"[W]e shall hear the Red Flag sung in Westminster Abbey within the next twelve months."
--Miss Brown of X. Y. O. (1927), by E. Phillips Oppenheim
Then raise the scarlet standard high
Beneath its shade we live and die.
Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer,
We'll keep the red flag flying here!
"The Red Flag" (1889) worldwide socialist hymn, sung to the tune of "O Tannenbaum"
Thriller writer E. Phillips Oppenheim is strikingly forgotten today, given that he was perhaps the single most popular English crime writer during the so-called Golden Age of detective fiction (essentially the decades of the Twenties and Thirties of the Twentieth Century). Nope, it wasn't actually Agatha Christie.
During the Depression-wracked years from 1930 to 1937, Oppenheim in modern value earned in America some twelve million dollars, two-thirds of this amount from American magazine serializations and a third from royalties on his fiction from his American publisher. Royalties from his English publisher, Hodder & Stoughton, and from publishers in other countries accounted for about another million, comparative peanuts compared with the golden American fleece. America made Oppenheim a multimillionaire who owned a country mansion in Norfolk and villas on the Isle of Guernsey and the Cote d'Azur.
Serializations of Oppenheim crime fiction in the American slicks Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post earned Oppy, as he was nicknamed, as much as $400,0000 a pop. His 1927 novel The Glenlitten Murder sold nearly forty thousand copies in hardcover in the US and was serialized in the Chicago Tribune, netting him around $420,000. Honestly when it came to the big green, the slicks, as they were called after their paper they were printed on, crushed the pulps.
Between 1887 and 1943 Oppy published 115 novels and forty collections of short fiction, making one of the age's most prolific, as well as profitable, authors. Yet today if he is remembered at all it tends to be for a single pioneering espionage novel, The Great Impersonation (1920), his most popular work, which sold a million hardcover copies alone through his American publisher, Little, Brown. The novel was reprinted by the British Library over a decade ago, but if you look at it's Amazon sales ranking, it's around 5.6 million. His novel The Ghosts of Society, which I introduced for Stark House, does better in its Kindle edition, having made it up to a rank of nearly three million. We have another one coming out, a collection of the novella For the Queen and the novelette Blackman's Wood and some additional short stories: will it do better? Check it out.
It would be pretty to think so, anyway. I feel Oppenheim is much underrated today. (How could he not be?) So, how came about this state of affairs? I detect partly the misguided hand of the late academic scholar Leroy Lad Panek, who was openly contemptuous of Oppenheim, in rather a smug academic way, in his 1981 study of espionage fiction, The Special Branch.
At the moment I don't know where my copy of Panek's book is, but I recall he writes about what a terrible writer Oppenheim is, which I think is flat wrong. Panek was similarly contemptuous of most Golden Age detective fiction writers in his egregiously misguided book Watteau's Shepherds (1979), one of the worse pieces of analysis ever done, in my opinion, of the Golden Age of detective fiction (see my explanation in my book Masters of the Humdrum Mystery).
These early works of Panek's are typical of the rotten Seventies criticism that it took crime fiction decades to recover from. (He wrote some good stuff later on his career.) Today we have rescued a great many unjustly dismissed and egregiously neglected Golden Age detective fiction writers--but what about the thriller merchants like Oppenheim?
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| E. Phillips Oppenheim Prince of Storytellers 1866-1946 |
Oppenheim was not a bad a writer. Read The Great Impersonation and you will find it's a fine, if extremely improbable, story with considerable narrative drive and suspense. And there are other books in his canon that are well worth reading. To me, indeed, Oppenheim seems more relevant today than he has been since the Thirties.
Like F. Scott Fitzgerald, who also wrote about Gilded depression-era life on the French Riviera, Oppenheim in his crime fiction was one of the great chroniclers of life among the opulent supposed masters of an increasingly chaotic universe, the proud people who deigned to think that they could run the explosive world until it all completely blew up in their faces (sometimes literally) when Nazi Germany and the Marxist USSR invaded Poland in 1939.
Like Scott Fitzgerald, Oppenheim was fascinated by the lifestyles of the rich and privileged and he wrote about them in book after book. Today when I look around at the world (and particularly the United States), with it rising authoritarian, nationalistic, fascistic movements and cliques of contemptible kleptocrats and oligarchs, I feel like we could be back in the world of ninety years ago. The only thing we are missing, MAGA hysteria notwithstanding, are the Communists.
