Review: Terror Keep

Terror Keep by Edgar Wallace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This J.G. Reeder novel shows us a couple of different sides of the usually intellectual detective. For one thing, he's in love, with his secretary. She's a good deal younger than him - a generation younger - but apart from that, she is a Plucky Gel who manages to get herself out of some bad situations, which makes her a fitting partner for him. And he abandons some of the mannerisms that make him seem older than his years in the course of the adventure.

And an adventure it certainly is. We have a mad criminal who doesn't hesitate to kill, escaped from Broadmoor and targeting Reeder; an old house and its grounds, the Keep of the title, crammed to capacity with secret passages and underground caves leading down to the sea; a gold heist, which is treated as almost a distraction by Reeder; and plenty of thrilling action, everything from a knife thrown in the dark to gunplay to desperate escapes and crashing scenery. Reeder's concern for Margaret raises the stakes, and both of them have some suspenseful moments.

It doesn't seem to have been filmed, unlike a lot of Wallace's work (he was the most filmed author of the 20th century and probably still holds the record), perhaps because the bigger set-pieces would take more budget than was usually allocated to those films. It's a pity, because it's even more cinematic than most Wallace books. Perhaps in a few years someone will do a generative AI film version of it, since it's in the public domain.

It's a good old rip-roaring pulp novel in the best sense of the term.

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