Edgar Wallace was the most prolific mystery writer of his time.

A million words a year spilled from his typewriter - novels, plays, film scripts, including The Four Just Men, The Squeaker, The Mind of Mr Reeder and Sanders of the River, seemed to flow uninterrupted from his fingers.

When he died in 1932 he owed £170,000. Within two years the royalties from his works had cleared the debt - that represents an income, at today's prices, of about two and a half million quid a year.

Mystery paid Edgar Wallace very handsomely - except for one: the mystery of the unmarked grave in Scholemoor Cemetery, Bradford.

Grave number B286 in the Roman Catholic section of the cemetery contained the mortal remains of Marie Richards, also known as Polly, from New Ferry, Liverpool, whose maiden name had been Mary Jane Blair.

She died aged 60 and was buried there on November 6, 1903 And she was the all-but-unacknowledged mother of Edgar Wallace, and a woman whose life reads like a bad Victorian melodrama.

In the 1870s Mary Jane Blair married a Merchant Navy captain named Richards, but was widowed not long afterwards with a baby daughter.

Changing her name to Marie, she went on the stage and in 1874 she was a member of a touring company run by the celebrated Alice Marriott.

Ms Marriott had a son, a handsome lad called Richard Horatio Edgar, who was engaged to marry a friend of Polly's called Jenny.

However, handsome is as handsome does, and by that definition young Richard Horatio was what used to be called a cad.

He embarked on a brief affair with Polly who ended up pregnant. She left the company and went into hiding in Greenwich in London until the child was born in March 1975 - just a week before the father married his fiancee.

The boy was given his father's name and the entirely unwarranted surname Wallace. Later I life he was to drop the Richard and Horatio and use only his third name, Edgar.

Within days of the birth, the boy had been adopted by a fish porter and his wife who had already brought up ten children of their own.

Later Wallace's official version was that he had been an orphan. In reality Polly was back on the stage within three days of the adoption, playing in Huddersfield with the Marriott company.

But truth to tell, she wasn't much good. Her stage career was increasingly punctuated with periods of 'resting' and while her son's career rose, hers faded almost daily.

In 1903, with Edgar almost a household name for his journalism, she turned up on his doorstep in London to see the son she had given away.

She did not know that he held a deep bitterness about her, that he had been brought up to believe she had abandoned nim. Wallace was an open-handed and generous man, but had no comfort for his mother.

She ended up working in Bradford playing small parts in local theatres. It was in one of these that she collapsed and was taken to the Royal Infirmary. She remained while the company moved on, and it was there she died, practically unmourned.

It was only after her death that her son was told, by his half-sister's child, that his impressions of his mother were wrong, and that she had been a tolerant, affectionate, kindly and generous woman.

He reproached himself ever afterwards for turning her away.

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