"We are on the verge of a volcano, Morrice—on the threshold of a European war!"

A tireless journalist, novelist, diplomat, and self-promoter, Le Queux's fiction and nonfiction work after 1890 transitioned from an early focus on French and Russian villainy to promoting "the notion of a German spy menace in Britain and stirring up anti-German feeling" (Stafford), which reached its popular peak just in time for the outbreak of World War I.

Much of the action of the episodic REVELATIONS uses for background the 1908 Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the prospect of war in the Balkans, "expected hourly" by master spy Hugh Morrice and arriving in actuality the year after REVELATIONS was published, and again the year after that. The true culprit at the heart of every plot is Germany, paymaster of unnumbered foreign spies and threatened invader armed with "those insidious wasps of the sea, the submarines," and "bombs dropped from dirigible balloons," and the ultimate plot foiled is the so-called "German Secret," a threatened Austro-German-Turkish alliance against the British Empire. These dangers Le Queux had foretold at length in his previous THE INVASION OF 1910 and SPIES OF THE KAISER, and his anti-German fervor was undiminished in the final pages of REVELATIONS: "Sneer, laugh, jeer as you will, but assuredly the day of Germany's might is fast approaching. If we are not prepared, she will burst her bonds and sweep our land with fire and sword until her War Lord will wear the laurel-wreath of conqueror."

REVELATIONS is also notable for featuring women more prominently than much of the resolutely masculine spy literature of the coming half-century. In addition to several female villains, two heroic female spies star in separate chapters: Gabrielle Fossard, a secret agent of the French Republic, who gallantly assassinates a German spy to save an English engineer from the shame of selling British secrets, then dies of consumption; and Henriette, pawn of an American swindler, who changes her loyalties through Morrice's own persuasive efforts. Persuasion, not seduction — Morrice is no James Bond, being altogether less brutal, more gentlemanly, and more cultured in ways no fictional spy, after the passage of two world wars, ever would be again.

Read more: Stafford, The Silent Game: The Real World of Imaginary Spies; Di Fiore & Abignente, Spies in European Culture, 1815-1914: Representations, Networks, Practices.