The Devil’s Paw by E. Phillips Oppenheim

World War I spy plot with anti-Red sermonizing

E. Phillips Oppenheim (1866–1946) was a very successful author of fiction involving espionage, intrigue, mystery, and crime. From 1887 to 1943, he published over 100 novels. The Great Impersonation (1920) is generally regarded as his best work. Other than that, I couldn’t tell you which of his books are supposed to be good or bad. When I’m in the mood for some Oppenheim, I just pick one at random, based on title. The Devil’s Paw, also published in 1920, is the ninth Oppenheim novel that I’ve read thus far.

Two friends sit before the fire in a hunting cottage near the coast of Norfolk, England. The owner of said cottage is Miles Furley, a parliamentary representative for the Labor Party. Julian Orden is a wealthy aristocrat who lives at his parents’ palatial estate nearby. Mommy and Daddy Orden host a who’s who of aristocrats at their mansion. Among the frequent house guests is the current Prime Minister of England. The year is 1917 or 1918. World War I is underway, and the Americans have joined the fight. Part of Furley’s wartime duties as a coastal landowner is to patrol the shoreline looking for suspicious activity. This evening, however, he injures his leg and asks Orden to cover his shift. While making his rounds on the beach, Orden spies a mysterious figure picking up a canister from the surf, presumably containing a message from a German submarine. Before he can make a move to intercept the spy, however, Orden is struck on the head and knocked unconscious. The next day, he finds evidence that one of his parents’ party guests, a beautiful Russian woman, may be involved in the treasonous act he witnessed on the beach. 

I’ve never been blown away by an Oppenheim novel, but I generally find them moderately entertaining. I wanted to like The Devil’s Paw, but this story kept letting me down. The plot here involves socialists. Rather than proletariats, however, most of the would-be radicals depicted here are wealthy, paternalistic socialists. Oppenheim isn’t really interested in people who work for a living. He thinks that aristocrats are the only people worth writing about, and the only people capable of running the world. Here he pays lip service to the cause of socialism and labor, but one never really gets the feeling that his heart is in it. Orden, the hero of the novel, was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and just happens to dabble in labor politics. The villain is the guy who wears shabby clothes and doesn’t like opera. The result is a jingoistic propaganda piece in which socialism is portrayed as a scam and pacifism is portrayed as evil.

Although this book was published between the two World Wars, Oppenheim’s fiction is still very much stuck in the Victorian Era of the 1880s or ‘90s. One annoying convention from that age is the idea that women can commit no evil. In Oppenheim’s world, the most heinous crime a man can commit is treason, but if the perpetrator is a beautiful, upper-class female, the gentlemanly thing to do is look the other way. (Of course, if she’s of the servant class, she could be shot or hanged for espionage, no problem.) Oppenheim also tries hard to create some sexual tension between his male and female leads, but that’s awfully hard to do when his characters and intended audience are stuck in an idealized gentility wherein you can’t even kiss someone without being willing to back it up with a wedding ring.

If you know anything about history, you know how the spy plot is going to turn out. Oppenheim can’t change the outcome of the Great War. Thus, the only possible thrills would have to come from having the characters threatened with peril. There’s surprisingly little danger in this thriller, however. It mostly reads like a series of political debates, the outcome of which is a foregone conclusion, given Oppenheim’s monarchical bent. Oppenheim should’ve stuck to writing novels about the rich and powerful and left the socialists out of it. He’s clearly out of his element here.

The Box with the Broken Seals by E. Phillips Oppenheim

Too many gentlemen spoil a thriller

British author E. Phillips Oppenheim was a popular and prolific author of thrillers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The plots of his novels often revolve around murder mysteries and/or British-vs.-German espionage. His novel The Box with the Broken Seals, published in 1919, falls into the latter category. This book has also been published under the title of The Strange Case of Jocelyn Thew.