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| American first ed. with cover by Bip Pares |
The Communists--Russians no less--are decidedly present in what was celebrated as Oppenheim's 100th published book of fiction, Miss Brown of X. Y. O., in 1927. The previous year The General Strike had convulsed the UK for nine days in May as a broad swath of British laborers attempted to succor striking mine workers. The strike failed, but fears of militant, Marxist-influenced labor action remained.
Agatha Christie--in many ways a complacent bourgeois despite what revisionists, including myself, have told you--had actually anticipated by four years the General Strike, which she most sinisterly appraised, in her thriller The Secret Adversary; and the possibility of a similarly General Strike looms large in Oppenheim's 1927 novel.
Relations between the UK and the USSR steadily worsened after the publication in the Daily Mail in October 1924, a few days before the general election, of the Zinoviev Letter, which purportedly was a missive from Grigory Zinoviev, Russian head of the Communist International (Comintern), which promoted the cause of world communism, to the British Communist Party of Great Britain, in which Zinoviev ordered the CPGB to engage in sedition against the British government. (It is now believed to have been forged by so-called "White Russian" counter-revolutionaries, generally much beloved in Golden Age thrillers.)
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| slightly different ill. on the Hodder & Stoughton first ed. |
Britain had only recognized the USSR nine months earlier in February. In the October 1924 election the Conservatives under Stanley Baldwin decisively defeated Ramsay MacDonald's Labour Party, in part it was believed because of the Zinoviev Letter. Russian machinations were feared during the General Strike two years later; and in May 1927, a year after the General Strike, relations between the two countries were severed after British police under orders of the government raided the London offices of the All-Russian Co-operative Society in search of evidence of espionage activity.
Evidently they didn't really find anything new, though the British government pretended that it did. Relations between the two countries weren't restored until Labour got back in power two years later.
This short history gives a notion of the poor state of affairs between the capitalist UK and communist USSR during the Twenties. The British Communist Party also had a tough time of it. The Labour Party expelled CP members and banned them from running for parliament under their banner. During the General Strike, Labour disbanded constituencies it deemed too sympathetic to the CP. Much of the CPGB leadership was convicted of seditious conspiracy and jailed on account of the Party's loyalty to the Comintern.
So Oppenheim's Miss Brown of X.Y.O. is highly topical if nothing else. Where Christie's novel The Secret Adversary is patently absurd--the Communists are not really ultimately behind the labour troubles, you see, because there's a single man, one of those criminal masterminds no less, behind the Communists (Golden Age British thrillers very much adhered to the Great Bad Man Theory of History--social upheaval couldn't simply be because there were genuinely grave social problems in the world, see Elon Musk on George Soros)--Oppenheim's novel actually has a more realistic background, even if the actual events in the novel aren't always logical.
In her thriller Christie openly embraced sheer daft nuttery, where Oppenheim in his offers us a realistic background which sometimes is at war with the thrills. Miss Brown we are told "had visions...of being abducted, of being tied hands and feet to her chair whilst bearded Russians applied inhuman tortures to induce her to part with what she remembered of the contents of her precious notebook," but she soon laughs this off as a "ridiculous" flight of fancy. And in fact nothing like this ever comes close to happening, though it actually might have made sense for the Russians to try this tactic and it certainly would have been more thrilling. (There is, however, a terrorist bombing in London which probably kills a score or more of people--the bad guys like to do things the hard way, it seems.)
Let me finally go into it all.
Stranded on a doorstep in an enveloping London fog with her trusty typewriter case, secretary Edith Brown find herself called into the house to type notes for a dying British intelligence agent from X.Y.O., victim of an affray with one of those nasty Russian operatives. (He potted the bloody Commie, however.) Soon Miss Brown finds herself pursued by wicked agents of international Bolshevism, who are desperate to get their hands on those notes, which are sure to discredit the British Communist Party.
You have to suspend a lot of disbelief here because it's hard to understand why the good guys simply can't manage to get the notes to Downing Street or Buckingham Palace or Scotland Yard or what have you. But if you just go with it, the story is pretty entertaining. Edith Brown has been denigrated--by academics again--as virtuously dull, which honestly she is, but her heroism is undeniable. We are told that Edith like Agatha Christie thriller heroines "had suffered all her life from an untapped spirit of romance."
