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...
Young Maurice Teyl, just turned 21, shy, non-drinker, non-smoker and the richest man in America, has been raised by his rigid Grandmother on a remote ranch in California but he shuns the limelight. So when a world tour is arranged by his guardian he is none too keen. He misses his train to begin the jaunt and meets up with a young English actress, Lucy Compston, and so begins a friendship and the slight deception, as he does not want her to know exactly who he is. He then g...
A novel of crime and conscience by Edward Phillips Oppenheim (1866-1946), the self-styled „prince of storytellers.” „The Profiteers” was written about the stock market post-World War I and pre-1929 crash. The tale of the Bechtel family dynasty is a classic American business story. It begins with Warren A. Bechtel, who led a consortium that constructed the Hoover Dam. From that auspicious start, the family and its eponymous company would go on to „build the world,” from the ...
This is another great novel by E. 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. David Newberry is released from Wandsworth prison having served a year for burglary. He was briefly a member of The Lambs, a London gang run by Tottie Green, with the help of the beautiful, coarse, but alluring Belle. Vowing revenge, Newberry buys a gym...
John Peters is the dissolute Crown Prince of Bergeland. The nephew of the rapacious and immoral King. Grace Pellisier is an English American actress who meets a thoughtful, serious, hiker in the mountains of Switzerland. Bernhardt is the energetic Chief of the Secret Service, protecting the aging King, and constantly searching for „The Watcher,” the leader of the revolutionary republicans. Written during a period of intense anti-monarchy which saw the end of the Russian Tza...
In the courtroom of Lord Malladene, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Richard Lebur stands accused of murdering his lover’s lover. Lebur is convinced to change his plea to guilty to avoid a death sentence. At the last minute, as he is being taken to jail, he shouts out that he is innocent. Seven years later, Martin Campbell Brockenhurst, Viscount and ex-policeman, with Scotland Yard, pursues the case further, convinces that Lebur is innocent, motivated by his love for Leb...
This 1907 novel was one of the early popular novels of society by E. Phillips Oppenheim. The story revolves around the conflict between a gentleman’s obligation to defend the honor of a lady, and his responsibility to his own feelings, family, and freedom. Sir Wingrave, imprisoned wrongfully for killing a man, finishes his sentence and plans his vengeance against those who would not tell the truth to help him during his trial. He becomes misanthropic, seeking only revenge. ...
Captain Austen Rotherby is on a mission of revenge in Paris and chances upon Louis, the head waiter of his favorite restaurant. Bored, he follows Louis to a shady café where he spots a pair he’s long been intrigued by – a South American gentleman and a young girl. Because of certain complications, Captain Rotheby finds himself forced to leave Paris, only to find himself travelling with the aforementioned gentleman, Mr. Delora, and his niece, Felicia. Arriving in London, Mr....
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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.
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...
