The Czar's Spy

An Englishman minding the British consulate at Leghorn is drawn into the affair of an English steam yacht that is not what her papers say, a rifled consular safe and a girl in a torn photograph, and the trail leads to the Russian secret police. Le Queux wrote scaremongering invasion novels that helped talk Britain into founding its Secret Service, and claimed to run his own spy network — a claim historians have picked apart ever since. The tsarist paranoia, at least, was real. Fifty-eight plates by painters including Ivan Shishkin and Ilya Repin carry the forests, winter roads and quiet interiors of the world Le Queux's Englishman moves through.