The Spy Fiction of Edward Phillips Oppenheim

The career of E. Phillips Oppenheim can seem an object lesson is how hugely popular writers can fade into utter obscurity, while relatively little-read auteurs come to enjoy an enduring fame. In his day Oppenheim was a titan of the publishing industry—enough so as to get away with immodestly dubbing himself "the prince of novelists."

Yet today he is so little known that, apart from seeing him mentioned in Moonraker (and just as quickly forgetting him that first time I read the book) I never heard of him until I started digging into the history of the thriller genre--and even after that I wound up having to work out how he fits into it for myself. Not only is it the case that one can roam the Internet for a very long time without finding a really worthwhile review of even his least obscure books, but (as David Stafford pointed out) even scholars whose business it is to know about people like him generally don't seem to have done their job here.1

That said, just how did he fit into the genre's history? Fleming's mention of him in Moonraker affords a clue. The reference occurs as Gala Brand (the one Bond girl Bond doesn't get to bed) considers the book's hero:

Well, at any rate she had put [Bond] in his place and shown him that she wasn't impressed by dashing young men from the Secret Service, however romantic they might look. There were just as goodlooking men in the Special Branch, and they were real detectives, not just people that Phillips Oppenheim had dreamed up with fast cars and special cigarettes with gold bands on them and shoulder-holsters.

Phillips Oppenheim, one of the first writers to take up the modern spy story in its formative years at the start of the twentieth century, can safely be credited with having brought to the genre the glamour with which it is associated. Rudyard Kipling's story of Kimball O'Hara's wanderings through India in the company of a Tibetan holy man has color and charm, and Erskine Childers' The Riddle of the Sands gave us our first "clubland" heroes in Carruthers and Davies . . . but neither is exactly a tale of high living. By contrast, in a book like The Double Four (1911) the international intrigue is thoroughly set within a world of Edwardian luxury--of well-staffed mansions and chauffeured motor-cars, of fine dining and nights at the opera, where it seems everyone is wealthy, titled or a celebrity, and often all three, and there is about the whole a sense of his offering the reader a glimpse of those high and seductive places virtually certain to be forever beyond their reach. Likewise, he afforded the reader a style of conflict characteristic of this kind of glamorous tale, in which hero and villain dance around each other in recurring meetings mixing murderousness and gentility (quite apparent in that novel's duel between Peter Ruff and Bernadine).

All of this, reminiscent of the sorts of adventure that had usually been set in safely distant historical periods (like Dumas' The Three Musketeers), carried through the genre tradition to Fleming's distillation of it in the '50s when he created his stories.

Striking, too, is Oppenheim's affinity for Gothic touches, on full display in what is perhaps his best known book, The Great Impersonation (1920). We get a protagonist given up for dead who has curiously and belatedly returned from the tropics, and may be someone other than whom he claims to be; we get a mansion with a mad woman in it, and haunted woods outside it. (And this, too, seems to have carried through the British spy novel tradition to a greater degree than appreciated, all the way up to Fleming's novels, which can appear surprisingly saturated with it, particularly in You Only Live Twice.)

Of course, all this sort of thing is more of interest from the standpoint of the genre's history than as an indication of his books' value as an actual reading experience--and it has to be admitted they have their limits there. It is not for nothing that the spy novels by writers like Kipling, or Joseph Conrad, or W. Somerset Maugham, have been so much more enduring. The books were conceived as shallow entertainments, and were not always well put together on that level. (The plot twists are often laughably hokey--as with the final reveal of who the protagonist is and how he came to be where he is at the end of Impersonation.)

