CLOAK AND DAGGER

Greymouth Evening Star, 20 March 1946, Page 8

CLOAK AND DAGGER

OPPENHEIM’S FAMILIAR THEME

MURDER NOT ALL FICTION Just as the name of Edgar Wallace is synonymous with mystery thrillers, states a correspondent of the Sydney Morning Herald, that of Edward Phillips Oppenheim will always be associated with the cloak and dagger intrigues of spies and diplomats. He tossed off 150 of these before he died in Guernsey. I There was a coincidental similarity I between the literary lives of Wallace I! and Oppenheim. Each worked proli digiously, turning out roughly the | same number of books, although Oplipenheim neve’r equalled Wallace’s ''feat of writing a complete volume on | the backs of telegraph blanks in four 'days. i| Seeking Atmosphere

Il Each was an enthusiastic gambler, ['and sought his colour in the atmos/phere of which he wrote. Wallace A found his frequently on the race i tracks; Oppenheim particularised on the gaming-tables of Cannes and r Monte Carlo and the bistrots of Paris [and Marseilles. ’ He was fortunate (or '(unfortunate) enough to witness real l( murder outside Seven. Taverns in [Marseilles and attempted murder and suicide at Le Rat Mort in Paris. These ! experiences were grist to his literary > mill. I i m umc l-» I i-i 1

son of a London leather merchant. After leaving school he did office work fpi- eight or nine hours a day, and then wrote fiction until 2 a.m. When “Expiation,” his first book, was published at his father’s expense, he went to America, where he married. A few years later a wealthy New York businessman, Julian - Stevens Ulman, bought the Oppenheim leather business, and made the novelist a director at a generous salary. Relieved of financial worry, he turned his attention to the spate of books which was to flow from his pen; five of them he wrote under the name of “Anthony Partridge.” Oppenheim’s femmes fatales were invariably glamorous, his diplomats suave, his criminals sinister. There are only a score of basic plots in the world—to eke them out he worked them A to Z and then about-turned them to work them Zto A. The lavishness of his output astonished fel-low-writers, for it was a fact that none of them ever saw him actively engaged on it.

Tremendous Royalties. His royalties were tremendous, and he maintained a cottage on the east coast of England, a house in Guernsey, and one in the south of France. Fie was known to win £5OOO in a night at roulette, and his expert evidence in an English court swayed judgment—that poker was not gambling, but a game of skill.

Oppenheim and his wife were living in Provence when France fell in 1940. With evil events piling up thick and fast, they decided to evacuate. Their escape via Portugal, Spain, and the English air clipper would make an exciting novel in itself. In Barcelona he obtained assistance from a Swiss hotel manager because of his identity—the Swiss had 14 volumes of Oppenheim upstairs in his bedroom. With Oppenheim there dies a figure as glamorous as were his own characters. He was known and was familiar from Paris to Manhattan, from the Channel Islands to the West Indies. His earnings and his spending were on the grand scale, and his niche in cosmopolitan cafe society secure. The words Margaret Lane wrote of her father-in-law, Edgar Wallace, might be a literary requiem for Oppenheim:—

“He charmed his public with suspense, action, and'excitement humanised by a deft touch in characterisation and an easy humour.”