by Colin Watson
If he was right, it is odd that one of the ugliest interludes of the early 1920s, the punitive activity of the ‘Black-and-Tans’ in Ireland, largely involved men of a type that could have come straight from the pages of a Raffles or Bulldog Drummond novel. Even more odd that American Prohibition – as fully-blown an instance of hypocrisy as anyone could have desired – engendered between 1919 and 1933 the crimes of which No Orchids for Miss Blandish was a pale reflection.
CHAPTER 4
De rigueur at Monte
My name is Carmela Rosselli. I am English, of Italian extraction, five and twenty years of age, and for many years – yes, I confess it freely – I have been utterly world-weary. I am an only child. My mother, one of the Yorkshire Burnetts, married Romolo Annibale, Marchese Rosselli, an impecunious member of the Florentine aristocracy …
Such an introduction was enough to tell the reader that he – or, more probably, she – had entered the world of William Le Queux. An impression of what that world was like may be gained from a paraphrase of The Gamblers, the typical Le Queux novel of which the above is the opening.
Carmela lives ‘in Kensington society’ with her guardian, Ulrica Yorke, a woman a few years older than herself. One autumn afternoon, Ulrica suddenly declares: ‘Carmela, I am ruined morally and physically; I feel that I want a complete change’, and proposes that they go to Monte Carlo. They stop off in Paris on the way and see the sights of the City. ‘Need I describe them? I think not. Those who read these lines probably know them all.’ Although both women are wealthy, they stay in a cheap pension long enough to save money for the Casino tables and to amuse themselves with the spectacle of ‘the most extraordinary collection of tabbies, some I regret to say, are actually our own compatriots’.
At the gaming tables, Carmela and her guardian meet two men of London acquaintance. One of these men, Reginald Thorne, wins heavily at roulette; later, the two women find his murdered body in their hotel room. The second man, Gerald Keppel, is the son of a South African millionaire, whose splendid steam yacht has just arrived on the Riviera. Carmela, incidentally, has seen in Monte Carlo her former love, Ernest (‘I loved Ernest with a wild, passionate love, and all others were now, and would ever be, as naught to me.’).
As soon as their yachting gowns arrive from the dressmaker’s, Carmela and Ulrica join the party which is to accompany Gerald Keppel and his father on a cruise. The ship sails out of Villefranche harbour. At sea, Carmela, unable to sleep one night, overhears a plot to blow up the yacht in order to conceal the death of a woman. Old Keppel seems implicated. All go ashore at Leghorn, where Carmela is accosted by a mysterious stranger, a dwarfish old man named Branca. She is persuaded to tell him what she has heard on her host’s yacht; then, convinced that the ship is doomed, she takes a train for Paris. In the same compartment as Carmela is the woman supposedly intended for death at sea. She is later to prove to be the mother of Reginald Thorne. Old Keppel also is on the train. And – yes – Ernest Cameron, the man Carmela loves.
In Paris, there is much further eavesdropping, spying and following. Ernest is now bearded. He writes a code message on a café table top. Along comes a tow-headed woman whom Carmela believes to be her supplanter in Ernest’s affections. The woman reads the message and then makes a rendezvous with the mysterious stranger from Leghorn, Branca. The scene changes to a secret gaming house in Paris. Carmela confronts Ernest. Ernest confronts the tow-headed woman, Julie by name, and accuses her of having killed Reginald Thorne. Julie demands to be allowed to pass, but Ernest raises a small whistle to his lips. Agents de police close in. Julie blames her Corsican accomplice – none other than Branca – for Reginald’s murder. She shows them a thimble fitted with a hollow spike and explains: ‘Within … is a small chamber filled with a most subtle and deadly poison, extracted from a small lizard peculiar to the Bambara country on the banks of the Upper Niger.’
The Corsican springs at her ‘with all the fury of a wild beast’ but then draws back ‘uttering terrible imprecations’. Five minutes later, he has ‘breathed his last in frightful agony, his ignominious career ended by his own diabolical invention’.
