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Popular Culture Review
fiction fields. William Le Queux: Master o f Mystery> should go a long way
toward correcting the oversight.
As the authors put it, Le Queux was always a writer “skilled in sensing and
exploiting the public mood” (51). In Britain, during the final decade of the
nineteenth century and the early 1900s, the public mood was increasingly taken
up with the danger posed by foreign spy sleeper-cells and the fear of invasion
(often by perfidious Germany, sometimes by the equally dastardly French and
Russians). Out of this anxiously xenophobic climate was reawakened the
fashion for an already long-established literary phenomenon: the invasion novel,
the modem take in which Le Queux occupied a prominent position, with novels
like The Great War in England in 1897 (published in 1894) and The Invasion o f
1910 (1906), in which the Germans land at Lowestoft, march on London, and
are finally crushed by a popular resistance. Interestingly, as the authors note, the
book sold well in Gennany, doubtless due to the fact that the denouement had
been changed to allow Germany to win. These were hugely popular novels,
made all the more credible by Le Queux’s clever use of pseudo-documentary
materials and newspaper reportage. And, as the authors demonstrate, the novels
also contain a wealth of insights into Edwardian attitudes towards Empire, the
evolving national self-image, the foreign Other, war-preparedness (or rather, un
preparedness), the political left, class anxieties, and the rising influence of the
urban poor; a broad picture, in effect, of a nation under considerable strains from
inside as well as out.
If Le Queux’s involvement in the invasion novel genre was topical rather
than innovative, then his contribution to the espionage theme certainly seems to
have had more claim to originality. Le Queux “was one of the first writers of
popular fiction to recognize the importance of espionage to modern warfare and
to exploit and develop the figure of the spy or secret agent in his writings” (47).
To pin down his contribution even more precisely, with his Duckworth Drew of
the British Secret Service (in Secrets o f the Foreign Office, published in 1903),
Le Queux initiated the tradition of the gentlemanly secret agent in the popular
British spy novel. In chapter five (“Spies and Dodgy Dossiers”) the authors
present an intriguing account of Le Queux’s own contact (he claimed to be a
British Secret Service agent) with the world of espionage, spy networking,
secret missions, and undercover intrigue. However, the authors conclude that he
seems to have had only a Walter Mitty-style connection at most. But, in any
case, a large part of Le Queux’s fascinating story as spy and mystery novelist
lies in his tendency to self-dramatize and fantasize, to merge his own personality
into those of his character creations, and to blend contemporary social and
political concerns into futuristic narrative.
William Le Queux: Master o f Mystery is written in brisk and jargon-free
style, with an extensive bibliography and some examples of Le Queux’s shorter
work included in appendices. Meticulously detailed and documented, the book is
a lot more than just a straightforward account of the biography. Chapters on