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Mr. Oppenheim was born in 1866 and went from school into his father’s leather business at Leicester—but he had started writing stories before that. He began to write them at fifteen, and showed his first to the headmaster of the school, “who, instead of giving me the birching I deserved, wished me luck and encouraged me to persevere.” The leather business was successful and was bought up by Blumenthals, a large American and Paris leather firm, who appointed young Oppenheim their director at Leicester. “His experience in that trade,” asserts Mr. A. St. John Adcock in his Gods of Modern Grub Street,[52] “has proved immensely useful to him. It has not only helped him to material for his tales, but it was through the American head of Blumenthals that he had his chief incentive to the writing of the type of story that has brought him such success as a novelist. This gentleman introduced him to the proprietor of the Café de Rat Mort, the once famous Montmartre haunt, for Oppenheim was frequently in Paris on the affairs of his leather company, and at the Café he acquired his taste for the mysteries of those international intriguings and rascalities that figure so largely in several of his books, for the proprietor used to tell him all manner of thrilling yarns about political and international adventurers, some of whom had been among his customers, and his listener formed a habit of weaving stories around the more striking personalities in the cosmopolitan crowd that he met in the Dead Rat.”
He was eighteen years old when his first short story was published, and only twenty when his first novel appeared. Before he was thirty he married Miss Elsie Hopkins, of Chelsea, Massachusetts. Mr. Oppenheim and his wife called their cottage in Sheringham, Norfolk, “Winnisimmet,” which was the Indian name of her Massachusetts home town. The house overlooked the North Sea. Perhaps this detail, as much as another, led the author to the construction in the years before the world war of that series of stories in which, as an element of his plots, Mr. Oppenheim kept repeating Germany in the rôle of the villain. Legend has it that during the war itself his name was on the list of Britons to be shot if captured, although lists of that sort are usually myths. “There was one period,” he has commented since, “in the autumn of 1918, when a well-directed bomb upon the Ministry of Information might have cleared the way for the younger novelists at the expense of Arnold Bennett, John Buchan, Dion Calthrop, E. Temple Thurston, Hugh Walpole and myself.”[53] He visited America in 1911 and again in 1922, when Mrs. Oppenheim came with him. On the latter occasion he made by far the wittiest comment of any visitor in reply to the usual question: what he thought of prohibition. “My only fear,” with a smile, “is that it may make me a drunkard.”[54] Those who met the victim of this reasonable dread saw a sturdy, broad-shouldered figure developed by air and outdoor exercise; and those who played golf with him respected his handicap of seven strokes only. His large, florid face seemed to kindle into laughter from the constant humorous gleam in his blue eyes. Among his own titles he confessed to a fondness for A Maker of History, The Double Life of Mr. Alfred Burton, The Great Impersonation and—perhaps influenced a little by its then impending publication—The Great Prince Shan. At this time he was subjected to one of those sets of questions from the answers to which one may construct a totally wrong picture of the person. However, we may note that his idea of happiness was tied up with his work, and that he gave as his notion of unhappiness, “No ideas.” His particular aversion, he said, was fog.[55] Fog? Yet he has said: “I would be perfectly content to spend the rest of my days in London. Half a dozen thoroughfares and squares in London, a handful of restaurants, the people whom one meets in a single morning, are quite sufficient for the production of more and greater stories than I shall ever write.”[56] He describes himself as no great traveller; he has, though, been in most European countries, and he pretty regularly spends his winters at his villa in Cagnes on the Riviera. He divides his time in England between the house in Norfolk and his rooms in London.