Kings, Celebrities, and Crooks

This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. William Le Queux turns his memoir into a brisk tour through royalty, espionage, journalism, and the hidden machinery of modern Europe. With playful vanity and a "things I know" candor, he casts himself as traveler, writer, and insider to courts, criminals, and statesmen, then begins with the audiences that made his reputation. He recalls a private interview with Tzar Nicholas II at Tsarskoye Selo, where the emperor speaks with startling frankness about Russia, Germany, Britain, and the threat of war, before the narrative moves to King Victor Emanuel III of Italy, who honors Le Queux, discusses literature, corruption, and reform, and praises his sympathy for Italy. From there the book opens into intrigue: a secret mission to recover letters in rural Italy, the strange finances of King Edward when Prince of Wales, and a wartime wireless message that helped sink a German cruiser. Le Queux then shifts to journalism, evoking the Globe's lively world of editors, politicians, and anonymous talent, and to sensational reporting such as Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper. The memoir closes this stretch with a remarkable encounter between Henry Morton Stanley and George Harding, a shabby former stoker whose improbable Congo adventures astonish even the great explorer.