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.