GEORGE HUTCHINSON

Victorian Fiction
The Throne of
the Thousand Terrors
By William Le Queux
Edited with an Introduction by Eduardo Zinna
Introduction
In a lecture in 1948, Vladimir Nabokov, the putative father of Lolita and Humbert Humbert, famously said:
‘Literature was born not the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came running out of the Neanderthal valley with
a big grey wolf at his heels: literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was
no wolf behind him.’ Nabokov thought it quite incidental that the shepherd’s boy who lied too often was finally
eaten up by a real wolf; what counted in his view was that ‘the magic of art was in the shadow of the wolf that
he deliberately invented, his dream of the wolf.’ ‘Literature is invention,’ said Nabokov, ‘Fiction is fiction.’ ‘To
call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.’
Fortunately, in old Aesop’s version of the story the shepherd’s boy who had cried wolf too often was not
eaten by the beast. He lived, but the wolf ate his sheep, and when he complained that no-one had come to his
assistance, the wise men of the village said: ‘A liar will not be believed, even when he speaks the truth.’ Aesop
does not tell us whether the boy learned his lesson.
By and large we can believe, with Nabokov, that every great writer is a great
deceiver. We are safe in the knowledge that the characters in a book or a film
are creatures of invention and that, regardless of how real they may look to us,
they are but fictions, even less substantial than so many wisps of smoke. Still,
Odysseus and Sindbad of the Sea, Othello and Raskolnikov, Jim Hawkins and Anna
Karenina, Sherlock Holmes and the Count of Monte Cristo often occupy a far
more important place in our lives than the people we cross daily in the street.
Yet there are story-tellers, some of whom are writers, and some of whom are
not, who claim to tell the truth when they are actually dreaming up their tales.
There are those who embellish upon what is known and call it ‘faction’; there
are those who make up their stories out of whole cloth and still call them true.
Sacha Guitry, a French film-maker known for his fanciful historical adaptations,
said of one of his films that it was ‘truthful - and sometimes plausible – since I
believe it is not lying to assert brazenly irrefutable improbabilities. Yes, I claim
the absolute right to imagine incidents that have remained secret and to narrate
adventures of whose unlikelihood I have found no evidence.’
Some of the authors who have turned an inquisitive eye to the Whitechapel
murders may legitimately be suspected of having embroidered their narratives
a little too eagerly. William Le Queux occupies a special place among them.
He was born in London in 1864 to a French father and an English mother, was
William Le Queux
educated in France and Italy and began his career as a journalist writing for French newspapers. In the late 1880s
he returned to Britain where he edited the magazines Gossip and Piccadilly and joined the staff of the Globe.
After a couple of years he abandoned journalism and became a full-time writer, both of fiction and non-fiction,
although often the distinction between the two was tenuous at best.
In 1893 Le Queux scored his first success in a field he would make his own: the speculative politico-military
thriller. Brimming with patriotic ardour, he wrote a magazine serial about a future treacherous invasion of Britain
by France and Russia, which was eventually repelled with the assistance of Germany. For a while French and
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