William Le Queux: 261 books

In these modern times of breathless hurry and great combines, when birth counts for nothing; when fortunes are made in a day and credit Is lost in an hour, men’s secrets are sometimes very strange ones. It is one of these which I have here revealed; one that will, I anticipate, both startle and...

“I sometimes despair of the country ever becoming alive to the danger of the unpreparedness of our present position until too late to prevent some fatal catastrophe.” This was the keynote of a solemn warning made in the House of Lords on July 10th of the present year by Earl Roberts. His lordship,...

You will recollect our first meeting on that sunny afternoon when, in the stuffy, nauseating atmosphere of perspiration and a hundred Parisian perfumes, we sat next each other at the first roulette table on the right as you enter the rooms at Monte Carlo? Ah! how vivid it is still before my eyes,...

Geoffrey Falconer removed the wireless telephone receivers from his ears, and sat back in his wooden chair, staring straight before him, utterly puzzled. “Eighteen-and-a-half minutes past seven!” he muttered to himself, glancing up at the big round clock above the long bench upon which a number...

The amazing ramifications of the German spy system in England are, unfortunately, not even to-day fully realised by the British public, or admitted by the Government. In face of the hard facts contained in this book, in face of the serious statements of Members in the House of Commons, and in face of...

From a derelict shed adjoining a lonely road which stretched for miles across the Norfolk fens, a strange shape slid silently into the night mist. It was a motor-car of an unfamiliar design. The body, of gleaming aluminium, was of unusual width, and was lifted high above the delicate chassis and spidery bicycle wheels that seemed almost too fragile to bear the weight of an engine.

Queen of the Unknown. Let me gaze down the vista of the tristful past. Ah! there are things that cannot be uttered; there are scenes that still entrance me, and incidents so unexpected and terrible that they cause me even now to hold my breath in horror. The prologue of this extraordinary drama of London...

I am a Veiled Man. Openly, I confess myself a vagabond and a brigand. Living here, in the heart of the Great Desert, six moons march from Algiers, and a thousand miles beyond the French outposts, theft is, with my nomadic tribe, their natural industry–a branch of education, in fact. We augment the...

Wrapped in furs until only my nose and eyes were visible, I was walking along the Nevski Prospekt in St. Petersburg one winter’s evening, and almost involuntarily turned into the Dominique, that fashionable restaurant which, garish in its blaze of electricity, is situated in the most frequented...

It is a remarkable sequence of events, a story which in these days of high civilisation is so extraordinary as to almost stagger belief. Yet the higher the civilisation the more refined are its evil-doers, the more ingenious is the innate devilry of man, the more skilful are those who act with malice...

The evening shadows were falling softly as the Earl of Saxham stepped into one of the small drawing-rooms of that palatial residence, Ticehurst Park, in the county of Sussex. Ticehurst Park was a magnificent domain, deeply mortgaged. Out of its fair revenues, there were two or three heavily-pensioned...

The Ambassador’s office was indeed a very thankless one, while my own position as second secretary of the Paris Embassy was a post not to be envied, even though it is popularly supposed to be one of the plums of the diplomatic service. With Paris full of spies endeavouring to discover our secrets...

The Madcap. “M’sieur Colin Trewinnard?” “That is my name, Captain Stoyanovitch,” I replied in surprise. “You know it quite well.” “The usual formality, mon cher ami!” And the tall, handsome equerry in the white uniform of the Imperial Guard laughed lightly, clicked his heels together, and handed me a letter which I saw bore the Imperial cipher upon its black seal

“Not one of them can compare with the girl in black—she’s ripping!” declared Raife Remington, a tall, well-set up, dark-haired, hatless undergraduate, who, in grey flannels, was walking beside his college chum, Edward Mutimer, at whose father’s house he was staying during the vac. Both were...