The Adventures of Mr. Joseph P. Gray

E. Phillips Oppenheim

Joseph P. Cray is an American manufacturer who has just completed a year serving coffee to the troops in France during World War 1. He is motivated by good will, and also to escape his American second wife who is the head of a temperance organization. With sybaritic glee, he returns to London, dons civilian garb, and enjoys his first cocktail. He is soon joined by his daughter, the beautiful Lady Sara Sittingbourne, who lives in London. Together the two seek adventure in the form of crimes foiled, jewels recovered, spies uncovered, and plots smashed. Edward Phillips Oppenheim was an English novelist, in his lifetime a major and successful writer of genre fiction including thrillers.

The Amazing Judgment

E. Phillips Oppenheim

This is a very early novel by E. Phillips Oppenheim from 1897. The wealthy and bored Lord Hildyard, Marquis of Esholt, is on a yachting tour with a group of friends, including his kept lover, Pauline Owston. When Hildyard spies an apparently uninhabited island, he slips off the ship in search of adventure. In the middle of the night, he hears wonderful violin music and finds a young and beautiful girl, Bertha, playing in the forest. She is accompanied by a cruel and misshapen dwarf. Enchanted, Hildyard stays on the island, where he finds an old college chum, Stanley Owston, the estranged husband of the actress, who is the guardian of the girl, and the owner of the island. The adventures are continuing...

The Amazing Partnership

E. Phillips Oppenheim

E. Phillips Oppenheim wrote most famously of secret agents and duplicitous diplomats, secret treaties and international conspiracies, moonlit Riviera casinos, Swiss hotel suites, perilous yacht trips, and glamorous trans-European express trains. Known in his time as the Prince of Storytellers, Oppenheim, like the brand names of todays best seller lists, offered readers in the first half of the 20th century a steady, predictable, and entertaining supply of pop fiction. The Amazing Partnership is one of E. Phillips Oppenheims most intriguing stories. This story deals with a young man and a young woman who make an informal partnership in criminal investigation.

The Avenger

E. Phillips Oppenheim

Yet another collection of linked short stories from Oppenheim. By chance a young man and woman meet and set up an agency to aid Scotland Yard, but is romance in the air? This story deals with a young man and a young woman who make an informal partnership in criminal investigation. This whodunit murder mysteries collection brings to you some of Oppenheims finest murder mysteries to keep you at your toes: The Evil Shepherd Murder at Monte Carlo, or Wolves Amongst the Honey, The Glenlitten Murder and others. Phillips Oppenheim was an internationally renowned author of mystery and espionage thrillers. His novels and short stories have all the elements of blood-racing adventure and intrigue and are precursors of modern-day spy fictions.

The Battle of Basinghall Street

E. Phillips Oppenheim

The story of a young man, Lord Sandbrook, who takes revenge against the directors of a company he holds responsible for the deaths of his father and mother. The battlefield is Basinghall Street, where the offices of Woolito, Limited, are situated. A textile business is the center of strange machinations suicides, failures, conflagrations, disaster to various directors, finally a raid on the stock, and the president is a ruined man. In this story Mr. Oppenheim takes a vacation from international intrigue in a Monte Carlo setting and devotes himself to describing a big business battle in London. The story is told with the usual Oppenheim flourish, a great deal of action, many details of personality and adventures.

The Betrayal

E. Phillips Oppenheim

Guy Ducaine is a recent graduate of Oxford University. Through a series of unfortunate events he is penniless and starving in the rural town of Brasters. Seeking to make a few shillings, he schedules a lecture on local history. On the same time, Lord Rowchester invites the officer and explorer Colonel Mostyn Ray to the village to speak. Ducaines lecture fails and he returns to his small house and collapses from hunger. Found there by Ray, and Rowchesters lovely daughter, Lady Angela, they revive him and set in motion a complicated, entertaining, and devious plot. With many twists and turns Ducaine eventually works as secretary to a War Preparations Committee which is chronically leaking plans to the enemy and saves the nation!

The Bird of Paradise

E. Phillips Oppenheim

Mr. Hamer Wildburn, a young American, graduate of Harvard is wintering on the Mediterranean coast of France in his newly purchased yacht The Bird of Paradise, and is puzzled by the desire he finds in visitors coming aboard at different times to buy the vessel from him. One night he is awoken at 3 am by the cries of a beautiful, and wearing priceless emeralds, woman swimming alongside. She comes aboard and offers to buy the yacht for twice what he paid. The next day, the foreign minister of France also makes an offer to buy the yacht at an outrageous price. Soon a known terrorist develops a bomb to utterly destroy the boat and all its inhabitants. And so on, and with the material of conspiracies, French politics, love and adventure the story is woven around the yacht.

The Black Box

E. Phillips Oppenheim

The Black Box is a series of loosely connected short stories detailing the adventures of Sanford Quest, worlds greatest criminologist. The story starts off in New York City, travels to England, Egypt, and around the world to San Francisco, then into the wild west of New Mexico. There are two main plot lines which merge into one along with romance mixed in with the ever present danger. Melodramatic, episodic, supernatural. Its all great fun and Oppenheim keeps the action moving along swiftly, as he always did. Wonderful entertainment and highly entertaining. If you havent discovered the joys of Oppenheims mysteries there is a good place to start. Highly recommended!