Sinclair McKay

A quantum of respect for the forgotten master

Sinclair McKay hails the pioneering novels of William Le Queux, true inventor of the modern spy novel, whose thrillers prefigured the Bond books by more than half a century

Double-dealing female agents. Secret ciphers. Car chases. Now that we have all ingested rather more than a quantum of publicity for Ian Fleming’s gaudy fictions, it might be time for the true inventor of the modern spy novel — and the original purveyor of the above-named elements — to take his bow. The name was Le Queux. William Le Queux. He is almost totally forgotten now. But between the 1890s and the 1920s, he was one of Britain’s most phenomenally popular authors.

In the dying days of Victoria’s reign, right up past the first world war, Le Queux turned out countless thrillers that gave us all the familiar leitmotifs of the spy genre. As well as the codes and the gunfight set-pieces, he also brought us the wire tap, the death ray and the lethal exploding cigar. We had Spies of the Kaiser, A Secret Service, The Czar’s Spy and The Great Plot. A few years before the advent of SIS, Le Queux saw to it that the idea of the intelligence man as heroic figure was born.

Of course, in Britain in the late 19th century, one didn’t say ‘spy’. Spying was something that beastly foreign nationals did to us. What we did, according to Le Queux, was simply throw up defensive counter-measures. In The Man from Downing Street (1904), the Foreign Secretary tells our diplomat hero Jack Jardine that he would be better off referring to himself as a ‘secret agent’. Incidentally, was this the term’s first use in popular fiction? If it was, then Joseph Conrad slightly took the gloss off it several years later by making his own ‘Secret Agent’, Verloc, a shabby pornographer.

Naturally, in that golden evening of Empire, there was much to defend.

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