At half-past eleven o’clock–Mr. Billingham was a man of regular habits–he quitted the promenade, crossed the Place in front of the Casino, and selected a table outside the Café de Paris. He selected it simply because it happened to be the nearest empty one and without even a glance at his neighbours. It was nevertheless, without a doubt, by the direction of that mysterious influence called fate that he should have chosen that particular chair and ordered his champagne cockt...
E. Phillips Oppenheim, writing as Anthony Partridge, in 1912. A curious tale in three parts. „The Court of St. Simon”, by E. Phillips Oppenheim tells the story of Monsieur Simon with his consort Josephine, who lives in the demi-monde of Paris, consorts with criminals and artists, and exacts „contributions” from various evil-doers in the „Court of St. Simon” an underground tribunal of, for, and by, the criminal class. One evening, he brings along with the jaded youth Eugene ...
Welcome to the adventuring, thrilling world of E. Phillips Oppenheim’s modern retelling of „Monte Cristo”. Gilbert Channay is released from prison after three years. He had been framed-up by business partners in the Channay Syndicate, and sets about executing his revenge. The retired policeman, Martin Fogg, mysteriously appears, knowing too much about Channay’s business. He helps Channay escape an attempt on his life, and keeps turning up at crucial times. The plot is the s...
Impatient of the numerous checks which had held up his car all the way from Croydon, Gerald Jennerton let down the window and looked out. London, he realised at once, was swallowing him up. Not the London upon which he had gazed half an hour ago from his earthward-gliding aeroplane–a huge, tumbled chaos of obscurity, with its far-spreading myriads of lights–but an engulfing wilderness of endless streets, through which cars from every direction seemed to be racing to some ma...
Ronald, Count Matsertser, was a world traveler and amateur. After several years of travel, he returns to his Norfolian estates, which deals with hunting, research and espionage in Africa and Asia. His treasures are huge, but his heart is empty. One night, a mysterious mercenary attacks him directly behind the gate of his estate.
Upward in long sinuous bends the road wound its way into the heart of the hills. The man, steadily climbing to the summit, changed hands upon the bicycle he was pushing, and wiped the sweat from his grimy forehead. It had been a gray morning when he had left, with no promise of this burst of streaming sunshine. Yet the steep hill troubled him but little--he stepped blithely forward with little sign of fatigue.
This is another great collection of short stories by Edward Phillips Oppenheim, the prolific English novelist who was in his lifetime a major and successful writer of genre fiction including thrillers and spy novels, and who wrote over a 100 of them. He was the self-styled „prince of storytellers., generally regarded as the earliest writer of spy fiction as we know it today, and invented the ’Rogue Male’ school of adventure thrillers. This volume is a collection of 10 myste...
Jedna z wcześniejszych powieści Oppenheima, nieco inna niż jego późniejsza dzieła, z ciemniejszymi motywami i bardziej tragiczną fabułą. Bogaty Anglik, zakochuje się w córce włoskiego arystokraty mieszkającego na wyspie Kruta na Morzu Śródziemnym. Niektórym jednak bardzo nie odpowiada ich związek. Ich bliscy potajemnie spiskują, aby ich rozdzielić.E. Phillips Oppenheim, nazywany w swoim czasie mistrzem wśród twórców powieści kryminalnych i sensacyjnych, był znanym na całym św...
Roger Sloane jest młodym Amerykaninem mieszkającym na Lazurowym Wybrzeżu pod koniec lat dwudziestych. Spotyka starego kolegę z klasy, który wędruje po Europie po odziedziczeniu tytułu w Anglii. Dwaj przyjaciele wraz z grupą dyletantów z wyższych klas walczą ze złowrogimi siłami gangu amerykańskich przemytników, którzy porzucili Nowy Jork i założyli wyrafinowany syndykat przestępczy na południu Francji.Napad, morderstwo, tajne kryjówki, szybkie samochody i piękne kobiety – wsz...
Major Andrew Forester is a retired British Army officer, of no discernible occupation, who wanders about Europe, England and the United States. He is looking for adventure, but not outside the bounds of the acceptable. He is willing to skirt the law, but not break it. His peripatetic life style brings him in contact with scam artists, gold-diggers, art thieves, industrial spies, taxi dancers, and flappers. Sometimes he benefits from these associations, but at other times he...
Mystery novel by E. Phillips Oppenheim involving a handicapped art collector. The book concerns recently demobbed and down on his luck Major Owston, who becomes the bodyguard of the deformed amoral art collector Martin Hews. Enabled by his enormous wealth to buy the world’s most beautiful works of art. Hews is plunged into a bitter rivalry with a gang leader simply known as „Joseph”. This is a thrilling and tense story of a struggle between master brains, of gang wars, of d...
