Peter Ruff, a small London agent with a genius for the discreet, is recruited into the Double Four — a European criminal directorate — and finds the way out is to run it. Oppenheim worked in his father's leather business for twenty years while writing at night, then produced some hundred and fifteen novels from the Riviera; this is his most cynical, and the criminals have better manners than the Foreign Office. Fifty-nine plates by painters including Walter Sickert and John Atkinson Grimshaw follow the story through nocturnal harbour lights, London streets and music halls, the shadowed city that was Oppenheim's own.
