E. Phillips Oppenheim

Edward Phillips Oppenheim (22 October 1866 – 3 February 1946) was an English novelist who wrote more than a hundred best-selling genre books. His stories featured glamorous characters, international intrigue, and fast action, and were notably easy to read, making them popular entertainments. In 1927, he appeared on the cover of Time magazine.

Born in Tottenham, London, to Henrietta Susannah Temperley Budd and leather merchant Edward John Oppenheim, he attended Wyggeston Grammar School until the sixth form in 1883, when family finances forced him to leave. He then worked in his father's business for nearly twenty years. His father paid for the publication of his first novel, which just broke even. Between 1908 and 1912, he published five novels under the pseudonym "Anthony Partridge."

Around 1900, wealthy New York leather merchant Julien Stevens Ulman, who enjoyed Oppenheim's books, bought the leather works and made him a salaried director to support his writing. Oppenheim quickly found a successful formula. In 1913, suspense novelist John Buchan called him "my master in fiction" and "the greatest Jewish writer since Isaiah." That same year, his publishers issued new editions of earlier works to meet, as one trade publication put it, "the insatiable demand of the public for more stories by him," adding that readers would find those early stories "full of interest, their very crudeness being positively amusing in light of his present finished craftsmanship."

In 1892, he married American Elise Clara Hopkins of Easthampton, Massachusetts. They lived in Evington, Leicestershire—now The Cedars pub—until the First World War, and had one daughter. During the war, he worked for the Ministry of Information.

Describing his method in 1922, Oppenheim said: "I create one more or less interesting personality, try to think of some dramatic situation in which he or she might be placed, and use that as the opening of a nebulous chain of events." He never used an outline, claiming, "My characters would resent it." For villains in his diplomatic and political intrigues, he drew on Prussian militarists and anarchists, leading one reviewer to lament "the baldness of his propaganda." In A People's Man (1915), a socialist discovers his movement is secretly run by German spies.

A 1927 New York Times review noted that he "numbers his admirers in the hundreds of thousands and has one or more of his books on a prominent shelf in almost every home one enters." Reviews treated his work as entertainments loosely related to the mystery genre. A 1933 review of Crooks in the Sunshine observed that "Mr. Oppenheim's crooks are so polished that they have no difficulty in moving in the very best society.... There is very little mystery in this book, but there is dress-suit crime galore." A 1936 review of A Magnificent Hoax, his hundredth novel, said: "The hoax is on the reader, who is led, through nearly 300 pages, only to find that nothing very terrible has happened." The Shy Plutocrat, published early in World War II, was called "a good tale to take your mind off your worries." Readers came to expect "the peculiar Oppenheim blend of dispatch-box atmosphere, femmes fatales, double traitors, and a tight plot." The Great Impersonation (1920) was considered his best work.

Along with dozens of novels and short story collections, he produced an autobiography, The Pool of Memory, in 1942. His literary success allowed him to buy a villa on the French Riviera and a yacht, then a house in Guernsey, though he lost access to it during the Second World War. He regained Le Vauquiedor Manor in St. Martins after the war and died there on 3 February 1946. His wife died there on 25 November.

An assessment in The New York Times upon his death stated: "As he recalls in his pleasant and modest autobiography, all his books were easy to write. They were equally easy to read, especially on a summer vacation, when escapist literature is most welcome." He composed by dictating to a secretary and once produced seven works in a single year. His social set included the characters that populated his novels, where he created "a glamorous world of international intrigue, romance and plushy society galloping along in swift action and suspense." One academic study calls him "a talented entertainer."

Short story collections

His writings include more than 100 novels between 1887 and 1943, as well as 38 short story collections, 27 of which were published in the United States. Most collections are series with a recurring group of characters. In 2004 and 2014, Stark House Press published two collections of previously uncollected Oppenheim stories, edited by Daniel Paul Morrison, a leading collector of his work: Secrets and Sovereigns: The Uncollected Stories of E. Phillips Oppenheim (2004) and Ghosts and Gamblers: The Further Uncollected Stories of E. Phillips Oppenheim (2014). Several of his works were adapted into films.