And of course, Oppenheim's books have dated, in style and content. They are slight in their handling of the organizational and technical detail that for many is an integral part of the spy story's appeal, and those who have felt Fleming's books were disappointingly short on action (as I did when first coming to them) would find these even less impressive on that score. There is, too, the steeping of the tales in the headlines and prejudices of the day--standard to the genre, of course, but managed with differing levels of aplomb, and clumsier here than in many another tale. In The Double Four, for example, one episode's big reveal concerns what really caused the sinking of the Maine, which cannot but have a different and lesser impact on today's reader (with the event more distant and the mystery more or less cleared up), while the tales are replete with the cliche of the Edwardian version of right-wing hysteria. Time and time again we get a scheming and bestially aggressive Germany, a decadent and perhaps unreliable France, pacifists and socialists as foreign-controlled traitors poisoning the body politic with their creed, and an England saved in the end by its amateur gentleman-adventurers (material a contemporary reader is apt to find either grating or ridiculous).2

Still, if Oppenheim is trashy, he does not waste our time pretending to be anything else, and he is not without his measure of skill. His knack for atmosphere makes his evocations of high life and Gothic absurdities far more effective than they would be otherwise, while his ability to keep us turning the pages puts that of most of today's bestselling writers to shame (admittedly, a reflection of the fact that writers in his day were allowed to be brief). The result was that while I looked at his books for research reasons, I ended up enjoying them a good deal more than I had expected.

1. This was in his 1981 Victorian Studies article "Spies and Gentlemen." As far as I can tell, however, things haven't changed much since, Oppenheim (and the others to whom Stafford referred) not much more likely to get acknowledged.
2. Admittedly, this is one case where things haven't changed very much.

The End of the Action Movie?

Looking at Hollywood's run of product recently I find myself wondering if the action film genre has not seen its best years already--and is in terminal decline. I mean, of course, not movies with action, but movies that are structured around a multiplicity of elaborate set pieces which provide their principal interest.

This may sound like a very odd thing to say given their extreme predominance at the box office, greater than ever before. (Compare any list of the highest-grossing films of the past decade with that of, say, the '90s or the '80s.) But it is worth remembering that that kind of ubiquity often comes only very late in the life of an art form.

Let's trot out that same three-generation genre life cycle theory John Barnes offered up way back in his Helix article I've cited so many times just one more time. (You can find the quickie version here.)

I think it can be said that the action movie as we know it started with the Bond films of the '60s. They established the essential pacing and structure for such films (give people a bit of action even before the story gets started, make sure they get another something every few minutes, etc.), the basic range of types of set pieces (frogmen fighting it out underwater, ski chases with the bullets flying, even ninjas) and the manner in which it has since been standard to photograph and edit them (the heavy use of short takes, close shots, jump cuts, exaggerated sound effects and the rest).

Successful as the Bond films were, early imitation of them tended to focus on their most superficial features (secret agents, gadgets, never mind how all this was put together). Filmmakers were rather slower to adopt the deeper techniques. However, the field had definitely arrived by the late '70s, and was a Hollywood mainstay by the '80s--which, naturally, led to a much more intensive exploitation of its possibilities.1 In the course of this some territory was exhausted (the silly finale of Rambo III spoke volumes about this), and the genre moved on to other, more fertile soil. Over the course of the '90s the "mundane" cops and commandos and paramilitary plots that epitomized the field during that decade (Rambo, Die Hard) gave way to science fiction and fantasy characters and themes (and practical effects to computer generated imagery) not simply because of changing tastes (important as these were), but because this was the only way to provide something new, and certainly the only way to provide something bigger than what had come before--super powers, alien creatures, fantastic vehicles.

A generation on it seems plausible that we have arrived at certain, intrinsic limits. The tendency to keep scaling action movies up has already mooted the whole idea of the disaster movie, because every action movie (the typical superhero movie, for instance--Avengers, Man of Steel, Thor: The Dark World) is for all practical purposes a disaster movie by the time the final, city-wrecking showdown is underway. Meanwhile, the continued intensification of action sequences through ever-quicker editing has produced increasing incoherence. (Remember when Michael Bay movies were actually novel enough to warrant reviewers noting this?)

Three years ago I wrote that

It strikes me that this sort of action film may be approaching a technical plateau as Hollywood bombast bumps up against the limits of human nervous systems, and of filmmakers' creativity . . . that one simply cannot go bigger, faster, flashier or more intense to any effect worth achieving, while the inventiveness of the application may be running into diminishing returns.

