The Great War in England in 1897

William Le Queux (1864-1927) was an extraordinarily prolific author. His writing career began in 1893 and his production of four or five novels a year was sustained unstintingly until his death. He led a life rich in social climbing and self-fantasy. He made a distinctive contribution not only to the highly charged atmosphere of pre-war Britain, show more but also to the emerging genre of spy fiction. Indeed Le Queux helped establish a narrative device that was to become extremely important in having spy fiction accepted by its burgeoning audience. This device was 'faction'; an authorial insistence that the spy novel dealt, in thinly disguised fashion, with real events, real characters, real conspiracies Nicholas Hiley is Head of Information at the British Universities Film and Video Council show less