The novel is set during World War I. As the story opens, two secret service agents, one British and one American, arrive in Chicago hoping to capture a spy who has stolen state secrets. They soon realize, however, that they are the victims of a diversion, sent on a wild goose chase by the man they’re hunting. The spy they’re after, a renowned gentleman-thief and “adventurer” named Jocelyn Thew, is really in New York, about to depart on a ship to Europe. Thew has stolen some diplomatic papers and plans to sell them to the Germans, if he can get them overseas. (The title of the book refers to the sealed dispatch boxes in which diplomatic documents were traditionally transported.) In typically vague Oppenheim fashion, the reader is never given the details of what is contained in these mysterious papers; they are merely an object for all parties in the book to chase. Thew is motivated by a grudge against England, a taste for the finer life that wealth brings, and a zest for the competitive game of matching his wits against law enforcement agencies. Of the two secret service agents with which we started the novel, the American is never heard from again, but the Brit, named Crawshay, will not be deterred from pursuing the trail of his dastardly quarry.

Like many of Oppenheim’s novels, The Box with the Broken Seals is moderately entertaining, but not much to get excited about for readers approaching the book a century after its publication. Here Oppenheim delivers a rather simple plot that is drawn out with too many redundant dinner-party conversations. The cleverest plot element to come out of the novel is a unique method of smuggling that could perhaps be advantageously utilized in a better thriller than this.

Oppenheim’s novels often suffer from a predictability that’s enforced by the restrictive self-imposed conventions of his time. In Oppenheim’s world, for example, a woman could never be capable of committing a crime, which thus renders half of humanity harmless as far as possible suspects go. Also, a gentleman could never truly be a villain, particularly a British gentleman of noble blood with an aristocratic title, no matter how small. Only working-class riffraff and servants can truly be evil. In this book, as in many of Oppenheim’s others, the hero and his opponent, both being gentlemen, engage in cordial relations while matching wits and develop a mutual admiration for one another. With Jocelyn Thew displaying all the refined qualities of the upper class, it’s basically a given in an Oppenheim plot that he will turn out to be not such a bad guy after all. Knowing that kills pretty much any suspense the spy story might generate.

Oppenheim’s novels call to mind old pre-Hitchcock spy movies that you might see on Turner Classic Movies. If you like those kinds of movies, and don’t mind a little antiquated hokeyness and predictability, then you’ll probably like this too.

The Double Traitor by E. Phillips Oppenheim

Less-than-credible spy novel set at the outbreak of World War I

British writer E. Phillips Oppenheim was one of the most popular authors of spy thriller novels in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His novel The Double Traitor was published in 1915. Since the story deals with the outbreak of World War I in Europe, it was a very timely fictionalization of current events. Even before the Great War, Oppenheim was writing novels about evil German spies working to infiltrate, invade, and conquer England. This trend in his work increased in frequency and intensity once the Germans declared war in 1914.

Francis Norgate is an English diplomat in Berlin. In a night club one evening, he gets into an argument with a boorish Prussian prince over a woman they are both wooing. The next day, Norgate finds himself relieved of his position,. The Kaiser, apparently a friend of the offended prince, has requested the diplomat’s ejection form Germany. The disgruntled Norgate returns to London for a leave of absence until he is assigned to a different embassy. On his way home, he shares a train compartment with a fellow passenger: Mr. Selingman, a German manufacturer of crockery. Over the course of the journey, Norgate learns that Selingman runs a German spy network in England. Upon his arrival in London, Norgate reports this to his superiors in the British government and to Scotland Yard, but no one will listen to him. The idea of Germany inciting a war with Britain is regarded as a ludicrous. Norgate, therefore, decides to take matters into his own hands and infiltrate Selingman’s spy ring by posing as a traitor to his country.

