Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace, South African author and newspaper editor, is born in Greenwich, England.

Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace was born on 1 April 1875 in Greenwich, England. Both his parents were actors. He started his career at the age of eleven working on Fleet Street selling newspapers at Ludgate Circus.  In 1894 he enrolled as a Private in the Royal West regiment and served in the medical staff corps. While he was doing his service, he started to write the song called ‘The Mission that Failed’ that was performed by the music hall comedians.  In 1896, he came to South Africa, during the Boer War, where he met with Rudyard Kipling, the English novelist also known for writing poems and tales for children.  At this time he was writing for the Cape Colony Press.  In 1900 he worked for the Daily Mail in London and left to become the editor for the Johannesburg Rand Daily Mail. In 1902 he returned to work in London where he visited  a place called Vigo during the Russo-Japanese war and learned a lot about spies that were operating around the coast of Spain. Wallace wrote his first novel ‘The four just men’ in 1905, about taking the law into one’s hands. He wrote more than 150 novels, selling more than 5 million in one year. In 1911 he wrote ‘Saunders of the River’ based on his African adventures that made him famous as a novelist.  In England, films based on his stories were produced.  Most of his books were adapted for the big screen. In 1929 he was featured on the cover of Time magazine.  He participated in the production of a play called ‘The Case of the Frightened Lady’ which led him being invited to write film scripts for Hollywood. He is famously known as a co-creator of King Kong (2005). On 10 February 1932 he died of pneumonia while he was working on a film project that would become King Kong (1993) in Hollywood, California, United States of America. He was buried at Little Marlow Cemetery in England.