Nothing I have seen since then has made me revise that opinion--while the level of inventiveness within this limits has waned. For all the giant budgets and all the frenetic technical activity it has been quite a few years since the last time a major action movie offered anything really new--a fact only partially concealed by the tendency to show the same old thing in 3-D and I-MAX formats so important to Hollywood profits this past decade.

I think, for example, of the major genre events of recent years. Watching Skyfall it struck me that while the film was full of competently staged, entertaining action, in contrast with not just the classics of the '60s but those predecessors announcing the series' return after a longer-than-usual absence, it failed to deliver a sure-to-be-classic set piece of the kind that befit the occasion. (Even Casino Royale had that parkour bit!)

I seem to have been virtually alone in that opinion--but this was not the case with Episode VII. This was, after all, a follow-up to two trilogies which had each revolutionized the special effects field, made with the expectation that this would launch a whole new mega-franchise for its new owners, and perhaps also be the highest-grossing film of all time. However, as John David Ebert noted in his review, the earlier "sense of visual innovation" as it stands. (Indeed, this even drove him to say nice things of the prequels--and Lucas' own, alternative ideas for Episode VII.)

Meanwhile, the prospect of innovation originating in the more narrative aspects of these stories seems dim due not just to the film industry's attachment to the same old IPs, but the rooting of action-adventure in genres which appear thoroughly played out after as much as a century of use (like the spy story or the comic book superhero genre), an issue that goes far, far beyond Hollywood. The sorts of trailblazing works that open up new territory to exploitation by artists--to put it bluntly, those works that found new genres (or even subgenres) for writers to work in--have been very scarce as of late all across the media spectrum.

1. Prior to that point what we got were apt to be crime dramas with an occasional set piece--like The French Connection (1971).

Defining the Novel: The First Few Pages of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe

Those who offer a straight answer about just "What is a Novel?"--beyond its being a "book-length" work of prose fiction--are (as previously pointed out here) apt to point to three qualities distinguishing the modern novel in the narrow sense from other kinds of long prose fiction, not totally unprecedented, but previously relatively rare, and much less likely to appear together in combination:

1. Its centering on the life of everyday, middle class persons, who had in pre-modern times received much less attention of this kind from storytellers, much more inclined to offer chivalric epics, royal tragedies and comedies of low-life.
2. What we might term a pseudo-documentary quality to the proceedings, which are supposed to appear realistically detailed in a straightforward fashion rather than conspicuously embellished and ornamented in the fashion of a romance or a picaresque.
3. An individualistic and indeed intimate approach to the tale, peering into an individual's private life, and even their innermost thoughts--which may not be limited in the manner of an occasional Shakespearian aside to the audience, but part of the "normal" way of telling the story.

You can find all these in the brief preface to Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, the first two in particular specifically referenced. As he remarks, it is "the story of . . . [a] Private Man's Adventures in the World," while "The Story is told with Modesty, with Seriousness . . . The Editor believes the thing to be a just History of Fact; neither is there any Appearance of Fiction in it." The third is implicit in these, but becomes apparent soon enough when we turn the first page and hear the protagonist relate his upbringing, his aspiration to go to sea, his dialogues with his parents about this idea--in the course of which dialogue Robinson's dad also gives him a long lecture about the great virtues of "the middle state," into which he was born, for which he seemed destined, and which his father also thought most likely to make him happy.

Of course, the tale takes a more exotic turn than Robinson's settling down to the cozy bourgeois existence his father intended for him, but these fundamentals of the story define what follows nonetheless.

Two Definitions of Science Fiction

Is science fiction flourishing, or is it dying? Some vehemently insist on the former, many insist with equal vehemence on the latter--and both in their ways right, but neither seeing it because, after all, they are parallel talking. The reason is that each is using a different definition of the genre, and accordingly a different standard for it.

The first, narrower definition of science fiction is that it is a genre which has scientific speculation--extrapolations, thought-experiments, call them what you will--as its raison d'etre, and its primary source of interest and appeal. Those who use the definition judge the quality of an individual work according to the originality and rigor with which it performs this task, and the health and fecundity of the genre by the extent to which its output is made up of stories working in this manner. Put another way, from their standpoint science fiction is above all idea fiction, and it is on the strength of its ideas that a story, and the genre, lives or dies. (One may speak of this as the standard implicitly adopted by John Campbell in his tenure as editor of Astounding.)

