The Great Impersonation
E. Phillips Oppenheim
With an Introduction
by Tim Crook
Poisoned Pen Press
Copyright
Originally published in London in 1920 by Hodder & Stoughton
© 2014 The Oppenheim–John Downes Memorial Trust
Introduction copyright © 2014 Tim Crook
Published by Poisoned Pen Press in association with the British Library
First E-book Edition 2016
ISBN: 9781464206566 ebook
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
The historical characters and events portrayed in this book are inventions of the author or used fictitiously.
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Contents
The Great Impersonation
Copyright
Contents
Introduction
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV
Chapter XXV
Chapter XXVI
Chapter XXVII
Chapter XXVIII
Chapter XXIX
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Introduction
Edward Phillips Oppenheim was rightly crowned ‘the Prince of Storytellers’, which was also the title of his 1957 biography by Robert Standish. ‘Oppy’ or ‘Mr Op’, as he was known to his friends, is among the most significant writers of popular English fiction of the late nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth centuries. Superlatives abound. Will Cuppy in 1934 said ‘When in doubt, grab an Oppenheim’. Barrie Hayne in 1985 said that Oppenheim’s output of well over 150 novels and collections of short stories was the product of ‘one of the most fertile imaginations ever to apply itself to the thriller’.
Born in London in 1866, Oppenheim had to leave grammar school in Leicester early to work in his father’s leather business. For twenty years he carried on the merchant trade by day and wrote by night. In 1905, his book sales made him so wealthy he could sell the family firm and move to live the life of a country squire in Norfolk. He soon migrated to the French Riviera, where he mixed with the global super-rich from whom he drew inspiration for characterization and plots.
Oppenheim was interviewed for the Secret Intelligence Service in 1914. He was not fluent enough in German or French and was turned down. He took solace in the knowledge that the person taken on instead of him disappeared in his first mission in enemy territory. He volunteered his services to waging war through propaganda, but despaired of intoning patriotic bombast at recruitment rallies. He was happier escorting journalists to the Western Front. By being spared the exhaustion and peril of real espionage, he was able to write the fictional version.
Oppenheim lived a sultanic existence on the Côte d’Azur through the 1920s and 30s. As Standish wrote, ‘he loved soft living and basked in the smiles of suave maîtres d’hôtels’. He loved too ‘the excitement of roulette, the popping of champagne corks and the rustle of scented petticoats’. Happily married to Elsie from 1892 until his death in Guernsey in 1946, he discreetly carried on affairs with the indigent countesses and princesses also enjoying life in Cagnes Sur Mer, Nice and Monte Carlo, usually on Mediterranean cruises in his huge yacht Echo.
The fall of France in 1940 and his failure to take the last British ship to leave the Riviera meant that the seventy-four-year-old Prince of Storytellers and his wife could have been interned by the Nazis. Reports in the British press feared for their safety, particularly when it emerged that his daughter and son-in-law had fled on the last boat to leave Saint Malo on 6 June, crammed with 1500 refugees in a terrible voyage. Oppy and Elsie were fortunate to find a way home via Spain and Portugal before German military occupation of the Vichy Zone in 1942.
Oppenheim’s storytelling had a huge impact on the cultural imagination. Few writers have been as rich and successful. He was a global literary superstar and even made the cover of Time magazine on 12 September 1927. Between 1930 and 1937 he received well over $500,000 in royalties from book sales and serialization rights in America. More than thirty of his books were made into films. His fame owed much to the insatiable demand for popular fiction fuelled by an exponential growth in literacy, leisure-time reading, and distribution of cheap editions and private lending library copies at railway station kiosks and high street retailers. The episodic serialization of his novels was also a mainstay of popular newspapers. Oppenheim first broke into this market in the late 1880s with publications in the London Pictorial World, Whitehall Review and the British regional paper the Sheffield Weekly Independent.
In time he became the metaphor by which professional spies would define their trade. The British Security Service’s director of counter-espionage during the Second World War, Guy Liddell, wrote in his diary in 1939 that a plot to use newspaper and radio bulletins to make contact with Nazi dissidents ‘all sounds rather Phillips Oppenheim, but there may perhaps be something in it’.
Only Edgar Wallace and Somerset Maugham rivalled him in popularity and earnings. Standish described Oppenheim’s novels as an ‘unending battle between the hedonist and the Puritan, the playboy libertine and the hard-headed man of affairs’. The romance was always intense and passionate, but unlike Ian Fleming’s James Bond books, bedroom scenes were not explicit. Hayne observes that an Oppy novel addressed, perhaps by exaggerating, the anxieties of his times: ‘Typically there are killings, often by villains of exotic race; the hero is often outwardly one who lives idly for pleasure, but is in fact working to save his country; there is usually a love interest; and Oppenheim has as much sense as Alfred Hitchcock of how terror may impinge upon the commonplace.’
