Wallace, the author of The Chapman Report, The Word, The Prize, The R Document, and a storyteller likened by many to W. Somerset Maugham, was 74 when he died after battling cancer for several months.
At his death, Wallace’s books, which he wrote painstakingly on an Underwood typewriter given to him by his parents when he was 13, had sold about 200 million copies, making him one of the best-selling writers of all time.
He also was one of the best-travelled of modern writers, having journeyed to the jungles of Honduras, to the beaches of Hawaii and to the mountains of Scandinavia for his material, which ranged from the working habits of the President of the United States to the cocktail party conversations of housewives in his Brentwood neighbourhood.
“To be quite frank about it,” he once said in The Sunday Gentleman, a collection of his writings, “I had never not written books. I had written them while hardly out of puberty. I had written them in high school, college, in the Army and in the Sundays of my magazine (writing) years.”
It wasn’t until The Chapman Report in 1960 that Wallace was catapulted from a life of economic travails into a writer the Saturday Review once identified as one of the five most popular living authors in the English-speaking world. That book, which grew out of his observations of neighbour women, became a controversial best-selling examination of sexual proclivities in the suburbs.
He carved a unique niche for himself in the literary world, examining such familiar subjects as the Nobel Prize and the Bible and making them convoluted personal dramas, drenched in research and crammed with conflict.
In Irving Wallace: A Writer’s Profile, John Leverence wrote that when Wallace begins a book he is “always curious to investigate what psychological motives bring a certain person into his field or profession. Why is a surgeon a surgeon? Why does he enjoy cutting flesh? . . . Why does that woman like to teach, and why does this man like to dig into the earth?”
Biographer Leverence saw the Wallace oeuvre differently:
Leverence’s comments themselves made sense, for it was in the disciplines of magazine journalism and film that Wallace began his lengthy and eminently successful relationship with words.
Young Wallace haunted the town library and began writing short stories and articles, the first of which he sold to a magazine for US$5 when he was 15. That was all the encouragement he needed.
He received several magazine assignments, among them a movie-star interview for Modern Screen. From that assignment grew not only a story but a marriage. His wife, then Sylvia Kahn, was the West Coast editor for Dell Publications, which owned Modern Screen.
He returned to free-lance writing after his discharge, and in 1949 - based largely on earlier successes interviewing such world celebrities as Pablo Picasso, Alfred Krupp, Polly Adler and W. C. Fields - broke into films with Columbia. Until 1958 he penned screenplays for Columbia, 20th-Century Fox, Universal and Paramount. But a year later he abandoned film writing to devote himself to novels.
He had begun writing his published book, The Fabulous Originals in 1953. It dealt with the people who had inspired some of fiction’s most memorable characters. Among them were William Brodie, Robert Louis Stevenson’s inspiration for Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Dr Joseph Bell, said to be Arthur Conan Doyle’s prototype for Sherlock Holmes. It was published in 1955.
But it wasn’t until 1960 and The Chapman Report that Wallace became the successful novelist of his dreams.
Next came The Twenty-Seventh Wife, a biography of Brigham Young’s last mate; The Prize, an inside look at the Nobel Prize and how they are awarded (long banned in Scandinavia because of its piercing examination of the Nobel selection process); The Three Sirens, about a team of American anthropologists studying a tribe of sexually permissive South Sea islanders, and The Man.
The Plot, a tale of intrigue set in Paris; The Seven Minutes, a novel of pornography and censorship, and The Nympho and Other Maniacs, a nonfiction biography of scarlet ladies of history, came next. And then Wallace temporarily abandoned sex for a novel many consider his most imaginative.
The Word took 10 years of thought and interviews with 58 Bible experts to bring to the page. A TV miniseries starring David Janssen was broadcast in 1978.
Wallace stepped up his fictional output in the 1980s with The Almighty, The Miracle, The Seventh Secret, The Celestial Bed and The Guest of Honor, although none attracted the international acceptance of his earlier works.
Eleven of Irving Wallace’s books have been sold to motion pictures, the medium he once decried as confining, while four have found their way to television. He has increased his audiences further with articles in The Encyclopedia Britannica, American Oxford Encyclopedia and Collier’s Encyclopedia.
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