of logical framework that, that Wallace has set up. Does it hold up today as an entertainment? Yes. As an intellectual game, I would say no. But that's not to detract from the fun that you can have with it.

Caroline: Yes. I think that's completely fair. And it's interesting to think as well the difference between somebody reading this, when it first appeared in 1905, 1906, and then someone reading it when it appeared in the Penguin series 30 years later in 1936, and thinking of all of the crime novels that have been published in between those two dates and how it might have been read differently even then, let alone when we are reading it now.

But yes, I think the fairest way to assess it is to imagine the reader that Wallace intended, the person who was going to read it, months after he'd written it, what was their level of technical knowhow and what would be there for them? I must say the one bit that slightly grated on me on the rereading is his pretty clumsy concealment of the fourth just man's profession or craft all the way through, it says, oh, we've brought Thery because he does that thing that we're not going to mention. And I felt that was a little bit overdone because obviously he turns out, he's an electrician, electrical specialist.

Tom: Yes.

Caroline: And that's why he's there. So that felt a bit like someone jumping up in the background going, look, look here. Which may be, if I was Edgar Wallace's editor, I don't know if he even had an editor for this book, I would've said, just don't mention that. You don't need to mention it at all.

Tom: Yes, you're right. I think the thing with Edgar Wallace is that he famously, once he became a household name, he was somebody who was almost pathologically averse to editing his books. He hated people tampering with them. He famously dictated them into a wax cylinder dictaphone.

Caroline: Which I find so impressive, by the way, don't know about you. As someone who has written books myself, the idea that you would just speak them aloud makes me feel quite unwell.

Tom: Yes, indeed. Same here. This is partly why I am so impressed by Edgar Wallace because to spin such a convoluted yarn effectively as a kind of stream of consciousness narrative is to me it's quite an astonishing feat. Now, I don't know how The Four Just Men was written because it came very early in Wallace's career. It was, I'm not sure if it was his first publication. He'd worked as a journalist ever since he was in the Press Corps.

Caroline: He was, and he'd had some nonfiction collections out and I think some poetry, he wrote a lot of very patriotic poetry during the Boer War, which I'm pretty sure probably doesn't hold up now.

Tom: Yes, indeed. Well, he was a big fan of Rudyard Kipling and his work reflects the pervading colonial mentality just of the era, really. There are elements of it in The Four Just Men, of course, with their globe trotting and their imposing themselves on international affairs and all that kind of thing.

But to get back to him as a plotter and the actual practical business of writing and the placement of clues. This is something that was refined over the subsequent decades. When we got to the golden age, the placement of clues was something that was highly prized by the great practitioners of the art like Agatha Christie. They were so deft at concealing clues in plain sight. They did it with such brilliant subtlety. Now you could never accuse Edgar Wallace of subtlety in any, anything he did really. But I think again, the fact that this is almost a prototype for the golden age, I think he more or less gets away with it. But it also explains why so many people saw through what he put together.

Caroline: And as you said before, some of the very best impossible crimes are incredibly simple, and that's what is almost so startling about them. And I wonder if that's what Edgar Wallace was going for in The Four Just Men. The reader's supposed to think they've closed off every possible avenue of entrance apart from this one that nobody thought of. That's just on the desk in his office.

Tom: Yes. Yeah. It could well be the case. But also another thing that strikes me is that Edgar Wallace was from an incredibly poverty stricken background and from a family that would not have had access to something as highfalutin as a telephone. So I suppose the fact that a phone could be used as a murder device would perhaps have seemed both deceptively simple and a very kind of upper class murder weapon if you like. A high society murder weapon. At that time and to somebody who, like Wallace came from this working class background and for whom that kind of technology certainly wouldn't be taken for granted the way something like that would be today.

Caroline: That's a really interesting point. I hadn't thought of that. Yeah, I did find it really interesting researching Wallace's childhood and early adulthood a bit because yeah, he went out to work from when he was 12. He had an astonishing number of jobs from selling newspapers to working in a rubber factory. He made shoes. He did plastering, he did all sorts of things all before he was the age where a lot of people today even start thinking about getting a job at all. So, yes, I think that's very interesting that maybe he was writing about a milieu that he didn't actually really know that much about that at that point, the idea of a wealthy man sitting in his house thinking about his estate and so on. That's, that's not, that's not what Wallace knew.

Tom: No. And he was relying on his imagination, which was always his greatest strength. And when he didn't know the circumstances he would invent them, which is what we all do as professional writers who write novels. I write mysteries set in the 1930s, but my knowledge of that era comes from the fiction of that era.

Once I get beyond the parameters of golden age detective fiction, I start to struggle. And so I have to just make things up and it's about giving a sense of authenticity rather than meticulous by the numbers research, it's about placing the story above the research, which is something that I think all the best storytellers do, really.