I previously read an Oppenheim novel entitled Havoc, published in 1911, in which he predicted the coming world war. The Double Traitor is less impressive because it merely relates events after the fact. A Bosnian Serb anarchist assassinates the Austrian archduke. Austria declares war on Serbia, with the support of Germany. Russia comes to the defense of Serbia. France, an ally of Russia, joins in. Germany invades Belgium. Then England enters the war. That’s the way things happened in the real world, and that’s the way they happen in Oppenheim’s novel. In The Double Traitor, Oppenheim proposes that the entire chain of events was calculated by Germany (as represented here by Selingman) as an excuse to declare war on England and conquer the British Isles.

Even if you agree with Oppenheim on that assertion, The Double Traitor often strains believability. The manner in which Norgate first learns about the German plot is too easy and convenient. The gullibility of Selingman in taking Norgate under his wing does not ring true. Norgate going undercover in a German spy ring, without any authorization from the British government, would make him a real traitor in the eyes of the law, not a fake one. The cluelessness of everyone but Norgate as to the intentions of Germany also seems a disingenuous fallacy designed to amplify Norgate’s heroism. Nevertheless, if you’re willing to suspend disbelief, this is a brisk and catchy read. One must have a high tolerance, however, for snooty aristocrats, Norgate included, whose main concern in life is who they dine with and where on any given night. The gentlemanly priggishness and feminine haughtiness that Oppenheim thought was so cool in the Victorian Era is quite grating in hindsight.

When all is said and done, it is difficult to see what Norgate really accomplished. World War I proceeded nonetheless, despite his spy-busting efforts. In fact, he knew about the assassination of Franz Ferdinand beforehand and did nothing to stop it. Oh well, if you don’t think too hard, you just might find yourself enjoying this fluffy potboiler of international intrigue.

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The Evil Shepherd by E. Phillips Oppenheim

All tease with little payoff

British author E. Phillips Oppenheim was a very popular author of crime and espionage suspense novels from the 1890s up into the early 1940s. I tend to think of him as the Alfred Hitchcock of English literature. Oppenheim wrote over 100 novels, but I couldn’t tell you which of those are considered his best, so when I’m in the mood for his sort of fare I tend to just pick a novel at random, based on its title. His novel The Evil Shepherd was published in 1922.

Francis Ledsam is a young defense attorney in London who has established a stellar reputation with his courtroom success record. His enthusiasm for his profession sours, however, when he finds out that a client he recently defended, who was acquitted of all charges, is actually a guilty criminal and despicable human being. From that point forward, Ledsam decides he will only defend clients who he knows for sure are innocent. After having proclaimed himself a crimefighting do-gooder, he is approached by a mysterious character, Sir Timothy Brast, who teases Ledsam with the prediction of a murder that takes place soon after. The wealthy Brast is also rumored to hold wild parties in a walled compound where all manner of illegal activity takes place. Ledsam sees Brast as a sort of Professor Moriarity-type criminal mastermind who acts as an “evil shepherd” over a flock of criminal henchmen, not so much committing crimes himself as facilitating them. Ledsam works to uncover Brast’s evil secrets, a task complicated by the fact that Ledsam has also fallen in love with Brast’s daughter.

Since one of these gentlemen is devoted to stamping out crime while the other openly sympathizes with criminals, Ledsam and Brast each considers the other his enemy. Nevertheless, that doesn’t stop the two from wining and dining one another as if they were the best of friends. Oppenheim takes the idea of “frenemies” a bit too far. Despite their differences, the two adversaries have clearly formed a mutual admiration society. Throughout most of the book, relations between Ledsam and Brast are so cordial that it nullifies any tension that should exist between them. The main problem with this book is that for all Brast’s talk of himself as being evil and immoral, the reader never actually learns of him doing anything wrong. His career as a criminal mastermind is apparently all talk and no action. Oppenheim keeps hinting at crimes, foreshadowing a revelation of evil deeds at the very end of the book. The reader waits and waits for the climax, but when it comes it’s a disappointment, and it feels like the whole story was just a big tease.