Need I relate how, on the following morning, Ernest sought me and begged me to forgive? Or how, with tears of joy, I allowed him to hold me once more in his manly arms, as of old, and shower fervent kisses upon my face? No … At Kensington Church, amid great éclat, within a month of our arrival back in town, my happiness broke into full flower … We have not visited Nice since. We prefer Cairo for the winter, with a trip up to Luxor and Assouan.
The sort of fulfilment presented in The Gamblers, as in so many other books by William Le Queux, was calculated to satisfy a much more modest appetite than his air of familiarity with riches might suggest. It was not, of course, for the Carmelas and Keppels that he was writing, but for those left behind in Kensington and places like it. A shrewd touch was the completion of the heroine’s full circle. By bringing her back home after her adventures the author accomplished several useful things. He confirmed the simple parochial patriotism of the great majority of his readers. He made easier their feeling of being involved in a romantic climax, of sharing that ‘great éclat’. And, thanks to the choice of a London district that happened to be a department store Mecca, he flattered not only its own considerable middle-class population but a host of suburban and provincial shoppers.
Flattery is distributed as generously throughout the pages of Le Queux as jewels in one of his gaming salons. ‘Reader, you probably know the panorama of the Riviera …’ Actually not; but the gracious implication is appreciated. ‘White serge is, as you know, always de rigueur at Monte in winter …’ But of course. And then, those sights of Paris. ‘Need I describe them?’ asks Le Queux, in airy tribute to the lady in the lending library who once almost went on a day trip to Boulogne. ‘I think not.’
The technique, selectively examined, looks much more crude now than it would have appeared to even a fairly sophisticated reader in the years after the Armistice. There was about the escapist literature of that time an air of brash confidence in the reader’s capacity to be impressed. The rigidity of class and economic barriers, the undeveloped state of cinema and wireless, the paucity and narrowness of curriculum in most schools, the lack of opportunity to travel – these were but some of the factors that made for naïve receptiveness. The gossip-writing Marquess of Donegal estimated in 1933 that those he termed ‘the wandering élite’ who could afford regular holidays abroad numbered only some ten thousand people. Whether or not his figure was accurate, there certainly was reserved for anyone who crossed the English Channel on pleasure special envy and respect. The Riviera was the supreme symbol of exotic self-indulgence. It was invariably ‘the playground of the rich’ in the obedient minds of newspaper sub-editors, and the public came to associate that short stretch of Mediterranean shore with all the romantic – and sinful – possibilities of wealth.
Opportunist novelists were not slow in appointing themselves guides to the flesh-pots of Cannes and Nice and to Monte Carlo’s gaming rooms. That most of them belonged to the ‘picture if you will, dear reader’ school of authorship was due to a grounding in Victorian literary convention (Le Queux had been born as early as 1864, Phillips Oppenheim in 1866) but it must not be supposed that gush and pomposity were yet unacceptable. They in fact were peculiarly well suited to the telling of the sort of stories that created and elaborated the great Riviera fantasy.
Here is Le Queux, showing his English housewives the company that awaits their taking wing from Balham and from Bolton:
Publisher. “I LIKE YOUR STORY, BUT I WISH YOU’D GIVE IT A DIFFERENT SETTING; YOU KNOW—SOCIETY, THE RITZ, DEAUVILLE, ASCOT AND ALL THAT SORT OF THING.”
Conscientious Literary Aspirant. “BUT I M AFRAID I HAVEN’T ANY ACTUAL EXPERIENCE OF THESE THINGS.”
Publisher. “OH, NEVER MIND ABOUT THAT. THE PEOPLE WHO’LL READ YOUR STORY HAVEN’T EITHER.”
The two bejewelled worlds, the monde and the demimon
de, ate, drank and chattered in that restaurant of wide renown. The company was cosmopolitan, the conversation polyglot, the dishes marvellous. At the table next us there sat the Grand-Duke Michael of Russia, with the Countess Torbay, and beyond a British earl with a couple of smart military men …
A precisely similar picture was being painted by a dozen writers of the period. A few were detective novelists, but in their case the choice of a Riviera setting was made only occasionally as a change from Mayfair and country manors. One feels in reading these particular whodunnits that uncertainty about French police procedure tended to detract from an author’s enjoyment of murder among the best people. More often, the crimes depicted were robbery, fraud or blackmail. Jewels figured in preference to cash, with emeralds top favourites. When mere money was involved, the victim was generally an American. This would seem to reflect current English antipathy towards a nation that was suspected of having made late entry into the war for motives disgracefully unrelated to the welfare of the British Empire. Americans also were concerned in a good many stories with fraud as their theme. They nearly always lost their dollars to impeccably attired tricksters of high pedigree, and again the reader often was left to draw the inference that breeding, even when evinced by criminals, will prevail against upstart prosperity.