Sir Joseph is a brilliant surgeon from Australia who went mad after operating on vast numbers of soldiers during World War 1. His terrible hobby is cutting people’s heads open to steal bits of their brains. His wife is a former nurse who went mad alongside him. They are pursued across England and the continent by Mr. Daniel Rocke, codebreaker of the Foreign service: Miss Ann Lancaster, daughter of one of Londe’s victims, and Sir Francis Worton, known as Q20, head of the sec...
Victorian Socialist Romance. Enoch Strone is a book-loving rustic loner who lives in a remote hand-built cabin. He works as a mechanical engineer in the industrial town of Gascester. One evening he meets a poor factory girl, Milly, who has been abandoned by her friends during a walk in the woods. On the same day he is accosted by the Reverand Martinghoe who introduces Strone to his beautiful, widowed, wealthy sister Lady Malingcourt. Strone is bewitched by her lovely singin...
Another great spy novel from the british author E. Phillips Oppenheim who achieved worldwide fame with his thrilling novels and short stories concerning international espionage and intrigue. This one is a connected collection of short stories about the leader of a secret society pledged to protect England and their German adversary. This novel is an Oppenheim classic from 1919 about a high society villain: characteristic of Oppenheim’s typical works, with the characters liv...
With the police hot on his tail, Peter Ruff decides to turn from a life of crime to the more lucrative life of a private investigator. With his ties to the underworld and his skill at disguise, Peter is the perfect sleuth. Along with his trusted and beautiful assistant, Violet Brown, Mr. Ruff is brilliantly successful in his new career. As his reputation for solving crime grows, he is noticed and adopted as a leader by a large conglomerate of criminals who have chosen to tu...
Edward Phillips Oppenheim is considered one of the originators of the thriller genre, his novels also range from spy thrillers to romance, but all have an undertone of intrigue. This novel is one of E. Phillips Oppenheim’s best works and opens with a fantastic description of the boring life of Mr. Peter Cradd, leather merchant, husband, father, slave to his family, stoic self denier, and all-around put upon man in the bowler hat. He is barely able to pay his bills, has a wi...
One of many great works by E. Phillips Oppenheim, who styled himself as the „prince of storytellers,” and is credited with creating the ‘rogue male’ genre of adventure thrillers and was one of the earliest writers of spy fiction from the late 19th and early 20th Century England. The hero in this one is Roger Sloane, a well-off American bon vivant who decides to blow the whistle on a gang of transplanted American gangsters who have abandoned New York and set up a sophisticat...
Mr. Samuel T. Billingham of New York, recently landed from the great liner anchored a few miles out, walked along the Terrace at Monte Carlo, serene, light-hearted, beatifically content. His yellow shoes and his variegated socks might be described as a trifle vivid, but the rest of his attire–his well-pressed grey suit, his irreproachable linen, and his well- shaped grey Homburg hat– was beyond criticism. He was a man of medium height, thick-set, inclined a little, perhaps,...
Miss Sadie Loyes, the manageress of the Hotel Weltmore Typewriting and Secretarial Bureau, set down the receiver of the telephone which had its place upon her desk and looked thoughtfully around at the eleven young ladies who comprised her present staff. She stood there, an angular, untidy-looking person, tapping a pencil against her teeth, unconscious arbitress, not only of the fate of two very interesting people, but also of the fate of a great nation. Portentous events d...
A solitary cabin stood far away in the backwoods of Canada, outside all tracks of civilization, in a region which only the native Indians and a few daring trappers cared to penetrate. Rudely built of pine logs, it was ill-calculated to withstand the piercing cold and frost which, for nine months out of the twelve, holds this region in an iron grip. Around it, a small clearing had been effected, but the ground was many feet thick in snow, which, save where in front of the do...
Five people were seated around a table in the private office of a well-known solicitor in Lincoln’s Inn. Their expressions and general attitude were sufficiently disturbed to suggest that their gathering was of no ordinary moment. A grey-haired, untidy looking woman in seedy black was tapping the mahogany table in front of her with long, ill-cared for nails, and breathing quickly. A fat, red-cheeked man, with a waistcoat the lower buttons of which failed to connect, with bl...
Edward Phillips Oppenheim (1866-1946) was an English novelist, in his lifetime a major and successful writer of genre fiction. This novel is an Oppenheim classic from 1919 about a high society villain: characteristic of Oppenheim’s typical works, with the characters living in luxury, and a very flowing and exact story. Much of Oppenheim’s work possesses a unique escapist charm, featuring protagonists who delight in Epicurean meals, surroundings of intense luxury, and the re...
Alfred Burton, a smooth-talking salesman, is having a perfectly ordinary day on the job when he stumbles across a strange plant with green leaves and a cluster of queer little brown beans hanging down from them in an old house. The virtue of the beans is that he who eats one shall see nothing, think nothing, say nothing but the truth. Alfred Burton has a well-meaning, rather ordinary wife who becomes unendurable to him, and he falls in love with a charming girl who would ha...