Showing results for "William Le Queux" in Crime Fiction

How to describe this book? In a word - savage. For those regular LibriVox Le Queux mystery listeners, this book is a step in a different direction by the author. The book starts out like most Le Queux. Our hero, Richard Scarsmere, befriends an individual (Omar) at an English boarding school who turns out to be an African prince from a kingdom called Mo. Omar receives a visit from one of his mother’s trusted advisers. His mother, the Great White Queen, seeks him to return home immediately. Omar convinces Scarsmere to return to Africa with him.

Le Queux (1864-1927) was an Anglo-French journalist and writer who was also a diplomat, traveller, flying buff and wireless pioneer. His best-known works are the anti-French and anti-Russian invasion fantasy "The Great War in England" (1894) and the anti-German invasion fantasy "The Invasion of 1910" (1906), the latter becoming a phenomenal bestseller. He wrote over 150 novels, many dealing with international intrigue, and a number of non-fiction works. This novel was first published in 1913.

Edward Royle is the head of a well-known chemical manufacturer in England, which he has inherited. He is engaged to the daughter of his father’s former partner, Phrida Shand, who lives with her mother. One night he is asked by his friend, Sir Digby Kemsley - a very famous railroad engineer, to come to his flat to discuss something although Kemsley is quite mysterious on the telephone. Royle visits, then returns home only to be summoned again by Kemsley, this time imploring him to return at once. Royle finds a gentleman in Kemsley’s place who is clearly not Kemsley, or is he?

The Earl of Saxham was vastly annoyed when his son, Guy, fell in love with a “penniless nobody,” and announced that he would marry her against all opposition. He determined to separate the lovers; to which end he persuaded an influential friend in the Foreign Office to secure an appointment for Guy in the Embassy at Madrid. He little knew that he was sending his son into the centre of a hotbed of anarchism, that Guy’s footsteps were to be dogged by a vindictive and revengeful woman, that his life was to hold many a thrilling moment and not a few narrow escapes.