William Le Queux
| William Tufnell Le Queux | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born |
2 July 1864 London |
| Died | 13 October 1927 (aged 63) Knokke, Belgium |
| Genre | mystery, thriller, and espionage |
William Tufnell Le Queux (2 July 1864 - 13 October 1927) was an Anglo-French journalist and writer. He was also a diplomat (honorary consul for San Marino), a traveller (in Europe, the Balkans and North Africa), a flying buff who officiated at the first British air meeting at Doncaster in 1909, and a wireless pioneer who broadcast music from his own station long before radio was generally available; his claims regarding his own abilities and exploits, however, were usually exaggerated. His best-known works are the anti-French and anti-Russian invasion fantasy The Great War in England in 1897 (1894) and the anti-German invasion fantasy The Invasion of 1910 (1906), the latter of which was a phenomenal bestseller.
Le Queux was born in London. His father was a French draper's assistant and his mother was English. He was educated in Europe and studied art under Ignazio (or Ignace) Spiridon in Paris. He carried out a foot tour of Europe as a young man before supporting himself writing for French newspapers. In the late 1880s he returned to London where he edited the magazines Gossip and Piccadilly before joining the staff of the The Globe as a parliamentary reporter in 1891. In 1893 he abandoned journalism to concentrate on writing and travelling.
His partial French ancestry did not prevent him from depicting France and the French as the villains in works of the 1890s, though later he assigned this role to Germany.
Le Queux mainly wrote in the genres of mystery, thriller, and espionage, particularly in the years leading up to World War I, when his partnership with British publishing magnate Lord Northcliffe led to the serialised publication and intensive publicising (including actors dressed as German soldiers walking along Regent Street) of pulp-fiction spy stories and invasion literature such as The Invasion of 1910, The Poisoned Bullet, and Spies of the Kaiser. These works were a common phenomenon in pre-World War I Europe, involving fictionalised stories of possible invasion or infiltration by foreign powers; Le Queux's specialty, much appreciated by Northcliffe, was the German invasion of Britain. He was also the original editor of Northcliffe's War of the Nations.
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