selling consistently with no margin of error for two full years to recoup the £2,500 he had mistakenly believed he needed to break even. Unfortunately during this period the number of entrants correctly guessing the right answer continued to rise inexorably. Wallace's response was to simply ignore the situation, but circumstances were ominous. As 1906 began and continued without any list of prize winners being printed, more and more suspicions were being voiced about the honesty of the competition. In addition, for a working-class Edwardian family, £250 was a fortune and since those who were winners knew it (courtesy of the published solution) they had been waiting impatiently for the prize to be paid out. Harmsworth, having refused the initial £1,000 loan, was furious at having now to loan over £5,000 to protect the newspaper's reputation because Wallace couldn't pay. Wallace went bankrupt and hastily sold the rights to the novel for £75 to Sir George Newnes to provide token amounts to his creditors. In 1910 the murderer Hawley Harvey Crippen was reading a copy of the novel during his journey on the SS Montrose prior to his arrest. Wallace covered his subsequent trial and execution for the Evening Times. Sequels The Four Just Men is best known as a stand-alone novel, but Wallace wrote five sequels: The Council of Justice (1908) The Just Men of Cordova (1918) The Law of the Four Just Men (1921) The Three Just Men (1924) Again the Three (1928) In 2012 Wordsworth Editions published The Complete Four Just Men, a volume compiling all six books. () Characters The four Just Men of the original novel are George Manfred, Leon Gonsalez, and Raymond Poiccart, who recruit a fourth, Thery, in their campaign to punish wrong-doers who are beyond the reach of the law. In later books, Wallace develops their backstory. The original fourth man, Merel, had died in Bordeaux, and the remaining three either recruit a fourth ad hoc or operates as a team of three. After The Great War, they are pardoned on condition that they remain within the law, and Poiccart retires to Spain. Gonsalez and Manfred continue to operate a legitimate detective agency. Adaptations The Four Just Men was adapted as a silent film in 1921, as a film in 1939 and as a British television series in 1959. References Bibliography Clark, Neil. Stranger than Fiction: The Life of Edgar Wallace, the