It is somewhat fashionable in academic and espionage circles to dismiss his achievements and importance. That would be a mistake. The Great Impersonation—published in Britain by Hodder and Stoughton and in the USA by Little, Brown in 1920—sold millions of copies. It was made into three films and as recently as 1985 was dramatized as a classic radio serial by the BBC. Its republication in the year commemorating the beginning of the Great War is highly resonant. For as the Times Literary Supplement observed on its publication, ‘The Kaiser, a noisy spectre, an intrusive spy, an earnest Duke, an amorous Hungarian Princess all help to make the running hot up to the final dénouement, which, as may be expected, takes place on or about August 4, 1914.’
The Scotsman’s reviewer in 1921 said that the author had scored again with high-quality light entertainment and lively incident. The novel became a classic in popular spy fiction. In 1984 David Lehman would say in New
sweek that it was Oppenheim’s best thriller and ‘escapism on a grand scale’. In 2009 the Guardian included it in its list of 1000 novels everyone must read.
One clue to the novel’s extraordinary appeal can be located in the way Oppenheim was able to combine the high-octane blend of spy thriller genre with a growing sense of Britain’s military and diplomatic fragility and imperialist anxiety. He delivered fantastic entertainment marked with the angst of a world power struggling to address the challenge of modernist war and catastrophic changes in moral values and technology.
The Great Impersonation was included in the famous collected edition of ‘five full-length novels of international intrigue’ marketed as The Secret Service Omnibus (Hodder and Stoughton, 1932). Alongside Miss Brown of X.Y.O., The Wrath To Come, Matorni’s Vineyard, and Gabriel Samara, The Great Impersonation cemented Oppenheim as the pre-eminent spy thriller writer of his time.
He begins the novel with English aristocrat Sir Everard Dominey being rescued by the Baron von Ragastein in German East Africa. They had studied together in Oxford. They have a remarkable resemblance. Dominey has fled England under suspicion of murder. Ragastein is to be deployed by the German Secret Service to infiltrate London. Ragastein contrives to have his look-alike drink himself to death in the African bush while he steals his identity and inveigles himself into the British establishment pretending to be Sir Everard. The artifice of coincidences, double identities and masked intrigue is Shakespearean in parts.
Oppenheim would rarely pre-plan and structure his novels. He would dictate to secretaries and not rewrite. Yet The Great Impersonation is sophisticated prose crafted with an interest in the exquisite dramatic interplay of multiple ironies. Its flawed protagonists are morally ambiguous and toy with the reader’s sympathy and disapproval.
Hayne says that the device of introducing ‘a Trojan horse into the very citadel of the British ruling class’ makes The Great Impersonation ‘one of the few novels of Oppenheim’s which depends upon surprise, and the secret is well kept to the end’.
William A. S. Sarjeant accorded this remarkable author a decent epitaph in his Oxford National Dictionary entry as being somebody who created ‘an escape for readers from their own drab lives into a dream world of adventure, wealth, and luxury’. ‘Mr Op’ and The Great Impersonation more than merit rediscovery and a greater degree of literary and cultural appreciation.
Professor Tim Crook
Goldsmiths, University of London,
and Birmingham City University.
Chapter I
The trouble from which great events were to come began when Everard Dominey, who had been fighting his way through the scrub for the last three quarters of an hour towards those thin, spiral wisps of smoke, urged his pony to a last despairing effort and came crashing through the great oleander shrub to pitch forward on his head in the little clearing. It developed the next morning, when he found himself for the first time for many months on a truckle bed, between linen sheets, with a cool, bamboo-twisted roof between him and the relentless sun. He raised himself a little in the bed.
“Where the mischief am I?” he demanded.
A black boy, seated cross-legged in the entrance of the banda, rose to his feet, mumbled something and disappeared. In a few moments the tall, slim figure of a European, in spotless white riding clothes, stooped down and came over to Dominey’s side.
“You are better?” he enquired politely.
“Yes, I am,” was the somewhat brusque rejoinder. “Where the mischief am I, and who are you?”
The newcomer’s manner stiffened. He was a person of dignified carriage, and his tone conveyed some measure of rebuke.
“You are within half a mile of the Iriwarri River, if you know where that is,” he replied,—“about seventy-two miles southeast of the Darawaga Settlement.”
“The devil! Then I am in German East Africa?”
“Without a doubt.”
“And you are German?”
“I have that honour.”
Dominey whistled softly.
“Awfully sorry to have intruded,” he said. “I left Marlinstein two and a half months ago, with twenty boys and plenty of stores. We were doing a big trek after lions. I took some new Askaris in and they made trouble,—looted the stores one night and there was the devil to pay. I was obliged to shoot one or two, and the rest deserted. They took my compass, damn them, and I’m nearly a hundred miles out of my bearings. You couldn’t give me a drink, could you?”
