The Adventures of Mr. Joseph P. Cray
E. Phillips Oppenheim, or Oppy as Wodehouse called him, was a prolific writer of the best kind of adventurous spy trash. Most of his work seems to center around the First World War and the intrigues leading up to it. Russian princesses. Stolen plans. Impersonations. Champagne. Monte Carlo. Blue Train. Sinister spies. Damsels in distress.
Fun, in other words. Innocent, old-fashioned fun.
On the other hand, it's as politically incorrect as you can get. No publisher would be able to print these books nowadays, which means that I have to scour the second hand bookshops. I mean, not only are the heroines often wimpy, silly, oh-Robin types — the bad guys are fleshy Germans with Jewish-sounding names, people are length-and-girth-coded (tall is important, small is unimportant and nasty, fat is evil, lissom is good), but white is good and black is primitive and often bad.
Anyway, it paints the picture of the first decennia of the twentieth century, when the British Empire was an empire still, and when a European War was seen not only as inevitable, but sometimes even desirable.
In the volume under advisement, the title hero, Joseph P. Cray, has just returned from a year's service in a YMCA tent in the battlefields of France, at the end of WWI. He longs for a drink, having been dry for a year, and gets as fast as he can to the best watering hole in London. And then a series of adventures start. Some of the adventures read a lot like the Saint's adventures; but in the last few, it's Joseph P. Cray who is bested by the rogues, instead of the rogues by him. Refreshing.
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