All tease with little payoff
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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