Word: oppenheimers
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...large doses: The Complete Dashiell Hammett (Knopf; $2.50), five full-length novels beginning with The Thin Man, proving pretty conclusively that the worst of Hammett is several parasangs ahead of his closest runners-up in the tough school; Three Famous Spy Novels (Random; $1.98), showing how dated E. P. Oppenheim's The Great Impersonation seems in the company of Eric Ambler's streamlined Journey into Fear and the sinister subtleties of Graham Greene's The Confidential Agent...
...Author Oppenheim was born to write romans d'intrigue, and born at exactly the right time. He wrote for the Europe which was preparing feverishly for World War I. His brand of literary Scotch & soda was as welcome in British clubs as U.S. club cars. "Opp" loved his age and his age loved "Opp." It also paid him well...
...royalties, Author Oppenheim oscillated between tennis courts, cricket fields and gaming tables, or drifted from Paris hotels to Manhattan hotels, from London to the Isle of Guernsey or the British West Indies, usually fetching up at Monte Carlo or Cannes. There he hobnobbed with other well-heeled amiable drifters such as Edgar Wallace, Somerset Maugham, Sax (Fu Manchu) Rohmer, P. G. Wodehouse, the King & Queen of Siam, the King of Sweden, Lord Rothermere ("although it was before the days of his peerage"), the "inevitable" Berry Wall, Tennis Player Suzanne Lenglen, "whom I boldly declare to have possessed, in her delightfully...
...Author Oppenheim was born at the right time, he made the same mistake as his age-he did not die at the right time. Shortly before Neville Chamberlain began commuting to Germany, Oppenheim and his wife bought the Domaine of Notre Dame, a small, hill-hugging, seaward-looking piece of Provence which they had long loved and where they expected to end their days. They were growing old. Then something happened which would never happen in a well-contrived Oppenheim novel-the Nazis swarmed into northern France. The refugees swarmed into southern France. It was like a badly directed...
...Oppenheim's free life. But it makes a memorable last section to his book. The Oppenheims had a chance to leave France on the overcrowded, death-ridden ship Somerset Maugham described in his Strictly Personal. They left via Spain. The crawling trains were crammed with human misery. Everything whereby Oppenheim had lived -his money, his reputation, his dignity-had lost its value. What happened to the old couple was quite unimportant. Their self-concern in the midst of a collapsing world is grotesque. But this sense of futile nullity in the face of crushing impersonal forces gives to Oppenheim...