Popular Culture Review Vol. 19, No. 1, Winter 2008 | Page 115

BOOK REVIEWS 111 “Shakespeare on the Tourist Trail,” W.B. Worthen’s “Performing Shakespeare in Digital Culture,” and Carol Chillington Rutter’s “Shakespeare’s Popular Face: From the Playbill to the Poster.” Many of the chapters in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture feature pertinent illustrations, while all of them present notes at the end of each entry, rather than their being collected into a whole at the back of the text. A bibliography of further reading (broken into the categories “Shakespeare and Cultural History,” “Appropriations and Adaptations,” “Theatre and Performance,” “Film, Television, and Radio,” and “Music and the Visual Arts”) and an extensive index usefully complement Shaughnessy’s volume. Without question, when such venerable publishing entities as Arden Shakespeare and Cambridge University Press offer titles like Shakespeare and Elizabethan Popular Culture and The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture, scholars of Shakespeare and popular culture ought to take notice. These indispensable volumes more than suggest the cachet and respect this expansive and inviting field of inquiry continues to acquire in the 21st century. By themselves, and as a pair, these texts provide a phenomenal introduction to, as well as a broad overview of, the field of Shakespeare and popular culture studies. Indeed, both are recommended highly not only for Shakespeareans, but also historians of popular culture in all disciplines. Anthony Guy Patricia, University of Nevada, Las Vegas William Le Queux: Master of Mystery Chris Patrick and Stephen Baister Privately published by the authors, 2006 In William Le Queux: Master o f Mystery>,Chris Patrick and Stephen Baister have produced an impressively researched and highly informative account of almost certainly the most prolific mystery and spy-story writer of the first thirty years of the twentieth century. The authors list well over 200 novels and short story collections published between 1899 and his death in 1927, not to mention dozens of uncollected short stories and journalistic and other periodical writings, and in 1917 alone a prodigious 14 novels. Many of his works were best-sellers and went through numerous reprintings. One of them sold over a million copies and was translated into 27 languages. Not for nothing did William Le Queux’s only biographer describe him as “the master of mystery.” And as the authors note, in The Ministry o f Fear (1943), Graham Greene has one of his characters observe that “the world has been remade by William Le Queux.” All the more remarkable, then, aside from one or two passing references, Le Queux has been largely overlooked in the more recent scholarship in the crime and mystery