The Detective Club ― The Terror

The sensational novel which launched Collins' Detective Story Club in 1929 was by Edgar Wallace, who wrote more crime stories in the 1920s, and more films, than any other author. This new edition of The Terror, with its original jacket artwork, also includes another classic Wallace text, White Face. A dangerous gang of criminals is imprisoned after a daring robbery, although the ringleader who masterminded the crime disappears with the loot.

Finally released after ten years behind bars, they are out for vengeance on the man who betrayed them, and the trail leads to a lonely house haunted by organ music and the spectre of a hooded figure who prowls its dark corridors. The Terror began life as a stage play, then a film, and finally the book that began Collins' Detective Story Club in July 1929. This new edition also includes White Face, the other crime novel Wallace adapted from one of his own plays.

A doctor finds a man murdered in a seedy part of London. The police suspect a notorious master of disguise known as 'White Face', and the doctor enlists a reporter to help him track down and unmask the elusive killer. This Detective Story Club classic is introduced by award-winning crime novelist and mystery genre expert Martin Edwards, author of the acclaimed The Golden Age of Murder.

Edgar Wallace was Britain’s most prolific crime writer, with more than 170 novels, two dozen plays and almost a thousand short stories to his name. His work has been made into at least 160 films, but he is best remembered today for writing the original story for King Kong just before he died in 1932 aged 56.