The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime - Michael Sims [58]
“C. Thorold.”
The next day the engagement of Mr. Harry Nigel Selincourt Vaux-Lowry and Miss Geraldine Rainshore was announced to two continents.
WILLIAM LE QUEUX
William Le Queux was outrageously, shamelessly prolific. His bibliography takes up more space than the life history of many writers. After traveling Europe, he worked as a journalist and wound up foreign editor of the London Globe. Le Queux’s many intriguing titles include Strange Tales of a Nihilist, If Sinners Entice Thee, and The Money Spider: A Mystery of the Arctic. One of his chief preoccupations, and the topic most associated with him, was espionage and the international dangers that faced Britain. Scholar Kevin Radaker calls Le Queux “the writer who set the guidelines for all subsequent British spy fiction until the advent of Eric Ambler.” Fortunately for readers nowadays, he traveled widely and left behind vivid snapshots of the European haunts of the rich and titled in the early years of the twentieth century.
His best-known work during his lifetime was the 1906 cautionary novel The Invasion of 1910, with a Full Account of the Siege of London. For all his foresight and genuine concern for his homeland, Le Queux was imitating an earlier success, The Great War in England in 1897, which he published in 1894. Apparently he genuinely had experience as an agent of the secret service, but most commentators take with a grain of salt his grand claims of intimate knowledge of behind-the-scenes machinations in high places.
Le Queux loved to entice readers with the words secret and mystery, including them in numerous story and book titles. “The Story of a Secret” was the third installment of a 1906 series in Cassell’s Magazine entitled “The Count’s Chauffeur: Being the Confessions of George Ewart, Chauffeur to Count Bindo di Ferraris.” A few months later, with more adventures added, the series became a book with the same title. Undoubtedly the count’s name, like Colonel Clay and Arsène Lupin, is fictitious even within the story. In the first adventure, Ewart narrates his unwitting involvement in the alleged count’s many nefarious schemes. By the time of this story, Ewart is caught up in the entertaining and profitable game of impersonation, as he gets assigned more and more tasks beyond chauffeuring the count’s gleaming roadster.
THE STORY OF A SECRET
The story of the secret was not without its humorous side.
Before entering Paris, after our quick run up from Marseilles after the affair of the jeweller’s shop, we had stopped at Melun, beyond Fontainebleau. There, a well-known carriage-builder had been ordered to repaint the car pale blue, with a dead white band. Upon the panels, my employer, the impudent Bindo, had ordered a count’s coronet, with the cipher “G. B.” beneath, all to be done in the best style and regardless of expense. Then, that same evening, we took the express to the Gare de Lyon, and put up, as before, at the Ritz.
For three weeks, without the car, we had a pleasant time. Usually Count Bindo di Ferraris spent his time with his gay friends, lounging in the evening at Maxim’s, or giving costly suppers at the Americain. One lady with whom I often saw him walking in the streets, or sitting in cafés, was, I discovered, known as “Valentine of the Beautiful Eyes,” for I recognised her one night on the stage of a music-hall in the Boulevard de Clichy, where she was evidently a great favourite. She was young—not more than twenty, I think—with wonderful big coal-black eyes, a wealth of dark hair worn with a bandeau, and a face that was perfectly charming.
She seemed known to Blythe, too, for one evening I saw her sitting with him in the Brasserie Universelle, in the Avenue de l’Opéra—that place where one dines so well and cheaply.