Even her best friend Frances Austin calls Edith a prig, however. Among other things she won't entertain a man in her bedsit and dislikes the notions of "spinsters" going on the prowl for cocktails and men. At 26 she herself has never kissed a man on the lips. Honestly I would have thought all that untapped romance in Edith would have caused her to explode by now. Edith seems to have presaged filmdom's Doris Day as a perpetual virgin.
In contrast with Christie's Tuppence in Secret Adversary, say, Edith is dull, there's no denying it, but there are compensations. Best friend Frances is far more interesting, as is often the way in melodramas with grimly good girl protagonists. The heroine is imagined perfection, as the moralists would have it, while the friend is lefty free to be more like a real person, more like the actual readers of the book, one presumes. Frances, who runs a chicken farm in the country with another "girl," is always visiting Edith in London to get a taste of cocktails and and men. Frances has even kissed men on the lips!
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| That Miss Brown has never kissed a man on the lips is a little harder to believe of this recent cheapo edition of the novel |
She tells Edith despondently:
I'm nearly thirty years old [27], and half the good times I might have had in life I haven't had because there have been things connected with them which one shouldn't do, or isn't supposed to do. I'm fed up with it, Edith. You come and look after my chickens for a time and see how you'd feel.
When Communistic MP Noel Frankland, a coarse man of rough working class origins, starts making up to Frances in a bid to make her his mistress--he freely tells her he's unhappily married--pious Edith observes that the MP isn't a"nice man," to which Frances tells chiding Edith exasperatedly:
Nice? Of course he isn't nice....I don't think that any men are nice nowadays. He's coarse and he's domineering and he's almost humorously egotistical, but he has power, Edith, and a quaint impressive kind of virility. He makes me realise all the time he's a man. Some of them don't.
Isn't this the age-old story of Caesar and Cleopatra or Hitler and Eva Braun? Or Trump and Melania? Or Putin and the former Russian ballerina mistress he collected and stashed in Switzerland with his bastards? Or Elon Musk and his myriad MAGA influencer baby mamas? Somethings never change.
Frances allows that her morals, or scruples as she calls them, have decidedly lapsed with the passing of time and opportunities: "I honestly believe that they only scruples I have left are scruples of taste." She's held off sleeping with Noel, in other words, not because it's "wrong," but because he has manners that repel her. There you have the ethos of a lot of Golden Age detective fiction, like that of Ngaio Marsh, for example. Women may have lost their morals, by and large (men never really had them); but the "good" ones still have their good taste to fall back on.
This side plot is interesting because we have a woman character, someone presented as sympathetic and essentially good at heart, deliberately contemplating becoming the mistress of an utterly odious man (and a Communist to boot). Will she or won't she? "Men are really all pretty well alike," she pronounces jadedly, "only the Frankland type are too clumsy to conceal what they want."
It turns out that Oppenheim himself was, like Noel, a great ladies' man, though you wouldn't have known it to look at him; and I think his worldly sophistication finds its way into his portrayal of the Frances-Noel relationship. Oppy's long-suffering wife, whom he seems genuinely to have loved after his fashion (their marriage lasted over half a century), readily put up with her wayward spouse's seemingly endless trysts with women aboard his yacht off the Riviera.
Fortunately for Frances though there's a Russian knight in white armor--one of those White Russians if you get me--who is pursuing her as well. But, drat the luck, he's a poor waiter with parents and a sister to support, despite being, don't you know, an exiled prince. If some authors loved a lord, Oppenheim had a mad pash for princes (and princesses of course). You can always expect one or more to pop up in his books. No mere baronets bludgeoned in the library for our Oppy!
This gets at a point about Oppenheim's crime writing that helps explain its onetime wide popularity, I think. It somewhat "transcended the genre," in the sense that a lot of it is essentially romantic melodrama, albeit spiced with crime. Oppenheim clearly was very popular with women readers, who made or broke the lucrative American slicks.
Politically Oppenheim charts something of a middle course in the novel. Even most of the British Communists seem not to be all bad fellows at heart; it's the internationalists and the Russian schemers who are the really bad aggs for the most part. Oppenheim even portrays most Labour pols and Socialists sympathetically, which is more than we usually got from British crime writers of the period. He even suggests that capitalists need to make compromises with workers, who have legitimate grievances. For someone who has the reputation of having been blinded and bedazed by the bejeweled rich in his writing, this was a more progressive pose than I expected. Oppy seems to have been a sight less reactionary than our MAGAs of today. Though, like Trump, he really hated the income tax! It's why he left England for the Roviere--an ill-fated decision as things turned out. More on that to come.
