Wallace, Edgar - Sergeant Sir Peter (1932)

Wallace's Sergeant Sir Peter (1929 - 1930) is a collection of stories about an aristocratic young man who becomes a Police Sergeant. Despite this conceit, this collection is much more realistic about life in Britain than many Golden Age works. The first two stories deal sympathetically with people who are discriminated against in British society: Indians, women, and the working poor. Wallace bluntly shows discrimination against racial minorities, and the oppression of women. Wallace also delights in exposing the flaws of the rich. There is also an emphasis on the financial needs of workers. Such material is fairly unusual in his era, and is consistent with the liberal sensibility Wallace exhibits in his other works. Unlike many writers with a point of view, Wallace shows little self righteousness. Instead, there is a tone of sly, risqué comedy, as Wallace gives us a inside look at the vices and follies of British life. The tone is one of an exposé, a droll recounting of the faults of everyone in the tale. The liberal look at social oppression is simply woven within this, as one more strand within his realistic account of British life.

Some of the sociological background here seems similar to early Dorothy L. Sayers, although Wallace is much more liberal. The look at people of color in Britain recalls Unnatural Death (1927), while the feminist aspects of women coping with difficult husbands reminds one of The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club. Wallace's sleuth Sir Peter shares both Lord Peter Wimsey's first name, and his aristocratic background.

Sergeant Sir Peter bears some resemblance to Agatha Christie's Partners in Crime (1924). Christie's sleuths were young socialites playing at being private detectives, Wallace's a young aristocrat taking on the job of a policemen. Both series are full of humor and social satire. The puzzle plot of Wallace's first story, "The Four Missing Merchants", resembles to a degree Christie's "The Case of the Missing Lady". In general, there is a Christie like feel to Wallace's puzzle plots here. Wallace, like Christie, is clearly in the tradition of Intuitionist detective writers. Wallace's "The Desk Breaker" deals with events whose motivation and hidden, underlying pattern are difficult to determine. It involves looking at the events in a different light, to understand their cause. This is the same sort of plot approach one will find in such inutuitionist tales as Christie's "The Affair at the Bungalow" (1930) and Ellery Queen's "The Seven Black Cats" (1933). Wallace's plot is composed of not just one, but two such events: the crime and the "domestic objects".

Several Wallace tales similarly deal with relationships that can be interpreted in more than one way. Such relationships are prominent in Fergus Hume, and writers who descended from him, such as Wallace and Christie. Wallace sometimes uses these relationships to build puzzle plots, as do other mystery writers. But he also sometimes sets them forth without any mystery, right in the exposition of the story. For example, the relationship between the policeman and the crooks at the start of "Death Watch" can be viewed two different ways, something that victimizes the innocent policeman in the tale. Wallace uses this not to build a mystery, but to get his plot rolling. Such relationships show Wallace's ingenuity. They adapt a technique, that of the ambiguous relationship, originally developed for puzzle plots, to do storytelling instead. Wallace is full of unusual relationships between crooks and other groups, such as police, middle class people, both honest and dishonest, and other professional crooks. In addition to ambiguity, these relationships tend to cause surprising consequences and results.

Mike Grost