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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.

Or maybe I do, because E. Phillips Oppenheim is a massive fucking snob, and I normally take it for granted, but when it’s the whole point of the book, it’s probably time to at least acknowledge it. The Double Life of Mr. Alfred Burton is, I suppose, tragicomic. At the beginning of the story, Oppenheim’s snobbishness was comic, and at the end it was tragic. And the move from tragic to comic is, at least, intentional, but Oppenheim’s snobbishness magnifies it.

But probably I should explain the story.

Alfred Burton is the head clerk for an auctioneer and house agent, and, being moderately vulgar and glibly untruthful, he’s pretty good at it. Then he…eats a mysterious bean in an empty house. Yeah, I don’t know either. But after that, he can only see and speak the truth. And obviously that changes his life, but not only — or even primarily — in the ways you would probably expect.

This is the comic part of Oppenheim’s snobbishness, because apparently being utterly truthful in thought and deed is the same thing as having the tastes of a man born to a wealthy and cultured upper class family. Only more so, I guess. This is kind of delightful when Burton is replacing his tails, cheap silk hat and gaudy tie with a quiet gray suit and a shirt with a soft collar, mildly painful when he points out an an auction exactly what lies and half truths have been told in the catalogue, and sort of awful when he finds himself completely disgusted with the appearance and manners of his own wife and kid.

The tragic part is that there are times in the book when the magic fades, and Burton reverts to his former tastes and pursuits. I don’t actually know what I hate more: the idea that seeing only truth makes you an asshole to anyone who doesn’t also like nice clothes and antiques, or that, having spent months appreciating fine art and music and honesty, you could go back to being exactly the person you were before. For Oppenheim, the accident of Burton’s birth makes him incapable of having good taste without the aid of magic, and the accident of his wife’s birth makes her horrible to be around for anyone who wasn’t raised similarly, and…I don’t know, it’s just super, super gross.

For what it’s worth, I think The Double Life of Mr. Alfred Burton is pretty good, if intensely problematic and at least a few chapters too long. But it’s not actually any more problematic than any of E. Phillips Oppenheim’s other books. He is, pretty fundamentally, an author of escapist fiction. And it’s a lot of fun to spend time with his wealthy and cultured characters, but only as long as you don’t see what he thinks of people who aren’t wealthy and cultured, because that’s a lot uglier, without being any more realistic.

But even more than the snobbishness, I hate the idea that people can’t change. Lower class people can only have good taste with chemical assistance. Having good taste with chemical assistance doesn’t change anything about their taste without it. And there’s apparently no possibility of anyone’s tastes changing naturally, ever.

I hate that I’ve fallen into the trap of thinking that Oppenheim’s “truth” equals good taste, although I suppose that’s better than thinking Oppenheim’s “truth” equals truth.

Whatever. This book kind of hit me hard, but there’s not a lot I can do about it besides choosing to be happier about the ending than Oppenheim might have wanted.

I haven’t read all that many E. Phillips Oppenheim books, but I’ve read The Great Impersonation three times. I worry that no other Oppenheim book will measure up to it, but if none does, that’s okay. I enjoy rereading it even though I know exactly what happens.

Two men meet in German East Africa in, oh, 1912, maybe? One is Sir Everard Dominey, self-exiled from England and steadily drinking himself to death during and in between a succession of hunting expeditions. Then there’s Leopold von Ragastein, exiled to Africa by the Kaiser after killing his lover’s husband, but doing his best to make himself useful to his country while he’s there. And he knows another assignment is coming to him soon. Dominey and von Ragastein are lookalikes, which offers von Ragastein the perfect opportunity to establish himself in England, as he’s been instructed to do.

The Sir Everard Dominey who arrives in London some months later has no real trouble establishing himself and claiming his property — even his meetings with his half-insane wife go more smoothly than anticipated. But there are also questions, and it’s interesting to watch him deal with people having a hard time recognizing him, or commenting on how much he’s changed. And then he’s got his instructions from his German handler, and the Hungarian princess who insists on recognizing him as von Ragastein.

The spy plot is given approximately the same amount of weight as the romance plot, which revolves around Dominey’s wife and the guy Dominey may or may not have killed before he left for Africa. There’s a sort of Mrs. Danvers-ish character, and Lady Dominey herself is delightful, although the number of times she was described as childlike made me a little uncomfortable.

