Reviews Mystery The Great Impersonation

By E. Phillips Oppenheim

Dover Books reprint, orig.1919

210 pages, paperback

Reviewed by Jamie Agnew

Owner of Aunt Agatha's

One of the many glories of the "used" part of the bookstore trade is the unpredictability of it all - I literally do not know what will walk into my door. How dreary to be toiling, enmeshed in one of the chains, certain to the inch how many books are to be hauled in, instructed by the publishers exactly where to place them, and by boss computer which unfortunates are to be yanked into oblivion.

Fortunately that oblivion is often a used bookstore (assuming that the books haven 't been destroyed as most paperbacks are), and many marvelous volumes that have failed the stockholders stem sales criteria find a warm, if often cluttered home there. As a lover of the oddball and obsolete (not too lucrative, but nice work if you can get it), strangers bring me bag-fulls of literary flotsam. Only too often I find myself immersed in this siren stuff, caught in the undertow of an author long forgotten by both the academic and commercial literary worlds.

Such a writer is E. Phillips Oppenheim (1866-1946). Known in his time as "the prince of storytellers," Oppenheim enjoyed tremendous readership and celebrity, but now there are few who have heard of him, much less read any of his 116 novels and 39 collections of short stories. The only work of his that is ever kind of generally available is his most famous, The Great Impersonation, which survives as a $5.95 Dover Books reprint. Supposedly Allen Dulles's favorite spy novel, The Great Impersonation was written in 1919, the carefully orchestrated culmination of the books Oppenheim produced at lightning speed during the Great War: 1914's The Vanished Messenger, 1915's The Double Traitor and Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo and 1916's The Kingdom of the Blind. Like a hot jazzman riffing on a lick, Oppenheim blew variations on the grim themes that rang everywhere around the birth of the modem age.

Part of his work was a reveille signaling the end of the long, illusory Victorian dream and the English "empire" that supported it. He described the war as a contest between the English, who "expect to find the world a playground for sport, a garden for lovers," and the Germans, who know there's "work to do." The English must clearly wake up and join the 20th century - leave the garden and charge into the wasteland.

Oppenheim's other overriding themes are the great ones of our time - Identity and Paranoia. Unsuspecting Britain has entered a world in which outward appearances are no longer trustworthy. Several of the books involve the struggle to unmask simple, fun-loving English gentlemen who are really cunning, immoral spies, and the even more painful necessity for actual simple, fun-loving English gentlemen to transform themselves into sterner stuff- to literalIy become the enemy in order to defeat him.

But in the end it is the language of Oppenheim that most delights me. Partially (and paradoxically) it's the age that makes his vocabulary and diction seem so fresh, but it's also the buzz of a snappier world, the epigramic dialogue far from the studied inarticulateness that drags through too many contemporary books. Besides, how can you resist a book like The Kingdom of the Blind, which features not one but two zeppelin attacks. There's poetry here, half now, half then, the strains of some new sound:

Far away in the clouds, it seemed, they could hear a faint humming, some new sound, something mechanical in its regular beating, yet with clamorous throatiness of some human force cleaving its way through the resistless air. "Now, " Granet whispered. High above them, something blacker than the heavens themselves, stupendous, huge, seemed suddenly to assume to itself shape.