The army quickly recognized the new recruit was better as a writer than he was as a fighter and transferred him from the infantry to the Press Corps where he filed official accounts of the battles for the War Office. It was the first sign young Edgar nursed literary ambitions. The surname was taken in honor of General Lou Wallace, author of Ben Hur.
By now he’d dropped his adoptive family’s name of Freeman in favor of Wallace.
He left school aged 12 and, the minute he was old enough, signed up as a soldier in the British Army, shipping out to South Africa to fight in the Second Boer War. The King of Thrillers was born into poverty in southeast London in 1875, the illegitimate child of a pair of touring actors.
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