So, you know. There’s a lot going on. And pretty much all of it is great. Also, I can’t think of any plot threads that are left hanging. I just really, really like this book, for whatever reason. I don’t even care that Oppenheim doesn’t have a sense of humor.

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.

Francis Norgate is a young diplomat, recently assigned to Berlin. He’s sent home again after only a month, having offended one of the Kaiser’s family members, which sucks for him professionally, but turns out to be for the best. On the way home, Norgate encounters Mr. Selingmann, a German businessman, and becomes suspicious of him. But neither his bosses, his friend who’s a cabinet minister, or Scotland Yard will pay any attention, so he singlehandedly sets himself up as a double agent and does what he can to prepare for war.

The Double Traitor isn’t as twisty as the other Oppenheim books I’ve read, but it’s suspenseful in a fairly straightforward way, keeping you guessing about whose loyalties lie where. You’re never in doubt of Norgate — which is nice because it allows you to sit back and watch him work — but pretty much everyone else is a bit of a question mark. Mostly this is a novel about how Norgate goes about being a double agent, which it turns out is a thing he’s mostly pretty well fitted for. He’s also ridiculously open at times — I love that he’s constantly going to his friend Hebbelthwaite and saying, “So, this is what I’ve been getting up to lately in my capacity as a German spy,” but…well, really?

There were things that I found disatisfying, and threads that were dropped and never picked up again. I never figured out exactly what happened with the suicide of one of the characters early in the book, and I objected pretty strongly to the way Oppenheim dealt with Norgate’s manservant. But mostly this was almost as much fun as I’ve ever had with an Oppenheim novel. It helps that the other Oppenhem novel it most resembles is my favorite, The Great Impersonation (which I’ve apparently never written about? I could have sworn I had). Both are about spies and impending war, and a particular type of young man working alone for his country. I like Oppenheim less when he does financial conspiracies and politics and people who are totally self-absorbed. But this has only a little bit of those, and lots of patriotic fervor and a young couple who work well together and almost an excess of spies. It’s pretty cool.

For some reason, I only feel like writing about E. Phillips Oppenheim when I dislike him. Which is to say that this was meant to be a post about Richard Lane’s creepy methods of courtship in Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo, but then I finished Nobody’s Man on the subway this morning and it was worse.

For one thing, Andrew Tallente’s political career didn’t interest me, and that’s what the book is about. Tallente is an MP, the token leftist in a coalition government. Except that Oppenheim’s notion of socialism contains a generous helping of conservatism, and his fictional Democratic party sounds kind of awful.

Tallente is well thought of, but has recently lost an election to a guy named Miller, a political rival and a bit of a personal one. Having lost his seat in Parliament, he’s thinking about living a quiet life at his country house in Devonshire for a while. Then Stephen Dartrey, head of the Democratic party, comes to visit with Miller and a writer named Nora Miall in tow, and offers Tallente a place in the Democratic party. It’s strongly hinted that when the Democrats take over the government, Tallente will be the Prime Minister. And, mostly because he’s a lot more in sympathy with their ideals than with the ideals — or lack thereof — of his current party, he takes Dartrey up on his offer.

Meanwhile, things aren’t going so well for Tallente personally. He and his wife, Stella, have finally separated after a long and uniformly dissatisfying marriage: he wanted her money and she wanted the social position she thought he would acquire, but he ended up not wanting that much money, and his time in the army during WWI hampered his political career. When the book begins, Stella is having an affair with Tallente’s secretary, Tony Palliser. Tallente takes Palliser to an outcrop over the sea to have a fight with him, but he accidentally knocks him over the edge. Only afterwards does he find out that Palliser’s just stolen a damaging document from Tallente’s safe and sold it to Miller. Then Tallente and his servant go look for him at the bottom of the cliff and find no sign he was ever there. It’s all very mysterious and suspenseful, especially when a police inspector — one Tallente compares to Inspector Bucket from Bleak House multiple times — comes around and starts asking pointed questions. But Oppenheim mostly abandons that storyline pretty quickly. He’s a lot more interested in Tallente’s relationship with his neighbor Lady Jane Partington, who is attractive, worshipful, and twenty years younger than he is. That and the fake politics.

