’Michael’s Evil Deeds’ (and they are very evil at times) is a rather ingenious crime novel in more ways than one. Firstly the 11 chapters each represent a separate incident but overall they do link together, if on occasions somewhat loosely. And secondly the tale is told by various of the protagonists so there is often a different point of view within each chapter.
The two men hesitated upon the tee, gazing down the glade towards the distant-green. Their caddies were still pointing in excitement to a motionless object stretched upon the smooth turf close to the flag. „Look there! „ „It’s a man! „ „He is dead! „ The players paused to consider the situation. They were oddly contrasted combatants–one, Mr. Edgar Franks, elderly, large and florid, with a mass of flaxen hair only slightly streaked with grey, a transatlantic millionaire, and...
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,...
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, 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.
A novel written in 1912. These are good Victorian or Edward tales about representatives of the English upper class who are engaged in uncovering crimes, espionage, good deeds and shrouded by secrets. Some of these stories Oppenheim continued to develop in full novels. Others are short master classes with sketches, character and description. Unlike many of his stories, the ending for a couple of them is more acute or sad than usual.
We all got up from tea in the hall, made our way to the drawing-room, and thence into the morning-room, which opened out of it. There was plenty of daylight still. James came in after us, and went straight up to a framed panel portrait which stood with others on a small table in a remote corner. It showed a tall handsome, clean-shaved man of three or four and thirty, of fine physique, seated astride a chair, his arms folded across the back of the chair as he faced the camer...
We were standing together in the small shabby bedroom of the boarding-house wherein I lived in Granville Gardens, facing the recreation ground close to Shepherd’s Bush Railway Station. The stifling July day was at an end, and the narrow room was lit by the soft hazy glow of the fast-fading London sunset. Through the open window came the shouts of children at play upon the „green” opposite, mingled with the chatter of the passers-by and the ever-increasing whirr of the elect...
It was a brilliant good Saturday morning before the harvest, and the large market and curves of the streets in Norwich proceed with a continuous crowd of farmers, livestock, dealers, county ladies with opinions that are adhering to shopping. Frantsinin on the London Street is filled up quickly: a very nice sight for worshiping a small owner who is standing in the upper corner of the room, managing his midridon’s operations, rubbing his hands and smiling, kindly begging each...
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...
American Millionaire meets Ruritanean Princess, Jeremiah Vavasour Strole meets the Princess Marya of Pletz at a weekend party in the Hamptons on Long Island. The year is 1933. Much of the world has been plunged into economic ruin by the stock market crash. Marya’s country, Jakovia, is ruled by a playboy monarch who would rather spend his nights with courtesans in Paris, than pay attention to the starving people of his homeland. Michael Grogner, the chief of police and son o...
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...
The youth in the multi-coloured blazer laughed. „You’d have to come and be a nurse,” he suggested. „Oh, I’d go as a drummer-boy. I’d look fine in uniform, wouldn’t I? „ the waitress simpered in return. Dennis Burnham swallowed his liqueur in one savage gulp, pushed back his chair, and rose from the table.
”See! It’s–it’s in my kit-bag, over there! The thing–the Thing at which the whole world will stand aghast! „ The thin, white-faced, grey-bearded man lying on his back in bed roused himself with difficulty, and with skinny finger pointed at his strong but battered old leather bag lying in the corner of the small hotel bedroom.
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...
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...
I am a Veiled Man. Openly, I confess myself a vagabond and a brigand. Living here, in the heart of the Great Desert, six moons march from Algiers, and a thousand miles beyond the French outposts, theft is, with my nomadic tribe, their natural industry–a branch of education, in fact. We augment the meagreness of our herds by extorting ransoms from some of our neighbours, and completely despoiling others. Mention of the name of Ahamadou causes the face of the traveller on any...
