The Seven Conundrums

I’ve been reading a lot of E. Phillips Oppenheim lately. This is a thing that happens to me sometimes. It’s kind of like getting a cold.

I’m afraid of running out of Oppenheim short stories at some point, so I’ve mostly been reading ones I’ve already read. One of those is The Seven Conundrums, a series of seven stories–and an intro–about three young entertainers working for a mysterious epicure.

Peter Ruff and The Double Four

I’m not going to write about all my recent E. Phillips Oppenheim reads–I’ve read about twenty of his books over the past month and a half, and that’s too many. But the more I read, the better a handle I get on him, and I’m finding most of his short story characters really enjoyable.

The Double Four seems to have been published before Peter Ruff, but Peter Ruff comes first chronologically. (You can find the two volumes in one here. I thought it was going to be a third Peter Ruff book, and was disappointed.) Peter is a nice young master criminal who falls in love with a young woman without anything in particular to recommend her. He’s trying to settle into a dull, middle-class lifestyle (to correspond with hers) when the police catch up with him and he has to leave his identity behind and create a new one. 

Some E. Phillips Oppenheim Stories

I’ve made the extremely belated discovery that E. Phillips Oppenheim’s short story collections are more fun than his novels. (With a few exceptions; you can pry The Great Impersonation from my cold, dead hands.) So, that’s mostly what I’ve been reading. Here’s a roundup of some of them.

Ask Miss Mott

When I say I kept forgetting Ask Miss Mott was by E. Phillips Oppenheim and not Edgar Wallace, it’s a compliment. There are things that point towards Oppenheim: a lack of humor, an uglier snobbishness,  a brand of racism that’s slightly different from Wallace’s. But the world feels like it belongs to Wallace, with its melodramatic gangs of master criminals, its gallant Scotland Yard official and its intrepid girl detective. The style is Oppenheim, but the substance is mostly Wallace, and that has immediately vaulted Ask Miss Mott into second place on my list of favorite Oppenheim books.

The Double Life of Mr. Alfred Burton

So, I read The Double Life of Mr. Alfred Burton, by E. Phillips Oppenheim, and…I kind of don’t want to talk about it.

The Double Traitor

So I finally read The Double Traitor, by E. Philips Oppenheim, and I’m not surprised that it’s Evangeline‘s favorite of his books, because it’s awesome.