William Le Queux
Ah! William Le Queux.
Le Queux is a great example of an author who fascinates me, but I've never read a single one of his books. I've read bits and pieces of several, but I don't get to sit around reading books on the job.
First, here's a peep at our shelves full of Le Queux:
That's three full shelves of solid LeQueux. And there's more, even.
How can one not be fascinated by titles like The Invasion of 1910 With a Full Account of the Seige of London (1906), Spies of the Kaiser (1909) or A Secret Service: Being Strange Tales of a Nihilist (1896)?
And check out these covers:
This seems like a good time to introduce one of my favorite reference books. Reference books are a huge part of my job, and I find this one quite handy:
There's an Oxford Companion for just about everything and I highly recommend them. Here's an excerpt from the entry on Le Queux:
His earliest novel was Guilty Bonds (1891) which was banned in Czarist Russia; there are more than 200 later novels, some published posthumously, as well as volumes of short stories and sensational books about contemporary history such as German Attrocities: A Record of Shameless Deeds (1914), German Spies in England: An Exposure (1915), and Rasputin, the Rascal Monk (1917).
Over 200 novels! We don't yet have HALF of them in Fales. Hence my fascination -- I managed to track down four missing titles last year.
A more extensive biography of Le Queux is available through another favorite of mine, the Gale Research online Literature Resource Center:
The Literature Resource Center is another excellent reference tool -- it includes the full text of the complete run of The Dictionary of Literary Biography. Don't be fooled by the term "Dictionary," these are substantial articles with extensive bibliographies attached.
But I haven't even gotten to the most interesting thing about Le Queux. In addition to being an extremely prolific novelist he was also an agent in the British secret service before such a thing truly existed. He wrote spy novels, and spy non-fiction, at the turn of the century when fears of an invasion of England ran high. (Edwardian Fiction: An Oxford Companion has a good entry on "invasion scare stories.") He claimed that he wrote fiction to support himself because no gentleman could accept pay for doing what was no more than his duty to his country. He's the Edwardian James Bond!