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    The House of Whispers
    The House of Whispers
    The House of Whispers
    Ebook423 pages5 hours

    The House of Whispers

    By William Le Queux

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateJan 1, 1999
    Author

    William Le Queux

    William Le Queux (1864-1927) was an Anglo-French journalist, novelist, and radio broadcaster. Born in London to a French father and English mother, Le Queux studied art in Paris and embarked on a walking tour of Europe before finding work as a reporter for various French newspapers. Towards the end of the 1880s, he returned to London where he edited Gossip and Piccadilly before being hired as a reporter for The Globe in 1891. After several unhappy years, he left journalism to pursue his creative interests. Le Queux made a name for himself as a leading writer of popular fiction with such espionage thrillers as The Great War in England in 1897 (1894) and The Invasion of 1910 (1906). In addition to his writing, Le Queux was a notable pioneer of early aviation and radio communication, interests he maintained while publishing around 150 novels over his decades long career.

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    • 5/5
      Sir Henry Heyburn is a rich and powerful man who used to be rising politician. That was before he became blind and withdrew from public life to live on his estate in Scotland with his devoted daughter Gabrielle. Sir Henry now spends most of his time in the study of ancient seals and er knitting. More to the point he is also involved in mysterious communications and transactions with individuals scattered around Europe. In this he is helped by Gabrielle who transcribes his messages in code,although she knows not what they mean when uncoded.She is (of course) deeply in love with her childhood sweetheart Walter Murie,with whom she corresponds in quite cringe-making language. For instance she begins one letter "My Sweetheart,My Darling,My Own,My Soul-Mine-Only Mine" and ends the same letter with "My love-My King!". Well she doesn't want to leave in any doubt of her love does she ?Anyway there is a fly in the ointment,namely one James Flockart who is a villain of the deepest hue. He hold a deep and dark secret regarding Gabrielle and she is thus in his power.Alright the story is extremely dated and sentimental in the extreme,but that to a certain extent is it's charm. There is no sex and no real violence either. What interests me in particular is that many of the places mentioned in the story are places well known to me personally.On page 195 we read 'Midway between historic Fotheringhay and ancient Apethorpe,the ancestral seat of the Earls of Westmorland,lay the long,straggling,and rather poverty-stricken village of Woodnewton. Like many other Northamptonshire villages,it consisted of one long street of cottages,many of them with dormer windows peeping from beneath the brown thatch,the better houses of stone,with old mullioned windows,but all of them more or less in stages of decay.With the depreciation of agriculture,Woodnewton,once quite a prosperous little place,was now terribly shabby and depressing.'Mention is also made of Bedford and Oundle and of walking beside the River Nene (pronounced Nen in our part of the world). Now this book was published in 1909,but in many ways this book could still be used as a guide to the area today.So on balance,the good vastly outweighs the bad,and lets face it often the bad is unintentionally funny anyway. So I happily give this entertaining story 5 stars.
    • 3/5
      The House of Whispers is set in Scotland, which gives the heroine, Gabrielle, who is "sweet, almost child-like in her simple tastes and delightful charm", far too many opportunities to go romping through the heather in her fetching tam o'shanter, trusty sheep-dog by her side. The Scottish setting also allows Le Queux to wander off into pages of Scottish history, which is only marginally relevant to the plot. There are many pages of poetry, some of it in Italian, some of it in French, but most of it in this type of Scottish English: Oh Castell Gloom! on thy fair wa's Nae banners now are streamin'; the howlit flits amang thy ha's, And the wild birds there are screamin'.The sickening Gabrielle is devoted to her elderly (he's 53!) grey-faced, blind father, who was a brilliant politician until he suddenly went blind one evening. Unfortunately, because she is a woman, no amount of devotion can make Gabrielle trustworthy, so the dreary old man chooses to believe the tales told him by a disreputable childhood friend of his wife's. This man, party to Gabrielle's terrible secret, "held her irrestistibly within his toils. His clean-shaven face was a distinctly evil one. His eyes were set too close together, and in his physiognomy was something unscrupulous and relentless. He was not the man for a woman to trust." There is a great deal of waffle about the terrible secret. Gabrielle would rather die than disclose it, but no secret can survive that sort of build-up, so in the end it's a bit of a disappointment. Characters pop in and out as needed and at least one undergoes a complete personality change. The plot is ludicrous.This is a lesson in how not to write a crime novel.

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    The House of Whispers - William Le Queux

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