Review: The hand of power

The hand of power by Edgar Wallace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a pulp novel that has everything. A secret society! A beautiful actress! Her wicked guardian! Her mysterious origins! A gentlemanly burglar! Disguises! Murder in the street! Kidnapping! Piracy! True Love!

Of course, every character is linked to every other by a chain of coincidence as thick as your wrist, and a key plot point hinges on a Convenient Eavesdrop, because the gentleman burglar happens to lodge with the mother of the other actress (the fake-French awful one), who has been recruited as a patsy in one of the schemes of the wicked guardian (who, in a separate plot thread, just happened to be passing when the head of the secret society fell ill), and the mother also is possibly the only person who knows the true origins of the first actress (the heroine), and happens to be telling her daughter all about it when the burglar overhears, and since he happens to know the people who are working in the heroine's interests and against her wicked guardian, he tells them. It's a big ball of yarn, after the cat has got at it.

If you can suspend disbelief hard enough, though, it's one of Wallace's typical gripping pulp thrillers. It's not clear for a long time what the heck is up with the guardian and the secret society and the heroine and the guardian's mysterious requirement for her to sit in a shop window writing at a desk, with a single rose in a jade vase, or for that matter why the burglar is involving himself. But the author tells it in a way that makes you want to keep reading and find out.

There's plenty of action, especially in the second half, and even a bit of high technology (for the time) - a listening device inserted into the villain's chimney. The characters are more or less stock, though the Scotland Yard inspector is from the records office and has never arrested anyone, which makes him different. There's a highly principled former accountant who is now, oddly, running a PR agency, which I would have thought was the opposite of something a highly principled former accountant would be good at. Perhaps he isn't.

The mastermind turns out to be someone I didn't suspect for a moment, and the hero certainly works for his happy ending, taking plenty of daring action. It would film well, like a lot of Wallace books (he was the most filmed author of the 20th century, and may still hold the record), and the film would be a rip-roaring thriller. Supposedly the 1968 German film Im Banne des Unheimlichen is based on it, but the plot and characters are completely different.

One of the best Wallace books I've read for action and suspense, despite the heavy reliance on coincidence to pull the plot and cast together.

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