The Edwardian Englishman
And Male Hegemony in William
LeQueux’s The Seven Secrets [1903]
At one point in Grahame Greene’s novel of 1943, The Ministry ofFear, the
Protagonist, Arthur Rowe, declares that “the world has been remade by William Le
Queux” (65). This was a backhanded compliment at best, and not quite the glowing
tribute to Le Queux that it may appear. In The Confidential Agent (1939), Greene
had already challenged as outmoded the “pre-1939 thriller” popularized by Erskine
Childers, John Buchan, and others—including Le Queux. These had been mainly
pre-World War One “Clubland” adventure sagas (essentially reassuring and
reinforcing) premised on a Xenophobie and ethnocentric vision of English cultural
superiority (Snyder 203-204). However, for all its irony, the context makes the
protagonist’s declaration instructive and significant, and it teils us something at least
about Le Queux’s prominent place in populär literary culture, readership, and taste
(in particular, crime or mystery fiction) during the first two decades of the 20th
Century. In the passage in question, as the German bombs rain down on London
during the Blitz, Arthur—in half dream, half memory—is addressing his deceased
mother, who died before the First War. The real bürden of his reference to Le Queux
is to draw a line under a vanished cultural era made up—in the protagonist’s
words—of “tea on the lawn, evensong, croquet, the old ladies calling, the gentle
unmalicious gossip, the gardener trundling the wheelbarrow full of leaves and grass.
People write about it as if it still went on; lady novelists describe it over and over
again in books of the month, but it’s not there any more” (65). That tranquil English
lawn has been left behind by a world in which “real life” [Arthur’s phrase] has
overtaken the outlandish events in the thrillers that his mother had laughed at, with
their “spies and murders, and violence.” The thrillers “are like life,” Arthur says.
The murders and violence of the pre-World War 1 potboiler have become part of the
new brutal actualities of a changed national and international reality, the fictional
unimaginable concocted by Le Queux and others has become the everyday, the
fantastic has become the commonplace. But it is certainly not as if Le Queux’s
fiction managed to remain completely insulated from the stresses and strains rippling
through early Edwardian society. By examining his novel of 1903, The Seven
Secrets, I want to argue that—for all of its undoubted shortcomings and its formulaic
middlebrow banality—Le Queux’s mystery fiction nevertheless exposed a ränge of
social and cultural insecurities that would eventually surface in the years preceding
the cataclysm of the First World War. In making such a case, I am conscious that it
may well involve issues of authorial intentionality. My assumption will be that in
The Seven Secrets (as to some extent with nearly all the Le Queux novels of this
type) we have a text that unconsciously or inadvertently reveals conflicting
ideological impulses as opposed to one which is intended explicitly to critique
particular hegemonic practices or to deconstruct an entire hegemonic social order.
In an avalanche of over 200 best-selling mystery novels tumed out with
conveyor-belt regularity during the opening twenty-five years of the Century, Le