84 years before Jim Carrey had to tell the truth in Liar! Liar!, Alfred Burton faced the same problem.

E. Phillips Oppenheim, The Double Life of Mr Alfred Burton (Little, Brown & Co, first US edition, August 1913). Hardcover, no just jacket. 322 p. Blue cloth boards, faded gilt spine titling. Gilt cover title in good form with green plant in an Egyptian-style container illustration. Frontispiece illustration with un-torn, unwrinkled cover tissue; six other v&w illustrations in the text. Aside from spine and text block fading and a small corner chip to one of the Oppenheim book adverts in the back, the book is in very good condition, with sound hinges front and back.

Here’s the plot: 

Alfred Burton, a smooth-talking head clerk of a third-rate auction house, is having a perfectly ordinary day on the job when he stumbles across a strange plant in an old house: a tiny plant with green leaves and a cluster of queer little brown beans hanging down from them. The virtue of the beans is that he who eats one shall see nothing, think nothing, say nothing but the truth.

What he doesn't realize is that the fruit of the plant, when eaten, will change not merely the entire course of his life, but in fact his very self. 

Imagine an absolutely truthful auctioneer! Alfred Burton has a well-meaning, rather ordinary wife who becomes unendurable to him, and he falls in love with a charming girl who would have no appeal for the man he formerly was. The book was the basis for the 1919 silent film directed by Arthur Rook and starring Kenelm Foss and Ivy Duke. Uncommon departure from mysteries by Oppenheim.

HBB price: $25.

Edward Phillips Oppenheim (1866-1946) was the son of a Leicester, England leather merchant. He dropped out of school at seventeen to spend the next two decades helping out in the family business, while pursuing a sideline urge to write stories.

Some early works came to the attention of a wealthy New Yorker, who, in the wacky, can-do spirit of the age, bought out Oppenheim’s dad and made the son a well-paid director, free mostly to write.

Unleashed from quotidian woes, Oppenheim transformed himself into one of the most popular and prolific English writers of his age. Under his own name and the pen name Anthony Patridge, Oppenheim turned out 116 novels and 36 collections of short stories over half a century and became known as The Prince of Storytellers.

Drawing on his World War I service in the British Ministry of Information, Oppenheim’s forte lay in the John Buchan/Richard Hannay style of adventurous spy fiction. His charismatic heroes- and antiheroes- had a singular talent for fomenting, or trying to prevent, wars while assiduously romancing beautiful women. 

Oppenheim branched out into science fiction, a la Mr H.G. Wells, producing reams of stories of charismatic heroes and antiheroes fomenting, or trying to prevent, wars while assiduously romancing beautiful women- and brandishing outlandish and destructive scifi weaponry.

With sales came wealth, fame, a yacht, a villa in France and a manse on Guernsey. Oppenheim entertained lavishly and counted everyone a friend. He made the cover of Time in September 1927, and P.G. Wodehouse dedicated Very Good, Jeeves to him in 1930.

Time passed Oppenheim by. After two world wars, his writing seemed dated, snobbish, and suffering from slack middles. But he had a remarkable, even extraordinary, ability to tell a story that insisted the reader follow. As early 20thC fiction has come back into some vogue, so have the works of the prolific authors who served the voracious readers of the premedia age so well.