The second, broader definition is that it is literature which just so happens to utilize elements of the fantastic, perhaps with not much fuss made over whether those elements are extrapolations from science of even a superficial kind, or a utilization of elements out of ancient mythology or latter-day superstition. Setting far less store by originality and rigor, or even the use of science of any kind, this makes more conventionally literary assessments of the quality of science fiction the standard. (Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas explicitly adopted this standard as editors of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.)

One may consider Murray Leinster's "A Logic Named Joe" of work epitomizing the first, idea fiction-centered ideal, and William Gibson's Sprawl stories, particularly his novel Neuromancer, as epitomizing the second, more conventionally literary ideal, in their very different ways of treating the Internet.

"A Logic Named Joe," which was published in 1946, rigorously extrapolates from the idea of ubiquitous, massively networked computers, and the result is staggering in the originality, range and accuracy of its technological foresight about how the Internet would be structured, the ways in which people would use it, and the problems and complications this would raise--which is, of course, a testament to just how good a job Leinster did of developing his concept.1 By contrast Neuromancer, despite its much later, 'eighties-era authorship when the shape the Internet was likely to have was a far easier thing to guess at, is in its actual depiction of the Net (how it works, the ways it develops and actually impacts our lives), superficial, and unsurprisingly much further off as a prediction, but by postmodernist lights it is far more impressive as literature than the "old-fashioned," "unstylish" story in which he wrapped up his speculation--which is what adherents of this standard really care about.

Today Leinster's story has become relatively obscure, while it is Gibson who, despite "getting it wrong" (as he freely admits in interviews), is confusedly and confusingly celebrated as the prophet of cyberspace--a reflection of the fact that adherents of the second definition (from McComas, through Ballard and Moorcock and polemicists for postmodernist science fiction like David Pringle and Colin Greenland, Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling to today) have prevailed as the fashionable taste-makers and opinion-leaders.2 Indeed, when critics and others tell us that science fiction has never been better, it is the more literary standard that they have in mind, not whether we are getting lots and lots of really original, impressive idea fiction. By contrast, fans of good old-fashioned idea fiction are apt to be less sanguine about the situation--less enthusiastic about all the literary stuff we are getting, and pointing to the comparative scarcity of what they wish we had more of.3

It is rare that this is flatly stated--but it seems to me that acknowledging this properly would clear up a good deal of confusion.

1. In Leinster's story a computer looks "like a vision-receiver used to, only it's got keys instead of dials and you punch the keys for what you want." The device integrates the functions of many earlier technologies and services into a single unit, at once "typewriter, radio, telephone, teletypewriter, newspaper," while also usable for "telecastin'," "a vision-phone connection" and a tool for general information searches on "everything you wanna know or see or hear," be it "the weather forecast or who won today's race at Hialeah or who was mistress of the White House durin' Garfield's administration."

Leinster also considered the issues of dependence, privacy and censorship with which society has grappled since the Internet's invention, from the intolerability of even a temporary Internet shutdown ("If we shut off Logics, we go back to a kind of civilization we have forgotten how to run!"), to the risk that others will easily be able to find out one's most compromising secrets (people racing to dig up dirt on acquaintances when they realize the safeguards against it are down), to the worry that children will be exposed to inappropriate content and adults find helpful advice on committing criminal acts while "online" (like how to get away with murder).

2. Indeed, reading the essays of J.G. Ballard and Michael Moorcock in New Worlds, I have been struck by the lack of any positive reference in their pieces to anything that distinguishes science fiction as a genre--the exaltation saved entirely for more conventional literary ideas (and in Ballard's case, generally hardcore literary ideas). The pattern continues today, with the sort of extrapolation Leinster did so well in his story overlooked or, if acknowledged, slighted as unimportant.

3. In reply they are often unkindly characterized in the genre's more respectable quarters as nostalgic for fiction not really all that good, or unsophisticated in their literary tastes, or simply "haters" in the asinine sense in which the word has been tossed about this past decade--the cranky, cantankerous, curmudgeonly coots of the field.