Arthur Gwyn and The Black Abbot: On a spring day in 1926, a solicitor named Arthur Gwyn, practising in the small market town of Cowbridge in the Vale of Glamorgan, South Wales, received a copy of the latest thriller by Edgar Wallace, then Britain’s most celebrated and widely read crime writer. The book was called The Black Abbot, and what Arthur found inside its pages left him distinctly unimpressed.
The novel’s villain was a solicitor guilty of forgery, embezzlement and fraud, who steals his sister’s fortune and fraudulently disposes of an estate he is administering. His name, as printed by Wallace’s publishers, was Arthur Gwyn, of the firm of Gwyn and Gwyn, described on the back cover as “the unscrupulous and dandified Arthur Gwyn”.
For the real Arthur Gwyn, this was no small matter. Reputation was everything. He and his brother Vivian Gwyn were solicitors at the Cowbridge firm founded by their uncle Thomas Rees in 1867, and were looking forward to marking its 70th anniversary. Arthur was a decorated veteran of the First World War, having served as a Lieutenant in the Welsh Regiment, and was Town Clerk of Cowbridge. He and his brother were among the most respected professional men in the town.
To find his own name attached, in print, to a fictional embezzler was not something Arthur Gwyn was prepared to let pass. He went straight into battle with the publishers and the author.
Edgar Wallace responded at once, and with evident alarm. His letter of apology survives: “I was staggered to get your letter on my return to town today and I lose no time in telling you how terribly sorry I am if I have annoyed you. It is all the more distressing to me because I was careful to look through the London Telephone Directory to see whether there was a Gwyn & Gwyn, or an Arthur Gwyn, before I set my wicked solicitor down in Holborn. I cannot tell you how sorry I am that this stupid and innocent blunder should have occurred, and I hope you will forgive me for even associating an honourable name with my Holborn villain.”
It is a remarkable piece of literary history, not least for what it reveals about Wallace’s own working method. He was, by his own account, careful enough to check the telephone directory before naming a villain, and unlucky enough to land on a real firm anyway. Wallace was, at the time, one of the most prolific and popular novelists in the country, credited with an extraordinary output of thrillers and said to have had a hand in a substantial share of all the books sold in Britain during the 1920s.
The consequences for The Black Abbot were immediate. The publishers withdrew the book from sale and called in all unsold copies. It was reprinted with a different name for the solicitor. Arthur Gwyn received a respectable amount of compensation, and a copy of the newly printed book, with an expression of regret signed by Edgar Wallace on the flyleaf.
What became of that signed copy was, for decades, a small mystery. Michael Morgan, a director of the Cowbridge firm that carries the Gwyn name into the present day, recalls being told the story when he started his career there in 1984. It resurfaced properly only in recent years, and in appropriately unlikely fashion, as the subject of the firm’s regular Lab Report column, written under the byline of Arthur, the office’s black Labrador and Michael’s own namesake mischief-maker.
“No one knew what had happened to Mr Gwyn’s signed copy of The Black Abbot, but I have recently found a first edition which includes Mr Gwyn’s name and look forward to reading of his fictional exploits.”
It is a story that has quietly outlived its own scandal. What was, in 1926, a matter of professional pride and a threatened lawsuit has become, a century on, a rather charming footnote to the career of one of British crime fiction’s most productive authors, and a reminder that even the most careful research can go wrong in the smallest of places.
Courtesy of Solicitor Michael Morgan who writes a column entitled The Lab Report for Vale Life magazine (with his trusted Labrador, Arthur) in The Vale of Glamorgan.
We’re unsure of the ISBN number for The Black Abbot – we shall make some enquiries, as they say. Whoever ‘they’ are.
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