An English steam yacht ran aground on the Meloria about ten miles out, and was discovered by a fishing-boat who brought the news to harbor. The Admiral sent out two torpedo-boats, which managed after a lot of difficulty to bring in the yacht safely, but the Captain of the Port has a suspicion that the crew were trying to make away with the vessel." -- "To lose her, you mean?" The faithful Francesco, whose English had mostly been acquired from sea-faring men, and was not the choicest vocabulary, nodded, and, true Tuscan that he was, placed his finger upon his closed lips, indicative of silence.Gordon Gregg, an Englishman living in Italy and serving as an acting consul, becomes the victim of a hoax when a visiting countryman invites him for dinner on a luxurious yacht. On board, he finds the photo of a lovely young woman, torn in pieces. Then he returns to shore to find the consulate's safe burgled. The yacht, meanwhile, has set sail for parts unknown.The Czar's Spy, written by The English/French author William Le Queux in 1905, is a tale of international espionage and intrigue. This tale takes the reader in a slalom excursion from Italy to England to Finland and Russia and back again. The reason for this journey is to solve a mystery but only adds more questions and ambiguous happenings instead of the sought of answers. The story's hero finds the torn photograph of a beautiful woman falls in love with this poor victim of circumstance and risks his life and more to save her. The story has it all... love, murder, deceit and mystery. At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century's, William Le Queux (1864-1927) was a prolific writer of mystery, espionage and thrillers and enjoyed much success but today is almost forgotten. This is a real shame as I think his style would appeal to many contemporary readers. I recommend it to everyone that enjoys naïve love and twisting mystery.
About the Author: William Tufnell Le Queux (1864 - 1927) was an Anglo-French journalist and writer. He was also a diplomat (honorary consul for San Marino), a traveller (in Europe, the Balkans and North Africa), a flying buff who officiated at the first British air meeting at Doncaster in 1909, and a wireless pioneer who broadcast music from his own station long before radio was generally available; his claims regarding his own abilities and exploits, however, were usually exaggerated. His best-known works are the anti-French and anti-Russian invasion fantasy The Great War in England in 1897 (1894) and the anti-German invasion fantasy The Invasion of 1910 (1906), the latter of which was a phenomenal bestseller. His partial French ancestry did not prevent him from depicting France and the French as the villains in works of the 1890s, though later he assigned this role to Germany. Le Queux was born in London. His father was a French draper's assistant and his mother was English. He was educated in Europe and studied art under Ignazio (or Ignace) Spiridon in Paris. He carried out a foot tour of Europe as a young man before supporting himself writing for French newspapers. In the late 1880s he returned to London where he edited the magazines Gossip and Piccadilly before joining the staff of the The Globe as a parliamentary reporter in 1891. In 1893 he abandoned journalism to concentrate on writing and travelling. Le Queux mainly wrote in the genres of mystery, thriller, and espionage, particularly in the years leading up to World War I, when his partnership with British publishing magnate Lord Northcliffe led to the serialised publication and intensive publicising (including actors dressed as German soldiers walking along Regent Street) of pulp-fiction spy stories and invasion literature such as The Invasion of 1910, The Poisoned Bullet, and Spies of the Kaiser. These works were a common phenomenon in pre-World War I Europe, involving fictionalised stories of possible invasion or infiltration by foreign powers; Le Queux's specialty, much appreciated by Northcliffe, was the German invasion of Britain. He was also the original editor of Northcliffe's War of the Nations. Apart from fiction, Le Queux also wrote extensively on wireless broadcasting, produced various travel works including An Observer in the Near East and several short books on Switzerland, and wrote an unrevealing and often misleading autobiography, Things I Know about Kings, Celebrities and Crooks (1923).