“With pleasure, if the doctor approves,” was the courteous answer. “Here, Jan!”
The boy sprang up, listened to a word or two of brief command in his own language, and disappeared through the hanging grass which led into another hut. The two men exchanged glances of rather more than ordinary interest. Then Dominey laughed.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “It gave me quite a start when you came in. We’re devilishly alike, aren’t we?”
“There is a very strong likeness between us,” the other admitted.
Dominey leaned his head upon his hand and studied his host. The likeness was clear enough, although the advantage was all in favour of the man who stood by the side of the camp bedstead with folded arms. Everard Dominey, for the first twenty-six years of his life, had lived as an ordinary young Englishman of his position,—Eton, Oxford, a few years in the Army, a few years about town, during which he had succeeded in making a still more hopeless muddle of his already encumbered estates: a few months of tragedy, and then a blank. Afterwards ten years—at first in the cities, then in the dark places of Africa—years of which no man knew anything. The Everard Dominey of ten years ago had been, without a doubt, good-looking. The finely shaped features remained, but the eyes had lost their lustre, his figure its elasticity, his mouth its firmness. He had the look of a man run prematurely to seed, wasted by fevers and dissipation. Not so his present companion. His features were as finely shaped, cast in an even stronger though similar mould. His eyes were bright and full of fire, his mouth and chin firm, bespeaking a man of deeds, his tall figure lithe and supple. He had the air of being in perfect health, in perfect mental and physical condition, a man who lived with dignity and some measure of content, notwithstanding the slight gravity of his expression.
“Yes,” the Englishman muttered, “there’s no doubt about the likeness, though I suppose I should look more like you than I do if I’d taken care of myself. But I haven’t. That’s the devil of it. I’ve gone the other way; tried to chuck my life away and pretty nearly succeeded, too.”
The dried grasses were thrust on one side, and the doctor entered,—a little round man, also clad in immaculate white, with yellow-gold hair and thick spectacles. His countryman pointed towards the bed.
“Will you examine our patient, Herr Doctor, and prescribe for him what is necessary? He has asked for drink. Let him have wine, or whatever is good for him. If he is well enough, he will join our evening meal. I present my excuses. I have a despatch to write.”
The man on the couch turned his head and watched the departing figure with a shade of envy in his eyes.
“What is my preserver’s name?” he asked the doctor.
The latter looked as though the question were irreverent.
“It is His Excellency the Major-General Baron Leopold von Ragastein.”
“All that!” Dominey muttered. “Is he the Governor, or something of that sort?”
“He is Military Commandant of the Colony,” the doctor replied. “He has also a special mission here.”
“Damned fine-looking fellow for a German,” Dominey remarked, with unthinking insolence.
The doctor was unmoved. He was feeling his patient’s pulse. He concluded his examination a few minutes later.
“You have drunk much whisky lately, so?” he asked.
“I don’t know what the devil it’s got to do with you,” wa
s the curt reply, “but I drink whisky whenever I can get it. Who wouldn’t in this pestilential climate!”
The doctor shook his head.
“The climate is good as he is treated,” he declared. “His Excellency drinks nothing but light wine and seltzer water. He has been here for five years, not only here but in the swamps, and he has not been ill one day.”
“Well, I have been at death’s door a dozen times,” the Englishman rejoined a little recklessly, “and I don’t much mind when I hand in my checks, but until that time comes I shall drink whisky whenever I can get it.”
“The cook is preparing you some luncheon,” the doctor announced, “which it will do you good to eat. I cannot give you whisky at this moment, but you can have some hock and seltzer with bay leaves.”
“Send it along,” was the enthusiastic reply. “What a constitution I must have, doctor! The smell of that cooking outside is making me ravenous.”
“Your constitution is still sound if you would only respect it,” was the comforting assurance.
“Anything been heard of the rest of my party?” Dominey inquired.
“Some bodies of Askaris have been washed up from the river,” the doctor informed him, “and two of your ponies have been eaten by lions. You will excuse. I have the wounds of a native to dress, who was bitten last night by a jaguar.”
The traveller, left alone, lay still in the hut, and his thoughts wandered backwards. He looked out over the bare, scrubby stretch of land which had been cleared for this encampment to the mass of bush and flowering shrubs beyond, mysterious and impenetrable save for that rough elephant track along which he had travelled; to the broad-bosomed river, blue as the sky above, and to the mountains fading into mist beyond. The face of his host had carried him back into the past. Puzzled reminiscence tugged at the strings of memory. It came to him later on at dinner time, when they three, the Commandant, the doctor and himself, sat at a little table arranged just outside the hut, that they might catch the faint breeze from the mountains, herald of the swift-falling darkness. Native servants beat the air around them with bamboo fans to keep off the insects, and the air was heavy almost to noxiousness with perfume of some sickly, exotic shrub.
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