William Le Queux

• Born: July 2, 1864
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: October 13, 1927
• Place of death: Switzerland

Types of Plot: Espionage; historical; private investigator

Contribution

William Le Queux was one of the earliest authors of espionage fiction; he strongly influenced the direction of the genre for nearly twenty-five years. In writing more than one hundred novels dealing primarily with political intrigue and spying, he anticipated almost every development of the spy story until the writings of Eric Ambler. Yet because he was reputed to have been a member of the British secret service for a number of years, his works are somewhat difficult to assess: Le Queux’s lively and vivid imagination makes it hard to distinguish between his factual and fictional writings; he was not at all reluctant to embellish a situation and present it as historical fact. During the early part of his career, Le Queux warned of a Continental invasion of England. As a result, his early novels were extremely popular for their topicality and sensationalism.

Biography

William Tufnell Le Queux was born on July 2, 1864, in London, the eldest son of William Le Queux of Châteauroux, France. Traveling extensively with his parents during his childhood, he was educated in London, France, and at Pegli, near Genoa. As a young man, Le Queux studied art in Paris, but his desire to travel led him to give up a career as a painter. During a trip to Russia, he gathered material for his first book, Guilty Bonds (1891), which dealt with the revolutionary movement in czarist Russia and was banned in that country. Later, he worked as a correspondent and from 1891 to 1893 served as foreign editor of London’s Globe newspaper. In 1893, he resigned from his position to devote most of his time to writing novels.

In the early part of the twentieth century, Le Queux visited North Africa and the Middle East and also made a trip to the Arctic. He was London’s Daily Mail correspondent during the Balkan Wars (1912-1913). At one time, he also served as consul to the Republic of San Marino. During and after World War I, Le Queux was popularly believed to have been involved in espionage work for the British government. Indeed, he himself insisted that his novels were written to support himself as a freelance member of the British secret service.

After retiring to Switzerland, he continued to write and lecture on spies and their techniques. He became an expert in wireless transmission and was a member of the Institute of Radio Engineers and president of the Wireless Experimental Association. Le Queux died of natural causes in Switzerland on October 13, 1927.

Analysis

William Le Queux’s first novel, Guilty Bonds, dramatized the political conflicts in prerevolutionary Russia, but more important it marked the beginning of his professional writing career. He began his career as a novelist in earnest with the publication of The Great War in England in 1897 (1894). The first of many novels detailing the threat of military invasion to Great Britain, the novel portrays the menace posed by a Franco-Russian alliance. Five years later, Le Queux wrote England’s Peril, in which a member of Parliament is betrayed and ruthlessly murdered by his wife, who is having an affair with the head of the French secret service.

Although Le Queux was of French parentage, he had become the quintessential Englishman—more English than his fellow citizens. He summarily dismissed the importance of Anglo-French political cooperation and friendship, sharing the popular belief that France was Great Britain’s enemy on the Continent. As a result, Le Queux’s warnings that England was not prepared to withstand an invasion from the Continent influenced spy fiction more than did the writings of many other authors during the same period. Although his novels were not of the same literary quality as those of Erskine Childers because they were overwrought and highly melodramatic, they were nevertheless very popular. Le Queux had a journalist’s sense of the topical, which, when combined with his talent for sensationalism, made his novels compelling reading. With a vast readership and numerous supporters, he soon became a widely admired and often-imitated novelist.

After further travels throughout Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, Le Queux became convinced that the threat to England’s security was not France but Germany. The first of his anti-German books, The Invasion of 1910: With a Full Account of the Siege of London (1906), singled out Germany as Great Britain’s probable future enemy. The novel The Mystery of a Motor-Car (1906) quickly followed, and Le Queux intentionally began using his espionage novels as propaganda instruments. In this story, a country doctor finds himself involved in a German plot against England when he treats the victim of an automobile accident.

Spies of the Kaiser

Le Queux soon found several senior officers in the British army who shared his views on Germany’s growing military might. The most important of these men was Field Marshall Lord Roberts, a supporter of conscription. In Spies of the Kaiser (1909), Le Queux warned that England was in imminent danger of an invasion by Germany and that thousands of German spies were living in Great Britain and gathering information on important individuals, shipyards, factories, arsenals, and the country’s overall military preparedness.

The German Spy

One of the best examples of Le Queux’s books during this time is The German Spy: A Present-day Story (1914), written just before the outbreak of World War I. His style in this book is characteristic of all of his other writings:

Zarñatu was . . . a bacteriologist, and, leaving the twelve half-penny stamps untouched, he had prepared the three small leaves, each of six penny stamps, with a gum that contained the most deadly germs. Thus a stamp placed upon the tongue would mean certain death.

