9798886011203
Stark House Press, 2024
originally published 1908
235 pp
paperback
Ghosts of Society was originally published as The Distributors in 1908, coming at number thirty-two in author E. Phillips Oppenheim's (1866 - 1946) published novels, the first having been published in 1887. He was incredibly prolific in his writing, publishing well over one hundred novels during his lifetime, along with several collections of short stories, a few autobiographical works, and as Daniel Paul Morrison notes in his extremely informative appendix at the end of this novel, "45 motion pictures." Five of his novels, including this one, were written under the pseudonym of Anthony Partridge. Ghosts of Society is my first novel by Oppenheim; I have a few more of his books on my shelves so it will very likely not be the last. I had fun with this one, for sure.
The "Ghosts" are a group of seven people who are all welcomed within the higher rungs of London society, right around the turn of the century. Their leader is Lord Evelyn, but all decisions are made by consensus among the members. In his introduction to this novel, Curtis Evans notes that they were a "fashionable set of Londoners," which
"the postwar, Roaring Twenties generation would call denizens of "cafe society, and today in the democratic social media era we simply term influencers."
The "essential qualifications," as explained by one of their number to the young American woman Sophy Van Heldt are "birth, culture, and understanding," and "an earnest desire to acquire some interest in life apart from the purely mundane." A more in-depth glimpse into the Ghosts is offered by another member much later in the story, who describes the group as people who
"had gone at life with too much of a rush. Life, you know ... is made up of many chambers and a man or a woman cannot live in all of them. These people made the mistake of trying to do this. They rushed from room to room. They drank great gulps where they should have only sipped. They plunged head-foremost where they should have only paddled. Then, when they were still young, weariness came. They had tried everything. They were foolish enough to suppose that they had given everything a fair trial."
Everyone knows that it is "considered a kind of bad form" to ask about them, and when Sophy makes the mistake of asking a certain Mr. Mallison directly about the group (not knowing that he is a member), she is given a fairly firm and very rude snub, one she does not take kindly. She makes up her mind that Mallison and "some of the others should suffer for it," which leads her to hire a private detective to get anything and everything he can find on the Ghosts. What no one knows except the group (and their fence) is that when the Ghosts
"come across a person whom we consider overburdened with this world's goods, and who shows no desire or design of doing anything else except spending his money upon himself and for his own gratification, we use our courage and our brains to make a pay a very legitimate fine."
In other words, they rob the wealthy of their jewels, using the proceeds of the sales to fund causes that benefit the poor, all anonymously of course. In this story, one of their "victims" is a known tyrant in his own country, while the other two are more or less arriviste, all of whom have the wealth that allows them access to the company and house parties of Society. The detective hired by Sophy just might turn out to be an issue, especially when things go very, very wrong during one such robbery. There are other forces at work as well among various individual members that may potentially threaten the group as a whole and certainly add uncertainty to the Ghosts' future.
There is, of course, much more to this story. I found myself completely drawn to the whole fin-de-siècle feel and the social observations of that particular era as expressed by the author, especially in terms of bored aristos craving change from what they see as their rather tedious, boring lives, and the desire to experience new sensations outside of the ordinary. The plot is also pretty good, with the suspense slowly building as Sophy's detective moves closer to fulfilling his mission -- the last few pages are definitely page turners.
My thanks to Stark House for my copy!
