E. Phillips Oppenheim

• Born: October 22, 1866
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: February 3, 1946
• Place of death: St. Peter Port, Guernsey, Channel Islands

Types of Plot: Espionage; thriller; police procedural

Contribution

E. Phillips Oppenheim contributed more than 150 novels to the mystery and detective genre. Because he served in the British Ministry of Information during World War I, Oppenheim was privy to at least some of the workings of the British Secret Service, and his protagonists are frequently Secret Service employees. There are no detective series in Oppenheim’s work; each novel introduces a new set of characters. Oppenheim wrote about wealthy supermen and their way of life. His largely upper-class characters share a love of good wine and smoke exotic cigarettes. The women are beautiful and virtuous. While the men fall in love in almost every novel, the excitement of adventure takes precedence over that of romance. Oppenheim claimed to have begun each book with “a sense of the first chapter and an inkling of something to follow,” and his plots are rarely dull.

That the plots of his immense oeuvre are not repetitive is a credit to Oppenheim’s fertile imagination. Most of his books involve some kind of international intrigue, and many of them reveal a surprise hero. His single greatest literary influence was probably his neighbor in the French Riviera, Baroness Orczy, author of The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905). Louis, the maître d’ of the Milan Hotel in A Pulpit in the Grill Room (1938) and The Milan Grill Room: Further Adventures of Louis, the Manager, and Major Lyson, the Raconteur (1940), is reminiscent of Orczy’s armchair detective, the Old Man in the Corner.

Biography

Edward Phillips Oppenheim was born in London on October 22, 1866. He left the Wyggeston Grammar School in Leicester in 1882 before graduation because his father, a leather merchant, was having financial problems. During World War I, Oppenheim served in the Ministry of Information, an experience that fed his imagination and allowed him to write so many novels of international intrigue. He married New Englander Elsie Hopkins, and the couple had one daughter. Until World War II, they lived on the French Riviera; forced to leave, they moved to Guernsey, in the Channel Islands. Oppenheim, who occasionally wrote under the name Anthony Partridge, died in St. Peter Port, Guernsey, on February 3, 1946.

Analysis

E. Phillips Oppenheim, dubbed “The Prince of Storytellers,” was a master of the spy novel. As a longtime resident of the French Riviera, Oppenheim kept his finger on the European pulse; he located his intrigues in Poland, Russia, England, and Africa, as well as in a small, imaginary European country. He was a monarchist whose characters did not like Germany, Russia, socialism, or communism. Oppenheim boasted that he had foreseen the expansionist ambitions of Russia, Japan, and, particularly, Germany. His writing before World War I was so anti-German, in fact, that his name was on a list of British citizens to be eradicated if the Germans successfully invaded England. Ironically, when the Germans did obtain control of the Channel Islands, the Luftwaffe chose Oppenheim’s house on Guernsey as their headquarters.

In A Maker of History (1905), a young Englishman obtains a copy of a secret treaty between the kaiser and the czar detailing an agreement to wage war against England. In The Double Traitor (1915), a diplomat obtains a list of the German spies in England and is able to identify them when war breaks out. In The Kingdom of the Blind (1916), an English aristocrat proves to be a German spy. Oppenheim had little faith in the ability of the League of Nations or the United Nations to obtain a permanent world peace, and he frequently emphasized the power and importance of secret societies engaged in world trade.

Mysterious Mr. Sabin

Among the novels that established Oppenheim’s reputation as a spy novelist was Mysterious Mr. Sabin (1898), in which the protagonist steals British defense documents to sell to Germany. He plans to use the money to finance a new French revolution. Sabin’s secret society, however, orders him to burn the documents obtained through blackmail, and Sabin must convince the other characters that he meant well all along.

The Great Impersonation

Another successful novel, The Great Impersonation (1920), describes the impersonation of the German major-general Baron Leopold von Ragastein in England of his former Etonian classmate Everard Dominey. Ragastein’s intent is to influence enough British citizens to keep England from entering World War I against Germany. His attempt is frustrated by his double, Dominey, a British aristocrat who has become an alcoholic. (This novel was later adapted as a film, featuring Edmund Lowe.)

The Dumb Gods Speak and The Wrath to Come

In the prophetic novel The Dumb Gods Speak (1937), Oppenheim describes the discovery of an all-powerful weapon in the year 1947. It is not an atomic bomb; rather, it is an electrical ray that can stop fleets of warships in the ocean without any casualties. In the novel, a single American warship defeats Japan by immobilizing its entire fleet. The people of the world deplore this action so much that they legislate against any future wars. In The Wrath to Come (1924), a German-Japanese plot for a joint attack on the United States is uncovered and prevented by the appearance of a deus ex machina in the form of a document.

Miss Brown of X.Y.O.

In the novel Miss Brown of X.Y.O. (1927), the bored secretary Miss Brown is sitting on the steps of a London mansion with her typewriter when she is called in to take a deposition from a dying famous explorer. If the dictated information should fall into the hands of the Bolsheviks, a European war would result. The dying explorer proves to be a healthy secret agent, and after withstanding many enemy attempts to steal the important document, Miss Brown and the agent not only save Europe from war but also fall in love.