Had not all the impregnated stamps been destroyed by Wedderburn, I should, I confess to the reader, have been sorely tempted to leave one of them for Whitmarsh himself, and thus avenge his dastardly and inhuman crimes.

Le Queux’s prose is typical of pieces written during the early part of the twentieth century in England. The language is stiff, excessive, and melodramatic. Many of his story lines also involve easily recognizable stock characters, including the intelligent, witty, urbane Englishman; the country gentleman; the scientist; the military attaché; the beautiful female love interest; and the foreign spy. In spite of these limitations, Le Queux could maintain an intense level of suspense. In fact, the combination of melodrama and heightened suspense contributed most to Le Queux’s success as an author.

Bolo, the Super-Spy

When World War I actually started, Le Queux continued writing about German spies in books such as The Mystery of the Green Ray (1915), Number 70, Berlin (1916), The Unbound Book (1916), and many others. Yet although his prewar plots were well constructed and not at all contrived, during the war they became more and more preposterous, as is illustrated by his novel Bolo, the Super-Spy (1918):

The real adventures of this most mysterious individual, this escroc who began life as a lobster merchant in Marseilles, and who before his execution as a traitor was a financier dealing in millions of francs, were indeed a romance more astounding than any imagined by a writer of fiction. . . . At the trial . . . much remarkable and sensational evidence was given and many startling statements were made—allegations only equaled by those proved against the mock monk Gregory Rasputin.

Although the background of his stories remained authentic and quite believable, the plots themselves seemed to undermine his authority as a writer of spy fiction. Indeed, from the literary standpoint, Le Queux became a casualty of the war—he was so obsessed with it that his writings lost all objectivity or detachment. Perhaps his association with the British secret service led to this obsession: Le Queux once remarked that, after the war had started, he carried a loaded revolver at all times because his life was constantly threatened by foreign agents.

Rasputin, the Rascal Monk and Cipher Six

In his nonfictional material, he invented overly dramatic situations to provide a degree of texture and richness to his work. Unfortunately, the lively imagination that assured his reputation as a novelist handicapped him as a writer of nonfiction, especially when fictional plots were presented as factual occurrences. This tendency makes it extremely difficult to evaluate what he wrote about his own actions. For example, Le Queux stated that during the Russian Revolution the provisional government had secretly provided him with a considerable number of official papers and documents supposedly discovered in a safe in the cellar of Gregory Rasputin’s residence. According to Le Queux, he wrote Rasputin, the Rascal Monk (1917) using this material. The existence of such papers, however, has never been independently verified. Another example of Le Queux’s extravagant embellishment of situations is his book Cipher Six (1919). This postwar work was supposedly based on actual occurrences that took place in the East End of London during the peace negotiations in 1918. According to the story, Le Queux assisted the police in unraveling one of the most baffling mysteries to take place in the recent past. Once again, fact and fiction are not easily distinguishable; no one has ever corroborated either Le Queux’s contribution to the police investigation or his portrayal of the events in question.

When Le Queux retired to Switzerland in the 1920’s, he returned to writing the kind of spy stories in which he had specialized at the turn of the century. No longer was there a single devious foreign country that served as the focus for his novels. Except for the change to a Swiss setting, his style remained the same—suspenseful plots interwoven with a large dose of melodrama.

Bibliography

Hitz, Frederick P. The Great Game: The Myth and Reality of Espionage. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. A former inspector general of the Central Intelligence Agency compares famous fictional spies and spy stories to real espionage agents and case studies to demonstrate that truth is stranger than fiction. Provides perspective and a way of analyzing Le Queux’s work.

Höglund, Johan A. Mobilising the Novel: The Literature of Imperialism and the First World War. Uppsala, Sweden: Uppsala University Library, 1997. Discusses imperialist ideology in Le Queux’s work of the World War I period.

Panek, LeRoy L. “William Le Queux.” In The Special Branch: The British Spy Novel, 1890-1980. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1981. Scholarly study of British espionage thrillers geared toward the nonscholar and written by a major critic in the academic study of mystery and detective fiction; sheds light on Le Queux’s work.

Sladen, N. St.-Barbe. The Real Le Queux: The Official Biography of William Le Queux. London: Nicholson and Watson, 1938. Biography of Le Queux authorized by his estate, with all the benefits and pitfalls such authorization entails.

Watson, Colin. “De Rigueur at Monte.” In Snobbery with Violence: Crime Stories and Their Audience. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1979. Study of the representation of snobbery within espionage and other crime fiction (especially in the tastes of major characters and their reactions to exotic settings and high culture), as well as of the snobbery of the fiction’s audience.