Edgar Wallace was an English writer. Born into poverty as an illegitimate London child, joining the army at 21, he was a war correspondent during the Second Boer War for Reuters and The Daily Mail. During the First World War Edgar Wallace wrote a number of morale-boosting tales about the skill and derring-do of the British military and intelligence services, mostly in the form of series published under such titles as "Clarence-Private". Several series were published in the form of dramatic pseudo-documentary accounts of what he claimed to be true stories. "Clarence-Private" is a fine series of Wallace stories about wartime espionage.