The Double Four

Peter Ruff has spent four quiet years farming at Aynesford Manor in Somerset when a summons arrives from the dying Madame de Maupassim. She heads the Double Four, a secret society with reach across Europe, and she has chosen Ruff to succeed her. There is no refusing: from the Double Four, she tells him, there is no resignation that counts. Reborn as Baron de Grost and installed at Merton House in Berkeley Square, he takes up the work, with the German agent Bernadine, Count von Hern, recurring as his opponent. Oppenheim built the book from ten linked episodes serialized in Pearson’s Magazine through 1911 and collected by Cassell that September. Published three years before the war whose rivalries it shadows, it trades gunfire for drawing rooms, ambassadors’ wives, and quiet menace over dinner.