E. Phillips Oppenheim

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Lore & Background

Edward Phillips Oppenheim was born 22 October 1866 in Tottenham, London, the son of Henrietta Susannah Temperley Budd and Edward John Oppenheim, a leather merchant. After attending Wyggeston Grammar School until the sixth form in 1883, his family's finances forced him to withdraw and he worked in his father's business for almost twenty years. His father subsidized the publication of his first novel, which proved just successful enough to break even. Around 1900, Julien Stevens Ulman (1865–1920), a wealthy New York leather merchant who enjoyed Oppenheim's books, bought the leather works and made him a salaried director to support his writing career. He published five of his novels between 1908 and 1912 under the pseudonym 'Anthony Partridge'. In 1892 Oppenheim married an American, Elise Clara Hopkins of Easthampton, Massachusetts. They lived in Evington, Leicestershire in what is now The Cedars pub until the First World War and had one daughter. During that war he worked for the Ministry of Information. He described his method in 1922: '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: 'My characters would resent it.' When he needed villains for his diplomatic and political intrigues he drew on Prussian militarists and anarchists. His literary success enabled him to buy a villa on the French riviera and a yacht, then a house in Guernsey, though he lost access to this during the Second World War. He regained the house, Le Vauquiedor Manor in St. Martins, after the war and died there on 3 February 1946.

Reader's Guide

E. Phillips Oppenheim was a highly successful commercial author whose works were consistently treated as entertainments with only a slight relationship to the mystery genre. A 1927 review in The New York Times said 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.' In 1933, a review of Crooks in the Sunshine noted: '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.' His one hundredth novel, A Magnificent Hoax (1936), was reviewed as leading the reader 'through nearly 300 pages, only to find that nothing very terrible has happened.' Readers came to expect 'the peculiar Oppenheim blend of dispatch-box atmosphere, femmes fatales, double traitors, and a tight plot.' In mid-career, The Great Impersonation (1920) was called 'his best work.' An assessment upon his death said: '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. One academic study calls him 'a talented entertainer.'

Did You Know?

• In 1913, John Buchan called Oppenheim 'my master in fiction' and 'the greatest Jewish writer since Isaiah'.
• Oppenheim published five novels between 1908 and 1912 under the pseudonym 'Anthony Partridge'.
• He appeared on the cover of Time magazine on 12 September 1927.
• Oppenheim once produced seven works in a single year by dictating to a secretary.
• His one hundredth novel, A Magnificent Hoax (1936), was reviewed as leading the reader through nearly 300 pages only to find nothing very terrible had happened.