For my second instalment of the ‘Hundred Years Hence’ challenge I could have re-read ‘The Great Gatsby’. I certainly know I’d have enjoyed it, but what is there to say about it that hasn’t already been said? Similarly I was tempted by ‘Carry On, Jeeves’ but I know if I did so I’d instantly want to re-read the entire collection of Jeeves books and then crack open the DVD boxset of ‘Jeeves and Wooster’ for the umpteenth time. I mean, that’s hardly burdensome, but truth be told we watched all those episodes earlier this year already, so…

I also considered digging out Earl Derr Bigger’s ‘The House Without A Key’ in which Charlie Chan makes his debut. Again though, I know that as with Wodehouse I’d be sorely tempted to go on a Charlie Chan spree. Guilty pleasures (but only slightly guilty)and all that.

If I were being worthy I might try ‘Mrs Dalloway’ again to see if I might finally find Virginia Woolf’s writing to be even the slightest bit enjoyable rather than a wearisome chore. Or I might finally have a go at John Dos Passos’ ‘Manhattan Transfer’ which has been on a shelf here for I don’t know how long.

In the end though I opted for Edgar Wallace’s ‘The Three Just Men’ and do you know what? I rather wish I hadn’t. The penultimate instalment of Wallace’s series of six novels that started with ‘The Four Just Men’ of 1905, ‘The Three Just Men’ reads, in 2025, as something of a flimsy, disjointed thriller that is going through the motions. It gives off the odour of a Marvel Universe movie where the rot has well and truly set in, dissolving any sense of recognisable plot and leaving only a seemingly never ending series of action sequences, each more preposterous than the last. The book begins with a young woman (Mirabelle) being enticed from a farm in an unspecified area of rural England (but probably somewhere in The Home Counties) up to That London to take up a post as a laboratory secretary. It’s quickly obvious that she’s been tempted there For Nefarious Reasons although it seems to take forever before we get any real inkling as to the motivation behind what is effectively her kidnapping. The opening of the book also prepares us for the involvement of The Snake as some kind of murderous weapon (a black mamba, recently escaped from London Zoo, is Chief Suspect). These two themes (Mirabelle’s capture and The Snake) continue to, ahem, wriggle through the rest of the book but they do feel hastily sketched and ultimately disappointingly explained. They feel instead like weak canes supporting sunflowers that end up dropping towards the earth, the blooms in this metaphor being those previously mentioned Action Sequences that we are meant to enjoy but instead look a little withered and tame, as if the seed packet promised multi-coloured hues and all we get are bog standard yellow.

Wallace in his time was hailed by publisher Hodder and Stoughton as ‘The King Of Thrillers’ and whilst this was certainly the publicity machine in full effect, the public certainly seemed to like it and Wallace’s books were enormously popular. By the nineteen twenties a distinction between Mystery and Thriller was beginning to come into focus, with the two distinct vines becoming a little more untangled, and whilst my personal preference is certainly for the Mystery branch, I do still enjoy a rattling good John Buchan or Dornford Yates tale of derring do. Both those authors perhaps owe a nod of acknowledgment to Edgar Wallace, but everything I have read by them has been immeasurably more enjoyable (though frequently no less preposterous) than ‘The Three Just Men’. Despite inhabiting a post-WW1 world, Wallace’s fiction here still retains the distinct whiff of Edwardian melodrama. There is some acknowledgment of the scars of war on one or two characters, but for the most part the book feels like a harkening back to something of the pre-war world. Criminals are dastardly and heroes are stout hearted. Women are for the most part decorative and To Be Protected/Saved (the Damsel In Distress meme). Official law enforcers (London’s doughty Police force) applaud the rather freely dispatched ‘justice’ of the vigilantes in way that rather suggests a certain, ah, moral flexibility. And whilst Wallace’s Just Men act as judge, jury and executioner in a way that feels, in the 21st Century, uncomfortably relevant, one feels that rather than being a warning about the dangers inherent in allowing members of the wealthy elite to act in such a way, Wallace instead is suggesting that it is something to be applauded.

‘The Three Just Men’ then for me feels disappointingly distasteful as well as rather hastily constructed. If jerry-built thrillers are your thing then you might get some pleasure from it, but me? I’m wishing I’d gone with ‘Carry On, Jeeves’.