They don't rely on research to tell the story for them. So in a novel like The Four Just Men, where we are in, as I say, high society and the corridors of power and worlds which would've been comparatively alien to somebody from Edgar Wallace's background, he was relying on the fact that most of his audience wouldn't know about this kind of thing either. And so he could get away with it.

Caroline: Yes, absolutely. Now unlike me, you have read all of The Four Just Men novels and stories. I think you've read several of the sequels. Can you give us a bit of a gist of what happens afterwards? Where does Wallace go with this idea?

Tom: Well, he goes pretty much everywhere you can think of. These are very much globe trotting adventures, as in we follow the Four Just Men to Europe and beyond. There was a considerable gap between The Four Just Men and the sequel, The Council of Justice which presumably was while he was getting back on his feet from the fallout of the first one. But by the time the second one came out, he was very much an established name. We have our three main protagonists and they get involved in various struggles against secret societies and underground political movements and all this kind of thing.

It's very colonial in its approach as I mentioned. And it veers into all kinds of John Buchan Thirty-Nine Steps type of territory. there are a couple more novels and then there are some short stories and I have them all in a lovely omnibus edition which is a great handy resource.

And I think The Four Just Men, the original title in the series, remains the strongest of the series, but it is also very satisfying to see no matter how bizarre the scenario he contrives for them, whatever kind of unbeatable trap they find themselves in, each tale ends with them somehow miraculously escaping by the skin of their teeth and you know that they are going to keep on getting away with it.

And there's something very kind of reassuring in that. With a lot of these anti-hero protagonists like your Arsene Lupin, your Phantom Mask, Raffles who I know you talked about recently, and even going forward to things like Patricia Highsmith's Ripley novels the characters find themselves in these scenarios, which seem unbeatable scenarios, but you know that somehow by some kind of ingenious contrivance they will get away with it. And that to me is the abiding pleasure of The Four Just Men as a series.

Caroline: Well, coming to the end of our appraisal of this book, I must ask you how many green penguins out of five would you like to rate it?

Tom: Yes. Now this is a tricky one because my first instinct was, it's a solid five. It's so ahead of its time. It's a book that feels like it could have been written 30 years ahead of its time. And then it's a novel that, oh, it deals with the kind of media glorification of criminals and justice and all this kind of thing about media perceptions. It's a book that works on so many brilliant levels. It raises so many interesting questions and ideas.

But then I keep coming back to that arbitrary locked room puzzle, which doesn't hold up too much in the way of scrutiny, as you say, and to the occasionally sloppy clueing, I'm going to give it a healthy four out of five. But it is a book that I have a lot of affection for. And Wallace, for somebody who was so prolific, he was capable of producing really great work when he was on form and some of his books are real gems and I think The Four Just Men is one of them.

Caroline: Well, thank you very much, Tom, for lending your thoughts and expertise on this one. It's been a delight to talk to you.

Tom: And you. Thank you very much, Caroline.

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Before I go, I just want to alert regular green penguin book club listeners to the fact that the mailbag section I used to do at the end of these episodes has now moved to the revamped Shedunnit newsletter, which is proving to be a much more timely and conversational home for our reactions to these books. If you don't already receive the newsletter, you can sign up at shedunnitshow.com.

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This episode of Shedunnit was produced and hosted by me, Caroline Crampton. My guest was Tom Mead. You can find out more about him and his books at his website, tommeadauthor.com, and pre-order his new novel, The House at Devil's Neck, at your favoured bookseller.

You can find a full list of the books and sources used in the making in this episode at shedunnitshow.com/thefourjustmen. I publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.

This will be my last reminder about the Shedunnit Listener Survey: it closes for submissions at midnight, UK time, on 27th May. If you'd like to share your views on the future of the podcast with me and the team before then, you can do that now at shedunnitshow.com/survey.

If you'd like to ensure the podcast's continued existence and get some extra audio goodies in the bargain, become a paying supporter now at shedunnitbookclub.com.

Following up on some responses in the survey about the Shedunnit Book Club, I wanted to emphasise that although as a member you can enjoy bonus episodes, the monthly reading schedule and the community, there's no obligation to take part in any of these things. I'd estimate that about a quarter of the club's members are active participants, while the rest are very happy just to support the podcast's continued existence with their membership without having to do anything else. The club is the main, and rapidly becoming the only, source of funds for Shedunnit, so if you've considered joining but been put off because you felt it was too much extra work or listening, please consider supporting as a silent member. You can do that by heading to shedunnitbookclub.com/join and scrolling down until you see the option to be a "silent member". It's very much a "choose your own level of participation" situation.Thanks!

Shedunnit is edited by Euan McAleece. Production assistance from Leandra Griffith. Member support for the Shedunnit Book Club from CC McLoughlin.

Thanks for listening.