The problem with a lot of Oppenheim’s books is that they were published at a time when one couldn’t really write about the hideous or horrific details of crimes. The audience of his day would have been disgusted and offended by a truly frightening description of a murder. Thus, authors of Oppenheim’s era had to resort to “gentleman killers” who don’t feel very threatening by today’s standards. (On the other hand, Arthur Conan Doyle didn’t have that problem with Moriarity, but Oppenheim always reads as if he were aiming at a more genteel audience.) To his credit, Oppenheim is a skilled enough writer that he manages to keep this cat-and-mouse game interesting for its entire length. Ultimately, it may be a letdown, but it’s not a bore. Nevertheless, since Oppenheim was such a prolific author, you’d be better off avoiding The Evil Shepherd and trying one of the other hundred-plus books he wrote.
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The Cinema Murder by E. Phillips Oppenheim

Less thrilling than typical Oppenheim fare

British author E. Phillips Oppenheim was one of English popular literature’s bestselling novelists of the early 20th century. He cranked out over a hundred thrillers about espionage, murder, and international intrigue. Dozens of his books were adapted into films, and his stories and characters often call to mind suspense films of the early talkie era, such as the early works of director Alfred Hitchcock. Oppenheim’s novel The Cinema Murder was published in 1917 and adapted into a silent movie in 1919. The book has also been published under the title The Other Romilly.

Philip Romilly, a poor English art teacher, goes to visit his sweetheart Beatrice at her home in the dreary hamlet of Detton Magna. To his surprise, he finds evidence that she has taken up with his wealthier cousin Douglas Romilly, who owns a shoe factory. Beatrice admits her defection to another man, insisting she is sick of poverty, and she chastises Philip for his lack of prospects and ambition. Soon after this incident (in chapter 2, so not really a spoiler), it is revealed that the jilted Philip has murdered Douglas, assumed his identity, and fled on a steamer to the United States. Having absconded with some of his dead cousin’s money, Philip hopes to start a new life in New York and pursue a career as a writer. During the transatlantic passage, he meets Elizabeth Dalstan, a famous American actress. With incredible hastiness, he confesses his crime to her, but she has no problem falling in love with a murderer. Can the two pursue a future together in America, or will Philip’s past catch up with him?

This can’t be called a murder mystery, since the identity of the killer is revealed early on. For the most part, it is a love story between Philip and Elizabeth, but of course with obstacles thrown in the way of their happiness. As a result, compared to other Oppenheim novels I’ve read, this one is decidedly low on suspense. There is always the danger that Philip could be arrested for his crime, but Oppenheim is more concerned with establishing a typical love triangle with Elizabeth’s ex-boyfriend. The fact that she is so willing to cozy up to a killer never really rings true. Wouldn’t she be wondering somewhere in the back of her mind if she might be his next victim?

Although The Cinema Murder was published on the eve of the roaring ’20s, it is still hampered by the prudish moral codes of the Victorian Era, which does much to dull the excitement and suspense. It is just assumed, for example, that all the unmarried characters are virgins, despite being at least in their late twenties, so don’t expect any sexual tension. In the respectable popular literature of this time, read by gentlemen and ladies, it must always be shown that crime does not pay, so the reader knows all along that Philip can’t be allowed to get away with his murder. Oppenheim comes up with a cockamamie solution to get around that hard fast rule, but despite its unreality the conclusion is still somewhat predictable. The way that women are depicted in Oppenheim’s novels is frequently annoying. The social conventions of the time make relations between the ladies and gentleman of wealthy, urban society seem like unconsummated prostitution. One refreshing breath of fresh air in The Cinema Murder, however, is the supporting character of Martha Grimes, an independent working woman who won’t stand for any bull or sanction any gentlemanly advances.

