Popular Culture Review Vol. 19, No. 1, Winter 2008 | Page 116

112 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