E(dward) Phillips Oppenheim Biography

While William LeQueux was the father of the espionage novel, E. Phillips Oppenheim made the genre his own. Like LeQueux, Edgar Wallace, and many other mystery novelists of his generation, E. Phillips Oppenheim was a prolific writer. The author of more than 150 books, Oppenheim produced only one truly classic mystery novel, The Great Impersonation (1920) over the course of a career that spanned fifty-eight productive years.

The so-called Prince of Storytellers, Edward Phillips Oppenheim was born in London on 22 October 1866, to Edward John and Henrietta Susannah Budd Oppenheim. Oppenheim's father, a leather merchant, later took his family to live in Leicester, where the future novelist attended Wyggeston Grammar School, leaving in December 1882 to go to work for his father. Although he continued his connection with the leather business until he was forty, he began writing early, in his spare time. His first novel Expiation (1887), with its publication partly subsidized by his parents, sufficiently impressed the editors of the Sheffield Weekly Telegraph that he was given a contract to write six stories for serialization in that newspaper. Having begun his long career as a published writer, Oppenheim married Elsie Clara Hopkins in 1891; they had one daughter, and, when Oppenheim left the leather business, they went to live in Norfolk. After serving in the British Ministry of Information during World War I, Oppenheim established a winter home in 1922 on the French Riviera, where royalties from his books enabled him to live the life of an aristocrat. The outbreak of World War II forced him to leave France in 1940. Later, when the Germans invaded the Channel Islands, they made his house on Guernsey the local Luftwaffe headquarters. In October 1945 Oppenheim was able to return to Guernsey, where he died on 3 February 1946.

Oppenheim's earliest works include romances, mysteries, and political novels, many of which were popular with his contemporaries but have no lasting distinction. His forte was the spy novel; his mystery novels are almost invariably suspenseful and often deal with some aspect of secret service. Many of his best novels deal with European intrigues, and in later years, when he realized the immense market the United States presented for his work, he wrote fiction with a strong American focus. Oppenheim's sensibilities were distinctly nineteenth century. He was a monarchist whose fictional characters sneer at democracy, socialism, and communism. This attitude imbues his work from his early historical novels to his later espionage fantasies, many of which advocate the establishment of benevolent European monarchies.

Oppenheim's reputation as a writer of popular spy novels began with the publication of Mysterious Mr. Sabin in 1898. The novel's nominal protagonist steals secret British defense documents, planning to sell them to a hostile Germany and to use the money to finance a new French revolution. To obtain these documents, Sabin resorts to blackmail, extortion, and other crimes. Then a mysterious character, who announces that he holds high office in a secret society to which Sabin also belongs, orders Sabin to burn the documents and cease his mischief. Despite all his previous efforts in service of his revolutionary ideals, Sabin agrees, and the rest of the novel--a substantial portion of the book--focuses on Sabin's efforts to rehabilitate his reputation among the book's many other characters.

Oppenheim's most successful novel, The Great Impersonation, written immediately after World War I, chronicles the efforts of a German nobleman, Baron von Ragastein, to impersonate his physical double and Eton schoolmate, dissolute English aristocrat Everard Dominey, in British society of East Africa. Von Ragastein's purpose is to influence British public opinion and keep England out of World War I. Oppenheim ignores the improbability of such a plot: since Dominey is married, his wife will have to accept the impersonation. Resolving his story with a classic twist of plot and counterplot, he holds his readers' interest while mollifying their incredulity.

Oppenheim's most convincing works are a handful of novels anticipating the expansionist aims of Germany, the Soviet Union, and Japan and predicting the ultimate impotency of such international bodies as the League of Nations and the United Nations. Novels such as The Great Prince Shan (1922), set in 1934; The Wrath to Come (1924), set in 1950; and The Dumb Gods Speak (1937), set in 1947 are fascinating extrapolations of the political dangers that faced Europe and America in the first half of the twentieth century.

The Dumb Gods Speak, perhaps the most intriguing of Oppenheim's predictive novels, concerns the international struggle resulting from the discovery and implementation of an ultimate weapon in the year 1947. While this much of the plot is remarkably prescient, Oppenheim's vision of the ultimate weapon and the result of its employment are not: it is an electrical neutralizing ray capable of stopping entire fleets of warships dead in the water without causing casualties. After one American warship uses the weapon to defeat the entire Japanese naval fleet, which is attacking the Philippines, aggressive nations of the world are so horrified by this weapon that, by the novel's end, war has been universally banned. Many of Oppenheim's espionage novels turn upon similarly preposterous plot devices. For example in The Wrath to Come, a joint German-Japanese attack on America is foiled after the discovery of a deathbed document. While modern readers tend to be critical of such implausibility, Oppenheim's contemporaries seemed to expect and enjoy such surprising twists of plot.

Late in life, Oppenheim came to believe in the moral superiority of the rich, and his later novels could be termed fantasies of aristocracy. Up the Ladder of Gold (1931) illustrates Oppenheim's naive but unshakable belief in the power of the wealthy when their aims are politically pure. Millionaire American Warren Rand tries to insure world peace by cornering the gold market and bribing the world's most powerful nations not to go to war for forty years. As in many of his spy novels, Oppenheim attempts to contrast the high ideals of a protagonist who commits espionage and other crimes on behalf of a greater good against the sordidness of those who work for evil regimes or, for what is in Oppenheim's eyes the ultimate sin, mere money. To modern readers of spy novels, accustomed to more pragmatic protagonists, these distinctions may seem ludicrous.

Oppenheim's final novel, Mr. Mirakel (1943), is clearly his response to World War II and to the consequences of his predictions becoming reality. Disgusted by the global conflict he cannot quell, the wealthy Mr. Mirakel creates a remote paradise where he and his followers begin a new civilization dedicated to peace. Oppenheim believed that international discord was not a natural condition but the result of improper leadership-specifically the absence of a single authoritative ruler.

Throughout his long career, Oppenheim seems to have been influenced by Baroness Orczy. Many of Oppenheim's early heroes are outwardly innocuous even as they set great events in motion, much in the manner of Orczy's Scarlet Pimpernel. In Oppenheim's late short-story collections, A Pulpit in the Grill Room (1938) and The Milan Grill Room (1940), the character of Louis, a crippled veteran of World War I and maitre d' of the Milan Hotel, who solves crimes from his table in the grill room of the hotel, owes much to Orczy's seminal armchair detective, the Old Man in the Corner.

At his best, Oppenheim was the consummate entertainer. His characters are artificial but amusing, most often members of the European upper-class social set to which Oppenheim himself belonged. Although his fiction was enormously popular during his lifetime, Oppenheim has suffered the fate of many early, prolific genre novelists. Since his death in 1946, all but a few of his books have slipped out of print, and even the best of his fiction is now read only by a shrinking circle of specialists.