A Maker of History
By E. Phillips Oppenheim
“Not as you and I understand it, perhaps,” Spencer explained. “No Scotland Yard is extending a protecting arm over the place and that sort of thing. But spies haunt the place, and there are intrigues in which the secret service police often take a hand. In return, getting to the bottom of any disappearance or even robbery through the usual channels is generally tough. To the casual visitor, it attracts thousands from its reputation; it presents no more dangers than the ordinary night café. But I could think of a dozen men in Paris today, who, if they entered it, I honestly believe would never be seen again.”
Spencer was exaggerating, Duncombe murmured to himself. He was a newspaper correspondent and saw these things with the halo of melodrama around them. And yet—four nights ago. His face was white and haggard.
The boy,” he said, “could have been no more than an ordinary visitor. He had no great sum of money with him, no secrets, and he did not even speak the language. Surely, he would have been too small fry for the intriguers of such a place!”
“One would think so,” Spencer said musingly. Are you sure that he was only what you said?”
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E. Phillips Oppenheim
Edward Phillips Oppenheim (22 October 1866 – 3 February 1946) was an English novelist and a prolific writer of best-selling genre fiction featuring glamorous characters, international intrigue and fast action. Notably, easy to read, they were viewed as popular entertainment. He was featured on the cover of Time magazine in 1927.
Biography
Edward Phillips Oppenheim was born on 22 October 1866 in Tottenham, London, the son of Henrietta Susannah Temperley Budd and Edward John Oppenheim, a leather merchant. After attending Wyggeston Grammar School until the sixth form in 1883, his family’s finances forced him to withdraw, and he worked in his father’s business for almost twenty years. His father subsidized the publication of his first novel, which proved successful enough to break even. He published five books between 1908 and 1912 under the pseudonym “Anthony Partridge”.
Around 1900, Julien Stevens Ulman (1865–1920), a wealthy New York leather merchant who enjoyed Oppenheim’s books, bought the leather works and made him a salaried director to support his writing career.
He quickly found a successful formula and established his reputation. In 1913, John Buchan, launching his career as a suspense novelist, called Oppenheim “my master in fiction” and “the greatest Jewish writer since Isaiah”. As early as that year, his publishers were bringing out new editions of some of his earlier works to meet, in the words of one trade publication, “the insatiable demand of the public for more stories by him”. It added: “Readers of the author’s recent books will find these first stories of life sketches full of interest, their very crudeness being positively amusing in light of his present finished craftsmanship.”
1892, Oppenheim married an American, Elise Clara Hopkins of Easthampton, Massachusetts. They lived in Evington, Leicestershire, in what is now The Cedars pub until the First World War and had one daughter. During that war, he worked for the Ministry of Information.
He described his method in 1922: “I create one more or less interesting personality, try to think of some dramatic situation in which he or she might be placed, and use that as the opening of a nebulous chain of events.” He never used an outline: “My characters would resent it.” When he needed villains for his diplomatic and political intrigues, he drew on Prussian militarists and anarchists, enough for one reviewer to lament “the baldness of his propaganda”. For example, in A People’s Man (1915), a socialist discovers that German spies secretly run his movement.
A 1927 review in The New York Times said he “numbers his admirers in the hundreds of thousands and has one or more of his books on a prominent shelf in almost every home one enters”. He appeared on the cover of Time magazine on 12 September of that same year.
Reviews for his work treated them as entertainment with only a slight relationship to the mystery genre. In 1933, a review of Crooks in the Sunshine explained that “Mr Oppenheim’s crooks are so polished that they have no difficulty moving in the very best society…. This book has very little mystery, but dress-suit crime galore.” In 1936, a review of A Magnificent Hoax, his one-hundredth novel, said: “The hoax is on the reader, who is led through nearly 300 pages, only to find that nothing terrible has happened. The explanation takes a bit of believing, but since it extricates several very nice people from what looks like a nasty mess, one is willing to let that pass.” The Shy Plutocrat, published early in World War II, was “a good tale to take your mind off your worries”. Readers came to expect familiar themes, “the peculiar Oppenheim blend of dispatch-box atmosphere, femmes fatales, double traitors, and a tight plot”. In mid-career, The Great Impersonation (1920) was called “his best work”.
Along with dozens of novel and short story collections, he produced an autobiography, The Pool of Memory, in 1942.
Oppenheim’s literary success enabled him to buy a villa on the French Riviera and a yacht, then a house in Guernsey, though he lost access to this during the Second World War. After the war, he regained the house, Le Vauquiedor Manor in St. Martins, and died there on 3 February 1946. His wife died there on 25 November.
Upon his death, an assessment in The New York Times said: “As he recalls in his pleasant and modest autobiography, all his books were easy to write. They were equally easy to read, especially on a summer vacation when escapist literature is most welcome.” He composed by dictating to a secretary and produced seven works in a year. His social set included the characters that populated his novels, where he created “a glamorous world of international intrigue, romance and plushy society galloping along in swift action and suspense”. One academic study calls him “a talented entertainer”.
E. Phillips Oppenheim
