The Crime Code

A cipher, a gang, and a man who can read both. Le Queux worked the codes-and-conspiracy vein for thirty years and knew exactly how to keep the pages turning. He also persuaded a good part of Edwardian England that German spies were living in every seaside boarding house, which sold a great many newspapers and did rather more harm than any of his novels. Fifty-nine plates of docks, harbours and fog by night, among them John Atkinson Grimshaw and Antonio Jacobsen, match the novel's world of shadowed waterfronts and quiet criminal work.