As for the third story-line, blackmail, a curious feature of its employment in the Riviera literature is the coy imprecision with which authors referred to whatever the victims were supposed to have done. Sometimes the mention of nothing more specific than ‘a bundle of letters’ was deemed sufficient. ‘The affairs of a certain company’, ‘a moment of indiscretion’, ‘a regrettable association, long forgotten’ – in such terms were defined the lapses whose discovery had thrust men and women of wealth and distinction into the power of extortionists. There is a reminder here, incidentally, of the obliqueness of reference in many of Conan Doyle’s stories to aristocratic transgression, which Sherlock Holmes was almost invariably ready to conceal in the interest of avoiding scandal.
Why were the sensation novelists of that time so neglectful of what would commend itself to their successors as good copy? The answer is that they did not neglect their opportunity: they scorned it, and not entirely for altruistic reasons, either. It is true that these writers – or the successful ones, anyway – had profound respect for the socially eminent and took care to be on as good terms with them as they could afford. A. E. W. Mason, for example, had a yacht of his own and used to go shooting with no less illustrious a marksman than King George V. But they also recognized that their public, the loyalist and substantially puritan-minded dreamers of the lending libraries, would not be amused by revelations of the true nature of Le Queux’s ‘bejewelled worlds’. If the Scott Fitzgeralds, Cyril Connollys and Michael Arlens wished to be clever about Riviera society, that was their business. The rich and consistent rewards awaited the pedlars of illusion: theirs not to soil the image of a lotus land where wealthy men and exquisite women enjoyed eternally the ministrations of omniscient maîtres d’hôtel and suave croupiers.
No one learned this lesson to greater advantage than did Edward Phillips Oppenheim, the son of a Leicester leather merchant, who first tasted the delights of the Côte d’Azur when he was travelling in France on behalf of his father’s firm. Oppenheim was what is sometimes called a ‘born’ writer, although ‘compulsive’ would describe him more accurately. His output in the long life that ended in 1946 was enormous. By the time he was forty he had written thirty novels and was already earning more than two thousand pounds a year in royalties when he decided to dispose of his inherited leather business and become a full-time author on the coast that had always attracted him. In the second half of his life, he produced four times as many books as in the first, making a total of 150 novels. Into these and countless short stories and articles he poured some thirteen million words.
Crime was an important but not the dominating ingredient of an Oppenheim story. His preoccupation always was the elegance and luxury of high life. Nothing but the best, the formula that won him the devotion of a huge public on both sides of the Atlantic, dictated that even a criminal had to be of Almanach de Gotha standard. Thus it was to the International Arch-criminal mythology that Oppenheim tended to contribute. His biographer, Robert Standish, in The Prince of Storytellers (1957), has suggested that Oppenheim consciously reinforced the average man’s idea that ‘the smooth-looking parties wafted to and from the best restaurants by limousine were not, as generally believed, members of the House of Lords, but the aristocrats of crime observed during their leisure hours. There they were, diamonds in their shirtfronts, puffing away at big cigars, the women draped in sables, the living proof that despite all the moralists said, crime did pay.’
Edgar Wallace and others also echoed this impression and profited from the public’s eagerness to read about the exploits of super-crooks who were scarcely ever out of evening dress as they rubbed shoulders with royalty and planned multi-million-franc coups. But Oppenheim had a special genius for understanding the fascination money exerted upon people who had just enough of it to be able to visualize (as the really poor could not) the possibilities which unlimited supplies could achieve. As Robert Standish pointed out, Oppenheim evolved a fiction in which money was ‘as potent as deathrays, guns that shoot round corners, clairvoyance and coincidences’. Money, as employed for Oppenheim’s literary purposes, created its own unique climate and a new set of standards. ‘To people who suffered rudeness and tyranny from shabby little shopkeepers, it was a glimpse into a promised land to read of a tycoon who, because he did not like the way the chef at the Magnifico prepared his sole Walewska, bought the hotel and fired the chef.’
