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Edward Phillips Oppenheim was an English novelist, primarily known for his suspense fiction.
He was born in Leicester, the son of a leather merchant, and after attending Wyggeston Grammar School he worked in his father's business for almost 20 years, beginning there at a young age. He continued working in the business, even though he was a successful novelist, until he was 40 at which point he sold the business.
He wrote his first book 'Expiation' in 1887 and in 1898 he published 'The Mysterious Mr Sabin', which he described as "The first of my long series of stories dealing with that shadowy and mysterious world of diplomacy." Thereafter he became a prolific writer and by 1900 he had had 14 novels published.
While on a business trip to the United States in 1890 he met and married Elise Clara Hopkins of Boston and, on return to England, they lived in Evington, Leicestershire until the First World War,and had one daughter. His wife remained faithful to him throughout his life despite his frequent and highly publicised affairs, which often took place abroad and aboard his luxury yacht.
During World War I Oppenheim worked for the Ministry of Information while continuing to write his suspenseful novels.
He featured on the cover of 'Time' magazine on 12 September 1927 and he was the self-styled 'Prince of Storytellers', a title used by Robert standish for his biography of the author.
His literary success enabled him to buy a villa in France and a yacht, spending his winters in France where he regularly entertained more than 250 people at his lavish parties and where he was a well-known figure in high society.
He later purchased a house, Le Vanquiédor in St. Peter Port, in Guernsey. He lost access to the house during the Second World War when Germany occupied the Channel Islands but later regained it.
He wrote 116 novels, mainly of the suspense and international intrigue type, but including romances, comedies, and parables of everyday life, and 39 volumes of short stories, all of which earned him vast sums of money. He also wrote five novels under the pseudonymn Anthony Partridge and a volume of autobiography, 'The Pool of Memory' in 1939.
He is generally regarded as the earliest writer of spy fiction as we know it today, and invented the 'Rogue Male' school of adventure thrillers that was later exploited by John Buchan and Geoffrey Household.
Undoubtedly his most renowned work was 'The Great Impersonation' (1920), which was filmed three times, the last time as a strong piece of wartime propaganda in 1942. In that novel the plot hinges around two very similar looking gentlemen, one from Britain and the other from Germany, in the early part of the 20th century. Overall more than 30 of his works were made into films.
Perhaps his most enduring creation is the character of General Besserley, the protagonist of 'General Besserley's Puzzle Box' and 'General Besserley's New Puzzle Box'.
Much of his work possesses a unique escapist charm, featuring protagonists who delight in Epicurean meals, surroundings of intense luxury, and the relaxed pursuit of criminal practice, on either side of the law.
A fast-paced thriller with spies and U-boats and loads of secrets. Of course, they could have arrested the bad guy, and half the thrills would be out of the story, but of course they let him run about in a hope that he’ll reveal his contacts, and of course that’s the whole thing that drives the story. What’s not a matter of course is the big twist ending that I sure didn’t see coming! It’s the ending that bumped it up to five stars for me.
Content: a few swears and mentions of some affairs
A traitor, a Mcguffin, a beautiful woman, an unconventional spy, and a lot of indiscreet chatter.
Jocelyn Thew is the suave and ruthless criminal with the Mcguffin in his possession and a burning hatred of the English. As one of the coppers he has outsmarted calls him "the bravest, coolest, best-bred scoundrel who ever mocked the guardians of the law."
Miss Katharine Beverley owes Thew a favour for saving her brother, so she agrees to act as nurse for a dying man returning by sea to England. She knows that she is being used and that something funny is going on and, yet she can't deny a fascination for the man.
Crawshay of the British Secret Service is on the case, playing the part of an innocuous hypochondriac while dogging Thew's footsteps all the way, outmanoeuvred but never discouraged.
He may have had more success if Oppenheim didn't believe that the secret service had such a laissez-faire attitude towards curtailing the activities of wanted criminals. There was never any doubt as to what Thew was up to, only the how (I guessed it the moment a glaring clue was presented). Yet no-one thought of just arresting him.
Mind you, it's more sporting to give the fellow a chance, just as it's more fun to openly brag about your felonious exploits. The game of cat and mouse was so conspicuously conducted that even the author thought he better let Crawshay explain himself:
"secrecy was our watchword. We hid in corners, we were stealthy, we always posed as being something we weren't. We should have denied emphatically having the slightest interest in the person under surveillance. In these days, however, everything is changed. We play the game with the cards upon the table—all except the last two or three, perhaps—and curiously enough, I am not at all sure that it doesn't add finesse to the game."
Oppenheim wrote tons of these types of gentlemanly espionage thrillers. He was born and raised in an English city beginning with the letter L.* I'll give you a clue, it wasn't Liverpool:
'The morning—grey, slightly wet—broke upon Liverpool docks, the ugliest place in the ugliest city of Europe.'
* It was Leicester, the town where I have lived for twenty years.