The story of a gallant soldier who is dismissed his regiment, and disowned by his father, because he has been found guilty, on „false evidence,” of cowardice in the field. He changes his name, and later his son falls in love with the daughter of the man whose false evidence led to his ruin.

„The Box with Broken Seals” is a thrilling cat and mouse murder mystery following the narrative of Jocelyn Thew and the English Service. This skillfully written and an exciting espionage story of intrigue, unfolding in the Oppenheim’s best style. The reader will follow with avidity the daring moves of Thew from the time he sails from New York on the „City of Boston,” accompanied by a dying man and a special nurse in the person of Katharine Beverley, a society girl who is un...

The story of a young man, Lord Sandbrook, who takes revenge against the directors of a company he holds responsible for the deaths of his father and mother. The battlefield is Basinghall Street, where the offices of Woolito, Limited, are situated. A textile business is the center of strange machinations – suicides, failures, conflagrations, disaster to various directors, finally a raid on the stock, and the president is a ruined man. In this story Mr. Oppenheim takes a vaca...

In an interesting precursor to the later „I Spy” television series, the novel follows the activities of a young British tennis professional, Mervyn Amory, who is spending the season in Monte Carlo. While traveling from Paris on Le Train Bleu, he meets an Italian secret agent who is carrying documents which show the treachery of the dictator Matorni. Matorni is a thinly disguised Mussolini. (The title of the novel bears no relation to the book). Interestingly, this novel was...

Havoc occurs when European countries are discussing covert alliances. The story revolves around the creation of a secret alliance between Germany, Russia, and Austria. The English hope to split Russia away by holding the Czar to his previous public commitments, but they need proof of what was done to create the pressure. All the pressures that lead to WWI are there, but the intrigues and secret treaties create an interesting background to the twists and turns of the plot....

General, his companion pronounced, „you are getting fat. Too many cocktails.” General Besserley, late of the Secret Service at Washington and now a very popular member of Monaco society, glanced downwards at his slightly increasing outline. He was rather a fine figure of a man and his carriage was beyond reproach, but it was certainly true that there was sometimes a little difficulty about the two bottom buttons of his waistcoat.

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...

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...

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...

The Princess opened her eyes at the sound of her maid’s approach. She turned her head impatiently toward the door. „Annette,” she said coldly, „did you misunderstand me? Did I not say that I was on no account to be disturbed this afternoon? „ Annette was the picture of despair. Eyebrows and hands betrayed alike both her agitation of mind and her nationality.

General Besserley sat before his writing-table, drawn close up to the wide-flung windows of his summer-house, his pen clasped in his idle fingers, his eyes wandering though a tangle of drooping roses and clematis beyond the gardens below to where a car was crawling up the mountain road. He leaned a little sideways and touched a bell. In a few moments a white-coated butler opened the door and approached the table.

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...

Mr. Hamer Wildburn, a young American, graduate of Harvard is wintering on the Mediterranean coast of France in his newly purchased yacht „The Bird of Paradise”, and is puzzled by the desire he finds in visitors coming aboard at different times to buy the vessel from him. One night he is awoken at 3 am by the cries of a beautiful, and wearing priceless emeralds, woman swimming alongside. She comes aboard and offers to buy the yacht for twice what he paid. The next day, the f...

E. Phillips Oppenheim wrote most famously of secret agents and duplicitous diplomats, secret treaties and international conspiracies, moonlit Riviera casinos, Swiss hotel suites, perilous yacht trips, and glamorous trans-European express trains. Known in his time as „the Prince of Storytellers,” Oppenheim, like the brand names of today’s best seller lists, offered readers in the first half of the 20th century a steady, predictable, and entertaining supply of pop fiction. „T...

This is a very early novel by E. Phillips Oppenheim from 1897. The wealthy and bored Lord Hildyard, Marquis of Esholt, is on a yachting tour with a group of friends, including his kept lover, Pauline Owston. When Hildyard spies an apparently uninhabited island, he slips off the ship in search of adventure. In the middle of the night, he hears wonderful violin music and finds a young and beautiful girl, Bertha, playing in the forest. She is accompanied by a cruel and misshap...

A best-selling author of novels, short stories, magazine articles, translations, and plays, Oppenheim published over 150 books. He 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. The tiny kingdom of Theos is surrounded by Eastern European powers in this 1902 novel of politics, war, and romance. Russia and Turkey are plotting to take over the peaceful and rural country. A ...

In the sleepy little Devonshire town of Melhampton, the lives of the village stalwarts are revealed in this charming collection of tales by Oppenheim. Mr Tidd, the manager of the local bank branch, has invested his life and savings in the education of his daughter, but has dipped into the banks funds to „maintain appearances.” On the eve of quarterly bank examiners visit, he is confronted with guilt and exposure. In another tale, the town veterinarian is conflicted about hi...