There was no one thing that infuriated me — except, okay, the bit where Tallente gets all snotty and writes Jane a nasty letter breaking off their relationship because she’s worried about what people will think if they see him leaving her house in the middle of that night. That made me kind of angry. Most of the rest of the things were just mildly irritating, like socialist Tallente’s deep dislike for trade unions, the way the women exist in service to the men, Tallente’s massive understatement in saying that his dislike for Miller is almost snobbish, etc. And then there’s the fact that the Tony Palliser storyline — and, for that matter, the entire book, is resolved by Tallente visiting Jane after not communicating with her for weeks, and saying something along the lines of, “Hey, the political storyline is resolved, Stella has divorced me without any input from me whatsoever, and now she’s married to Tony Palliser, which I guess means he’s not dead.”

All the minor irritations combine to make this one of of the most frustrating books I’ve read in a long time. The setting r

Consider this your warning. I am going to give away the ending of this book. And that’s probably a bad thing, because the big twist ending is kind of the point of The Cinema Murder, and I’ve yet to decide out whether there’s any other reason to read it. I actually did guess the surprise ending pretty early on, but I ignored my instincts and trusted E. Phillips Oppenheim to do it right, as he has done on other occasions.

That was a mistake.

In retrospect, of course, I realize I was meant to sympathize with impoverished art teacher Philip Romilly. And when he showed up to visit his girlfriend, Beatrice, and realized that since he’d last seen her she’d become his cousin Douglas’ mistress, I did. It’s just that when he murdered Douglas and dumped his body in a canal, I stopped.

Conveniently, Douglas was all set to flee to the United States that very day with money embezzled from his failing shoe factory. All Philip has to do is impersonate Douglas until he gets to New York. On the boat, Philip is introduced to a famous actress, Elizabeth Dalstan. She reveals that she was passing by in a train when Philip and Douglas walked under a bridge over the canal and didn’t come out. And then they have a nice technical discussion about writing plays. She doesn’t seem to have a problem with the murder thing at all.

That was when things started to get weird for me. It wasn’t so much when she was all “the heroine of the play you’re writing is so courageous and strong, while not being at all masculine. I’m just like that.” It was more the way she unhesitatingly accepts a man she knows to be a murderer as her new best friend and keeps reassuring him that murdering his cousin was totally fine. That was the point at which I started wondering if Elizabeth was mentally unstable, or perhaps planning some kind of long con. There seemed to be some support in the text for the former theory, but alas, it was not to be.

Anyway, Elizabeth tells Philip to rewrite his play and promises to produce it in New York, so after arriving as Douglas Romilly, Philip disappears, dons a new identity, and gets to work with the assistance of a cranky but sympathetic stenographer named Martha Grimes (no relation to the mystery writer, obviously). She falls a little bit in love with him, of course, but he’s not any more of an ass about it than he can help.

The play is a huge success, but on the opening night Philip recieves a visit from a detective named Dane, who can prove that Philip is the Douglas Romilly who disappeared from the Waldorf the day after he arrived in New York. Why he doesn’t immediately arrest him for embezzlement or whatever, I’m not quite sure. I mean, Dane explains why, he’s just not convincing. He’s decided that the next step in his investigation is to go to England. Maybe he just wants a vacation.

Theoretically, Philip has little to worry about. He can’t be proved to be Douglas, since he’s not Douglas, and the decomposing body that was pulled out of the canal was identified as Philip himself. Still, he’s increasingly worried, and really I have no objection to Philip becoming a nervous wreck.

Things are complicated further when a midwestern millionaire named Sylvanus Power returns from along sojourn in China. He and Elizabeth have a history: during an earlier, less successful portion of her career, he built a theater and promised her that she could act in it if she would became his mistress. She agreed, but Power left for China almost immediately and she never had to follow through. Now he’s back, and really not happy to find that she and Philip are

There have been a lot of articles and blog posts floating around lately about what to read if you’re into Downton Abbey. One in particular, which talked about Elizabeth von Arnim apropos of one character giving a copy of Elizabeth and Her German Garden to another, made Evangeline at Edwardian Promenade say, “hey, what about Elinor Glyn?” Which, obviously, is the correct response to everything. And then I read it, and thought, “yeah, Elizabeth and her German Garden was popular when it came out in 1898, but would people really be trying to get each other to read a fifteen rear-old(ish) novel by a German author during World War I?” And then we decided that we could probably come up with an excellent list of Edwardian and World War I-era fiction that tied in the Downton Abbey. And so we did.

It’s a pretty casual list, mostly composed of things we came up with off the tops of out heads, a bit of research on Evangeline’s part and a bit of flipping through advertisements on mine, so we’re making no claims to be exhaustive. If you have suggestions for additions to the list, leave a comment.