The biggest mystery is why this book is titled The Cinema Murder, since it has nothing much to do with a cinema or movies at all. Elizabeth is shown to be acquainted with some producers in the film industry, but in this novel she only acts on the stage. The hero is a playwright of a Broadway play. The Theatre Murder might have made sense, but cinema’s got nothing to do with this.
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Havoc by E. Phillips Oppenheim

Espionage, murder, blackmail on the eve of World War I

E. Phillips Oppenheim was a popular British writer of suspense novels in the early 20th century. His books call to mind some of the old black-and-white films of Alfred Hitchcock or similar movies of the early talkie era. His novel Havoc, published in 1911, is a spy thriller and murder mystery that takes place at the outbreak of World War I. Of course, the Great War didn’t actually start until 1914, so this is all fictional speculation on Oppenheim’s part. By 1911, however, Europeans could see the writing on the wall, and Oppenheim’s depiction of foreign affairs at this time rings reasonably true to life.

The novel opens with a conversation between a British spy and an American journalist. They have both come to Vienna for a summit meeting between the Czar of Russia, the Emperor of Austria, and the Emperor of Germany. It is clear that Austria and Germany are formulating a war plan to conquer territories in Europe. What is unclear is the role that Russia will play. Will it side with Austria and Germany or ally itself with Britain and France? Following the meeting, the American journalist is granted an interview with the chancellor of Austria. At that moment, the chancellor happens to have a nervous breakdown, and with his impaired judgment he reveals state secrets that would otherwise be classified information. The chancellor hands the reporter a sealed envelope containing a verbatim transcript of the closed-door meeting between the three heads of state. Who wouldn’t want to get their hands on this vital piece of intelligence regarding the impending war? The journalist, seeing the ultimate scoop, wants to publish the document for fame and fortune, though his friend the British spy advises against it. With secret document in hand, the reporter boards a train headed towards London. But will he survive the trip?

This international intrigue kicks the novel off to a promising start. Once the action moves to London, however, the pace of the plot slows down considerably. A new protagonist is introduced, and a murder takes place that amounts to an extended side track away from the spy story. It’s all related, but often feels like two different stories running parallel to one another. The two male heroes of the novel each have their love interest, so there is plenty of romance, but the time spent on dinner dates and theater engagements tends to stall the plot and needlessly drag things out.

Oppenheim is a skilled storyteller capable of weaving several interesting plot threads into an intriguingly complex web. The thrills of this thriller, however, are deadened by Victorian conventions. This was pre-noir, so there’s very little moral ambiguity to the characters. The heroes are English gentlemen; the villains are evil Germans; the women are lovely virgins. Occasionally someone threateningly points a gun, or a punch is thrown, but there’s little that could really be called violence, which significantly lowers the fear threshold. You know there’s no chance of sex before marriage. There’s never any doubt who’s going to triumph in the end, and even the identity of the killer is predictable. The depiction of women is somewhat annoying also. Although the two female leads each have some degree of independence, their behavior towards the men is very subservient and their obvious destiny is to abandon their careers for marriage.

Havoc is a moderately entertaining espionage adventure, as one would expect from Oppenheim. It certainly isn’t boring, but this one feels more dated and predictable than most of his efforts. Instead of Havoc, I would recommend his novels The Avenger (1907) or The Great Impersonation (1920).
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The Modern Prometheus by E. Phillips Oppenheim

Guilt-ridden romance

E. Phillips Oppenheim

I recently discovered the work of British author E. Phillips Oppenheim (1866-1946) and have enjoyed reading a couple of his books. He published over 100 novels, most of them thrillers involving espionage, crime, or political intrigue, and many of them bestsellers. Other than The Great Impersonation, which is probably his best-known work, I really don’t know which of his books are considered his best. So when I decided to read more Oppenheim, I just scrolled through the novels in the Delphi Classics’ Collected Works of E. Phillips Oppenheim and chose one randomly by title. Looking for a shorter work, I settled on The Modern Prometheus, published in 1896. The title intrigued me because it is reminiscent of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus. I did not expect Oppenheim’s novel to bear any similarity to Frankenstein, but it is surprising that the story doesn’t seem to have any relation at all to the myth of Prometheus.