Selling glimpses of promised lands to others was such a remunerative business that Phillips Oppenheim never had any difficulty in paying for the upkeep of the material paradise he had gained for himself. He lived in a villa big enough for the entertainment of more than 250 guests at a time; his mammoth parties were famous throughout the region. Wherever he travelled, he insisted upon the most splendid accommodation and the sort of service normally reserved for potentates. No less Pasha-like was the status he enjoyed at home. He was attended every morning by a valet, a masseur, a secretary ready to pour out his coffee and slice his toast into convenient fingers, a manicurist and a chauffeur. His American wife, with whom he remained on more or less amiable terms for more than fifty years despite his countless infidelities, seems to have tempered the absolutism of her husband’s domestic monarchy with tolerance and good sense. Her presence, at board, if not in bed, also must have given his reputation some protection from scandal – a service no less necessary to a bestselling author than that of his accountant. In gratitude, perhaps, for Mrs Oppenheim’s patience he kept most of his sexual adventuring offshore. Not for nothing was the Oppenheim yacht known on the Côte d’Azur as ‘the floating double-bed’. He even took the trouble of going all the way to a chemist in London whenever his stock of contraceptives needed to be renewed. Whether he was prompted to do so by tact or by residual patriotism one does not know, but there always exists the intriguing possibility that his prophylactics, like the hand-made cigarettes favoured by the characters in his novels, were personally monogrammed.
There was, inevitably, a difference between the author pictured by the readers of his diamond-studded fantasies and the real self-disciplined businessman whose industry was such that it could earn him £5,800 in just over six weeks in 1925. Ethel Mannin, coming across him some years later in Ciro’s Restaurant, found that he was completely unlike her own conception of a thriller writer. ‘Fat and jolly, he looks more as though he would write nice clean fun for The Boy’s Own Paper’.
Other views of the Riviera existed, too, than that which the Oppenheim novels presented year after year. Sydney Horler, tempted by legend to go and see it for himself in 1934, reported back in disgust that it resembled ‘a cocotte awakening each winter with a stifled yawn to dab some more powder on her face because sh
e expected a rich admirer’. He declared the area to be plagued with lung and throat diseases and susceptible to typhoid outbreaks occasioned by contamination of the public water supply. Its sunshine was frequently countered by treacherous icy winds blowing down from the Maritime Alps. Sanitation was bad and most of the streets neglected. Bathing was ruled out by reason of ‘Gallic lack of hygienic sense’. After such unfortunate if brief experience of what he dubbed henceforth ‘the most overrated locality in the world’ Horler watched from his London-bound train the rising of mist from English meadows. ‘I could have cried with joy.’
To say it was lucky for Phillips Oppenheim and his fellow miners in the rich seam of High Life fiction that very few indeed among the reading public could afford fact-finding trips to the Mediterranean is to misunderstand the issue. Certainly, the great majority had to be content with luxury by proxy and romance at one remove. But were not these, rather than the real articles, what they truly desired? To identify oneself with a character who rounds off the winning of a few thousand at baccarat with an exquisite supper and still has time to unmask a murderer or penetrate the disguise of a countess – that is one thing. It is quite another to see hard-earned money whisked away by dispassionate foreigners wearing intimidatingly smart suits; then to grapple with an incomprehensible menu, odd food and a terrifying bill; and to wind up by being discovered by a chambermaid in the act of mistaking the bidet for a drinking fountain.
It did not matter that travellers as jaundiced as Horler despised, or affected to despise, the pretensions of the Côte d’Azur (or Zone Septique, as some dubbed it); nor that intelligent and perceptive observers were aware that nowhere else on earth was there to be found a comparable community of spongers, frauds and phonies. The myth existed in splendid isolation from the facts, and it was sustained throughout the 1920s and 1930s by the determination of the readers of Oppenheim and his like to have a place in their imagination where they could dress up as millionaires and play at being respected, knowledgeable and powerful.
