64
Populär Culture Review
Queux routinely recorded disruptions to the hitherto secure world of the English
upper middle dass establishment and the lower strata of the aristocracy (which for
Le Queux stood as the repository of what was decent, moral, and honorable in the
English character). Eventually, the threat would be fended off, the mystery
unraveled, the malefactor unmasked and brought to book, and the social Status quo
ante restored and justified, shaken but none the worse. On the face of it, this was an
essentially conservative and an often reactionary agenda. Sensational, melodramatic,
sentimental (and blatantly sexist), this became the tried and tested formula that made
Le Queux a household name with his middlebrow readership and established a wide
and enduring reading community (Pittard). At the same time, in the process, the
novels often grappled with the tensions created by the late Victorian “crisis of
masculinity” and the fin-de-siecle gender debates. Through a masculinizing agenda,
the male protagonist or protagonists (usually of an approved dass and social
pedigree) display perseverance, courage, and intuition in solving an enigma which
has threatened a calamitous collapse of order, control, and stability. In this Standard
scenario, the protagonist—with his allies, if any—becomes identified with a
normative and hegemonic masculinity, while other male flgures (who are sometimes
actually pillars of the upper-bourgeois establishment, as in The Seven Secrets) may
become deviant and disruptive expressions of an aberrant masculinity and moral
bankruptcy that must be rooted out and expunged. So, although the typical Le Queux
mystery would always be resolved comfortingly with the Edwardian Status quo and
its values valorized and rescued from chaos (the necessary and common ideological
expectation of his reading community), it was also unavoidably part of a more
generalized nostalgia for a declining social order and would often not conclude
without having examined related issues (in The Seven Secrets, for example, the
questions of public versus private heroism and individualized idealistic leadership
versus the institutionalized).
The social milieu of The Seven Secrets is predominantly upper-bourgeois
and Professional, and the events take place mainly in grand London houses, Harley
Street Consulting rooms, fine old country mansions, and the flrst-class compartme