In the opening chapter, we are introduced to Francis Kernham, a reluctant celebrity in his hometown of London. He is a self-made man who has struck it rich digging for gold in a foreign land (the details of his meteoric career are never really revealed). He has returned to London for the first time in a decade, and his primary goal is to track down an old flame. Ten years earlier, Kernham was a struggling writer in a relationship with an equally struggling young actress. He left her to seek his fortune, knowing full well that he was possibly abandoning her to an iniquitous fate, forcing her to capitalize on her beauty and become a “kept woman” (somebody’s mistress) in order to survive. Motivated by both love and guilt, Kernham is now resolved to find his lost lover and face the truth of her unknown fate.

Oppenheim’s forte may be spy stories and adventure tales, but this is just a romance, and a rather dreary one. It is unclear to the reader why any two people in this novel are in love with each other because we never actually see any of the characters enjoying one another’s company. Though there’s a lot of grandiose talk here about love, the only factors that seem to bind couples together are money and physical attraction. The latter element might be sufficiently captivating for a movie, depending on the casting, but not for Victorian prose. For a novel of this era, The Modern Prometheus is admirably forward in its discussions of premarital and extramarital affairs. This is no erotic thriller that capitalizes on scandalousness, however. The narrative is still hampered by the Victorian code of mores that binds gentleman and ladies. Any sexuality that’s hinted at in the narrative only serves to pile on more guilt.

For the first half of the book, Oppenheim does a great job of keeping the reader guessing as to what exactly is going on between Kernham and his mystery woman. Each chapter ends with a bit of a cliffhanger that makes one look forward to the succeeding chapter. Once the basic premise is revealed and established, however, the novel becomes awfully formulaic and clichéd. In scenes seen countless times in old movies and pulp fiction, the characters all take turns renouncing love in the name of honor.

The Modern Prometheus is one of Oppenheim’s earlier works, so perhaps he was still finding his mature authorial voice. His later works call to mind the thrillers of Arthur Conan Doyle or Agatha Christie. Though this novel was a disappointment, I will continue to delve blindly into Oppenheim’s prodigious body of work, where I know there are gold nuggets to be found.
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The Great Impersonation by E. Phillips Oppenheim

Defies belief, but still fun

English author E. Phillips Oppenheim (1866-1946) was a writer of immensely popular thrillers in the early 20th century. His novel The Great Impersonation, likely his best-known work, was published in 1920 and sold more than a million copies that year. It also spawned three film adaptations.

The novel tells a story of international intrigue involving German spies in London just prior to the outbreak of World War I. The narrative begins, however, in Africa. Two former college friends meet at a camp in German East Africa. Leopold von Ragastein is a German baron and the military commandant of the colony. Everard Dominey is a down-on-his-luck English baronet, drifting around Africa in an alcoholic stupor after his plans for acquiring a fortune have fallen apart. Back when the pair were studying at Oxford, their friends always said they could be mistaken for twins. Von Ragastein sees an opportunity in taking advantage of their similarity of appearance. He decides to kill Dominey, assume his name, and take his place in English society, thus providing himself with a cover to spy for the Germans.

Despite the fact that the false Dominey is an imposter, he is the protagonist of the book and thus the character with whom the reader sympathizes most. At first von Ragastein’s mission for the Germans is unclear, even to himself. He gets mixed messages from his German “handlers” in London. He may be there to act as an active saboteur in case the two nations go to war, or he may be there to function as a propagandist urging for peace and economic cooperation. Both Dominey and von Ragastein have skeletons in their closet, and the imposter ends up having to deal with both of their mysterious pasts. Despite all the talk about war and espionage, the main focus of the novel for most of is length is romance. The primary conflict is not whether von Ragastein will do harm to England but rather whether his undercover work will require him to have sexual relations with Dominey’s wife, which would be ungentlemanly, even for a German spy. The espionage plot isn’t really clarified until the final four chapters, which cap the novel with an exciting finish.

