Wallace, Edgar - The Green Rust (1919)

One feature of Wallace and other thriller-writers from the early 20th century that seems quaint to us now is the fallibility of their super-villains. Here is the evil Dr. Van Heerden plotting to destroy wheat harvests across the world but he forgets -- oops! -- that the wheat season in the southern hemisphere is six months different from that in the north. Despite his fiendish ambitions he still lives in a suburban apartment -- no hollowed-out volcanoes or mountain fortresses for this evil genius -- and wastes a good deal of time in a futile plan to forcibly marry an heiress. Rather than memorise a secret message of vital importance, he inscribes it in a watch, which he pawns; it doesn't occur to him that he might need the message at a time when the pawnbroker happens to be closed, or that the shop could be burnt down, sold up, or burgled. He compounds his folly by keeping the ticket locked in a cashbox where anyone finding it could see its importance; so naturally the heroine makes off with it and leaves him in the lurch. This man badly needs training.

Luckily for him the hero is almost as useless. He leaves the heroine a gun but doesn't show her how to use it; he gets himself locked in via the oldest trick in the book, and only a jerry-built brick wall saves him.

But for all that The Green Rust has its moments. The menace of the epidemic is quietly convincing, and the stock market machinations that signal its readiness for use are well done. As with nearly all Wallace, there are snippets of much better -- and worse -- writing in amongst the flurry of exclamation points and laboured melodrama. As Van Heerden himself says:

Jon.