If You Can Walk With Kings by David Ian Chapman

William Le Queux was a famous name in his day, a bestseller whose influence extended far beyond his readers. It may be argued that his warnings about the threat of invasion in the period leading up the First World War was of great benefit and may have led, at least indirectly, to the creation of the modern British secret service. For most of the past century, however, his reputation has been in serious and sustained decline.

David Ian Chapman has set out a revisionist view in If You Can Walk With Kings: a view of William Le Queux, seeking to put forward a more balanced assessment of a writer and public figure who was undoubtedly a talented entertainer. Like many writers, he lived a great deal in his imagination, and his liking for fiction extended to accounts of his own life. I've never, for instance, found his account of an encounter with Dr Crippen plausible, and David Chapman doesn't cover it in this book, perhaps for that reason.

But he does cover a great deal, and in an accessible style. The text is supplemented with illustrations, some of them in full colour, as well as extensive quotations from Le Queux's correspondence. A good deal of painstaking research has gone into this book, but even more importantly, David Chapman has thought carefully about his subject, and has avoided the trap of simply repeating the standard criticisms of Le Queux.

At the same time, he doesn't overlook the man's faults. Le Queux's personal life was complicated,and although he made a great deal of money, he also spent extravagantly. As a result, he was declared bankrupt. He is best-remembered as a leading proponent of "invasion fiction", but as this book explains, he was highly prolific and wrote detective fiction as well as thrillers. I found this a very interesting and readable study, a nicely produced paperback from Janus Publishing which first came out four years ago.

Collecting Richard Austin Freeman

Whilst I was researching The Golden Age of Murder, I corresponded with David Ian Chapman, who had been introduced to me by a mutual friend as someone very expert in the work of R. Austin Freeman, a crime writer admired by Dorothy L. Sayers, T.S. Eliot, and Raymond Chandler (and many others, but that's not a bad trio to start with...)

I've never met David, but the information he supplied me was very helpful. This included fascinating insight into Freeman's coded journal, extracts from which David allowed me to publish in the book. Our hope was that someone would come along and help to decipher it. This hasn't happened as yet - Freeman's code is tricky! But I live in hope.

Anyway, it's only recently that I've acquired a copy, inscribed by David, of his bibliography of Freeman and also his biography of another author he's very interested in, William Le Queux. Le Queux was a fascinating character and I am planning to devote a separate blog post to David's very enjoyable study of his extraordinary life.

In the meantime, I've enjoyed the Freeman book, because I've collected a number of the author's novels and David discusses them, and their background, in fascinating depth. He also explains how he came to collect Freeman's work, and if you fancy collecting a crime writer, what he has to say will be of special interest. I'm in regular correspondence with a number of collectors in different parts of the world and my impression is that interest in the older detective stories is growing.

The lovely illustrations in Collecting Richard Austin Freeman, some of them in full colour, are in themselves a delight. If you're interested in Austin Freeman, do take a look at David's book. It was published two years ago by Highfield Press.

Oleander Press and The Charing Cross Mystery

Oleander Press is a small but enterprising publisher which has launched a brand new imprint, "London Bound". The clue, of course, is in the title - this is a series of London-based books, and they are vintage crime novels. I was delighted to receive through the post the first of them today. This is The Charing Cross Mystery by J.S. Fletcher, a prolific and once very successful author who is now pretty much neglected.

The book is very well produced, with striking jacket artwork, and I'm looking forward to reading it. Looking forward, also, to the appearance of further titles in the series. At present we are promised The Doctor of Pimlico by that larger-than-life character William Le Queux, due later this month, and another book of which I have very high hopes.

This is a very rare Golden Age book, one I've never seen, Fatality in Fleet Street. The author was Christopher St John Sprigg, who was a truly fascinating man. He wrote six detective novels, all now highly sought after, but was better known for his poetry, which he wrote under the name Christopher Caudwell. He became a Marxist and joined the International Brigades who were fighting in the Spanish Civil War. He was killed while manning a machine gun at the battle of Jamara. He was just 29 years old.

Well, that's a treat in store for me and I'm sure for many other fans of Golden Age fiction. It's such a good thing that publishers like Oleander are making books like this available again at long last. Meanwhile, it'll be interesting to see how The Charing Cross Mystery shapes up.