Admittedly, the general premise of the plot is rather ridiculous. The idea that two unrelated men could look enough like one another to fool even one of their wives is hard to believe, as is the fact that von Ragastein could learn enough about Dominey’s affairs in London over the course of a few conversations to be able to pass for him without slipping up. This book was published in the 1920s, however, when such plot devices were common in movies and spy novels. Suspension of disbelief is forgivable as long as the author keeps us entertained, and Oppenheim does, with ample twists, turns, and close calls. Out of Oppenheim’s 100+ works, why is this his most popular? Its renown likely rests largely on one audacious climactic plot twist. I could see it coming, however, based on foreshadowing hints that Oppenheim provides earlier in the book.

This is only the second book I’ve read by Oppenheim, both of which I have enjoyed. The first was The Avenger, published in 1907, which I actually prefer over The Great Impersonation. In both cases, Oppenheim crafts intricate and suspenseful plots with an interesting ensemble cast of characters. His novels resemble cinematic thrillers from the early days of Alfred Hitchcock. They may be too farfetched for verisimilitude, but they do make for a fun ride.
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The Avenger by E. Phillips Oppenheim

Somewhere between Conan Doyle and Hitchcock

In a career that spanned from the 1880s to the 1940s, English author E. Phillips Oppenheim produced over 100 novels and dozens of volumes of short stories. His novel The Avenger was originally published in England in 1907 under the title of Conspirators before being released in America the following year under its present title. The Avenger is the first of Oppenheim’s books that I have read, and if the quality of this novel is an accurate indication of his overall body of work, I look forward to exploring more of his prolific literary output.

The Avenger is presumably set during the early 20th century, an era when one would see both hansom cabs and electric broughams plying the streets of London. Herbert Wrayson returns to his apartment one evening to find an intruder rummaging through his desk. His shock and indignation are relieved a bit when he realizes said intruder is a beautiful woman. It turns out she has the wrong apartment. She had meant to break into the flat of Wrayson’s upstairs neighbor, Morris Barnes, a man with whom Wrayson is acquainted but does not count among his friends. After some inconclusive grilling, Wrayson is distracted by a phone call while the woman slips away. Later that night, Wrayson finds Morris Barnes’s dead body in a cab out in front of his building. When questioned by the police, Wrayson leaves out any mention of the woman he met that evening. Even he is not really sure why he does so. Perhaps as a gentleman, he simply feels honor-bound to protect a woman he suspects may be in some distress, or maybe he has fallen in love with her? Either way, Wrayson decides to find this mystery woman and get to the bottom of Barnes’s murder.

Oppenheim was an immensely popular novelist during his lifetime, and after reading this book it is easy to see why. The Avenger may be intended as popular entertainment for the masses, but it is very intelligently written. Oppenheim’s storytelling style (in 1907, anyway) reads like a cross between Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the early thrillers of Alfred Hitchcock. The narrative retains some Victorian propriety in its somewhat antiquated belief in a rigid class structure. Gentlemen are born a breed above the riff-raff and live by a gentlemanly code. Women of the upper classes are presumed eminently virtuous while those of the lower classes are prone to vice. Nevertheless, the story reads as surprisingly modern in its lack of prudishness concerning murder, infidelity, women of ill repute, and philandering cads. Like Hitchcock’s earlier films, it delivers danger and suspense while stopping shy of the more hard-boiled and violent film noirs. Though there is a murder mystery here, it is not a detective story in the vein of Sherlock Holmes; deciphering clues is not the main concern. It is a sophisticated adventure in which classy characters find themselves involved in international intrigue. The storytelling is always dignified but never boring. Oppenheim constructs a complex and engaging plot that always keeps the reader guessing.

I read a lot of classic literature and vintage pulp fiction, and it is rare that I encounter a “new” (to me) author that really impresses me. Oppenheim is one such fortuitous discovery. His work bears similarities to that of Edgar Wallace and John Buchan, but I found The Avenger superior to novels I’ve read by either of those writers. Though no longer a household name, Oppenheim is a 100-hit wonder that definitely deserves further consideration.
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