Up the Ladder of Gold and The Gallows of Chance

Oppenheim’s sympathy with the wealthy and aristocratic is demonstrated in both Up the Ladder of Gold (1931) and The Gallows of Chance (1934). In the first novel, a fantasy about the power of money, the rich American Warren Rand corners the gold market and, using this power, tries to persuade the nations of the world not to go to war for forty years. Rand commits crimes for a good cause, and clearly Oppenheim approved. In The Gallows of Chance, Lord Edward Keynsham, a member of an illegal bootlegging syndicate, is allowed to escape indictment for murder because he is beloved in his community. Indeed, he will marry his love, Katherine Brandt, an otherwise law-abiding leading actress who knows of his crimes. His best friend, Sir Humphrey Rossiter, resigns as home secretary to escape the duty of prosecuting Lord Edward. This occurs in spite of the fact that Lord Edward and his syndicate had kidnapped Sir Humphrey and threatened to hang him unless he met their demands to stay the execution of a convicted murderer.

Mr. Mirakel

In Mr. Mirakel (1943), the protagonist sets up a utopia to which he takes his followers; they escape with him, not only from war but also from an earthquake. The powerful leader is able to convince his followers that they will achieve a lasting peace.

The Seven Conundrums

One of Oppenheim’s most unusual books, The Seven Conundrums (1923), has a Faustian theme. Maurice Little, Leonard Cotton, and Rose Mindel, three down-at-the-heel performers, sell their souls to Richard Thomson in return for professional and financial success. In seven different actions, the three go where they are told and carry out Thomson’s typed and mysteriously delivered orders. After each order is carried out, they question Thomson. Instead of a reply, he counters with “That is the First [or Second . . . ] Conundrum.” Although the performers refer to Thomson as Mephistopheles privately, he promises to return their souls at the end of a year; at that time, he supplies answers to all seven conundrums and reveals his own identity as a member of the British Secret Service. The structure, the allusions, and the credible love story make The Seven Conundrums one of Oppenheim’s finest works of fiction.

The Ostrekoff Jewels

Although many of Oppenheim’s tales of intrigue involve spies acting alone, The Ostrekoff Jewels (1932) pits American diplomat Wilfred Haven against a beautiful Russian spy, Anna. The two escape from Russia together, the last leg of their journey to England taking place on a commandeered, antiquated, German plane. Not until the end of the novel does Wilfred trust Anna, although he had fallen in love with her at first sight. She proves to be the Princess Ostrekoff, the rightful owner of the crown jewels for which Wilfred has risked life and career.

The Strangers’ Gate

Mr. Treyer in The Strangers’ Gate (1939) is another of the Germans determined to topple the British government. In this story, Nigel Beverley, president of a British-owned company, represents the Crown. In a situation unusual for an Oppenheim protagonist, Nigel has to choose between three women: his fiancé, a wealthy socialite who is the daughter of his business partner, Lord Portington; Katrina, a beautiful opera singer who is the mistress of Prince Nicolas of Orlac and who makes advances toward Nigel; and Marya, an impoverished princess from Orlac who has been reared in a convent. Nigel chooses the innocent Marya, who will learn how to be the wife of a businessman-socialite. The action centers on the conflicting attempts of Great Britain and Germany to control the bauxite mines of Orlac.

Whether detective story or straight espionage, Oppenheim’s fiction is infused with his love of storytelling. So successful was his writing career that Oppenheim was able to enjoy the same luxurious lifestyle of many of his characters. Read by millions of thrill seekers, his works betray his interest in “world domination for good purpose, especially pacifism, his admiration for the superman of wealth, and his fascination with the game of world politics played as on a chess board.”

Bibliography

Gadney, Reg. “Switch Off the Wireless—It’s an Oppenheim.” London Magazine 10 (June, 1970): 19-27. The title of this tribute to Oppenheim refers to a marketing slogan appearing on the cover of several of the author’s novels, indicating that those novels were more entertaining than radio.

Hitz, Frederick P. The Great Game: The Myth and Reality of Espionage. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. Hitz, the former inspector general of the Central Intelligence Agency, compares fictional spies to actual intelligence agents with the aim of demonstrating that truth is stranger than fiction. Although he does not mention Oppenheim, this work provides context for understanding his work.

Overton, Grant. “A Great Impersonation by E. Phillips Oppenheim.” In Cargoes for Crusoes. Boston: Little, Brown, 1924. This essay on Oppenheim’s work forms part of a wide-ranging study of 1920’s literature and culture. An idiosyncratic but useful reading.

Roth, Marty. Foul and Fair Play: Reading Genre in Classic Detective Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995. A poststructural analysis of the conventions of mystery and detective fiction. Examines 138 short stories and works from the 1840’s to the 1960’s. Touches on Oppenheim’s The Great Impersonation.

Scaggs, John. Crime Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2005. Contains a chapter on crime thrillers that provides a perspective on Oppenheim’s work.

Standish, Robert. The Prince of Storytellers: The Life of E. Phillips Oppenheim. London: Peter Davies, 1957. Full-length biographical study of Oppenheim, his fiction, and the real-life experiences that contributed to that fiction.

Wellman, Ellen, and Wray O. Brown. “Collecting E. Phillips Oppenheim (1866-1946).” Private Library: Quarterly Journal of the Private Library Association 6 (Summer, 1983): 83-89. Checklist of Oppenheim’s works targeted at the collector rather than the casual reader.