Secret ciphers. Death rays. The newest guns and fastest cars. A suave government agent fond of cocktails and fancy cigarettes barely escaping death in exotic locales. The trappings of spy yarns are familiar—we know them from James Bond and other tales of page and screen. But they actually follow a blueprint laid out more than a century ago by William Le Queux.
Le Who? Born in 1864, the creator of the dashing-secret-agent genre now lies in the dustbin of history. And yet the writer of thrillers like England's Peril was a literary innovator and Queen Alexandra's favorite novelist.
Was Le Queux a great writer? God, no. His prose has been called "childish" and "wooden." But respect must be paid: His books were read by a young Ian Fleming, and his Duckworth Drew character was undoubtedly one of the inspirations for 007. Cosmopolitan but an "Englishman to the backbone," Drew wielded killer gadgets and killer charm to survive the globe-trotting spy missions assigned him by his superior, "MM."
Beyond literature, the man's true (evil) genius was as a propagandist. His paranoid novels and bogus pronouncements were aimed at convincing fellow Brits that England was infested with foreign agents. In fact, the flimsy evidence of German spying he stovepiped to a government subcommittee—a subcommittee that arose from anxieties he helped stir—prompted the 1909 founding of the British Secret Service Bureau (later a model for the CIA). Historians even assign Le Queux some blame for pre-World War I tensions between England and Germany.
Few remember him today, but not for nothing does the protagonist of Graham Greene's The Ministry of Fear cry out, "The world has been remade by William Le Queux."
