William (Tufnell) Le Queux Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on William (Tufnell) Le Queux

A prolific author of novels and short stories of mystery, crime, and international intrigue, William Le Queux is best remembered as the writer who set the guidelines for all subsequent British spy fiction until the advent of Eric Ambler. Though Le Queux's stories may be faulted for their often heavy padding, particularly in their treatment of love affairs, they are notable for what they reveal about his impressive knowledge of military and political affairs and his fascination with the intricacies of criminal activity.

Born to a French father and a British mother, William Tufnell Le Queux was educated privately in London and at Pegli, near Genoa, Italy. After studying art in Paris under Spiridon and touring France and Germany on foot, he returned to England, where he drifted into journalism. At first Le Queux reported police-court cases for the Eastbourne Gazette, after which he joined the staff of the Middlesex Chronicle, where he served as editor for five years. He then received an appointment to the parliamentary staff of the London Globe as a reporter in the gallery of the House of Commons. In 1891, after three years with the Globe, Le Queux was named foreign editor, a post that he thoroughly enjoyed. He resigned in 1893 to devote his time to writing fiction, but he returned to journalism in 1912 to spend two years as Balkan correspondent for the London Daily Mail during the Balkan War.

Throughout his life Le Queux loved to travel, and during the final decade of the nineteenth century he visited various parts of Europe and the Middle East. Following the advice of Émile Zola, who once encouraged him to become personally acquainted with the scenes and characters of European life, Le Queux wandered through Spain, Russia, Egypt, Norway, Sweden, Poland, and Italy. In these and other countries Le Queux came to know firsthand the settings for his fiction. He also visited fashionable European resorts such as Trouville, Etretat, San Sebastián, Carlsbad, Wiesbaden, Ems, Aix-les-Bains, Vichy, and Monte Carlo, and he would display his knowledge of them again and again in his novels of Continental life.

The bulk of Le Queux's fiction consists of mysteries involving crime, and most of these stories take place in exotic or fashionable settings where exorbitant wealth and power add allure to the tale. As an ardent criminologist, Le Queux was fascinated with all sorts of criminal types. Nevertheless, he was careful never to glorify the criminal. In fact many of his stories--including Secrets of Monte Carlo (1899), the best known of his early crime novels--contain moralistic passages that dwell on the vice and greed of criminal activities. The narrator of Secrets of Monte Carlo is Antoine Martin, the general director of the surveillance department for the casinos, who recounts various criminal cases that could have been witnessed only by such an official. But in the midst of Martin's accurate descriptions and his convincingly logical explanations, Le Queux inserted passages such as: "Over-ambition and greedy avarice, which are universal traits in human nature, are the bank's greatest safeguards. The man who wins today is almost certain, if he returns, to lose tomorrow.... In our close, stifling rooms, where the light of day is subdued and the fresh air excluded, avarice is, as elsewhere, the cause of the ruin of thousands." In Le Queux's fictional world, morality is simple: the desire for money is the genesis of all crime.

According to Le Queux's biographer, Norman St. Barbe Sladen, Le Queux was a British Secret Service agent before and during World War I. Le Queux himself claimed to have intimate knowledge of the secret services of other countries and to have been consulted on such matters by the British government. Whatever role he played, it is clear that he was well versed in matters of espionage. Nearly one-quarter of his fiction consists of spy stories, most of which were written between 1890 and 1910. Until the end of the nineteenth century Le Queux saw France as the primary threat to British security, a view that was common in military thinking at the time. England's Peril (1899) opens with the murder of Lord Casterton, a member of Parliament who has been protesting England's inadequate military preparations. By the end of the novel the reader learns that Casterton has been the victim of an explosive cigar given him by his wife, who is in love with Gaston la Touche, the chief of the French secret service. In The Great War in England in 1897 (1894) the Russians join the French in invading England, a fear often expressed at that time, particularly by military historians.

In the twentieth century Le Queux turned his attention to the threat posed by Germany. The Invasion of 1910 (1906) and Spies of the Kaiser (1909) are especially noteworthy predictions of World War I. In the preface to Spies of the Kaiser Le Queux warned his readers that England was "in grave danger of invasion by Germany at a date not far distant" and suggested that five thousand German agents were active in Great Britain. For The Invasion of 1910 Le Queux consulted military strategists and traveled more than ten thousand miles by car throughout England to determine its most vulnerable points. Le Queux produced a book of 550 pages, complete with maps and plans outlining the course of a possible invasion by Germany. As Le Queux wrote in the preface, the object of his forecast was to "bring home to the British public vividly and forcibly what really would occur were an enemy suddenly to appear in our midst." The serial publication of The Invasion of 1910 in the Daily Mail was generally well received, and after Eveleigh Nash published it in book form, it went through several editions by 1917. The widespread attention accorded the book was partly due to the fact that Le Queux had received help from three of the best military minds of the day: Col. Cyril Field, Major Matson, and H. W. Wilson, who wrote the naval chapters of the novel. The Invasion of 1910 has been translated into at least twenty-seven languages, including Arabic, Urdu, Syrian, Japanese, and Chinese. The total sales of various editions have amounted to nearly one million copies.

During the later years of his life, Le Queux concentrated primarily on producing crime fiction, including several collections of related short stories about individual criminals. The stories in The Lady in the Car (1908) are about "Prince Albert of Hesse-Holstein," who masquerades as the Kaiser's nephew; those in "Cinders" of Harley Street (1916) are presented as leaves from the diary of Dr. Villiers Beethom-Saunders, whose exploits are revealed by his friend and executor, barrister Charles Barrington-Mayne. The Crimes Club (1927) is a collection of stories about the detective work of ten members of that real organization. The club included among its forty members Le Queux, Melville Macnaghten of New Scotland Yard, Eveleigh Nash, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The most intriguing stories in the collection are "A Secret of the Underworld," which involves hidden jewelry and secret passageways in a Spanish castle, and "The Purple Death," which reflects Le Queux's lifelong fascination with poisons and their effectiveness.

Perhaps Le Queux's best collection of short stories is Mysteries of a Great City (1919), which contains twelve stories told from the point of view of Monsieur Becq, former chief of the detective bureau of Paris. Not only does this volume contain some of Le Queux's best descriptive passages and tightest plots but Monsieur Becq is one of the most interesting and logical characters that Le Queux ever created. At times Becq's reasoning is reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes's. As Becq comments in "The Mysterious Mademoiselle," a story of a double poisoning executed by a jealous and ambitious doctor: "I am naturally a very close student of human nature.... Given a crime, my first objective has ever been to discern the motive. No crime is ever committed without some direct motive, be it ever so well concealed."

Like Becq, Le Queux was an ardent student of human nature, a student who studied and wrote about some of the most fascinating and infamous criminals of his day. Although Le Queux is no longer highly regarded as an author of crime fiction, he continues to be recognized as a seminal figure in the development of the spy novel.