Julian Osgood Field (1852-1925)

He was born at 128 West 23rd Street, New York City, a member of the wealthy and influential Field family and a great-grandson of Samuel Osgood, 1st U.S. Postmaster-General and 1st President of the City Bank of New York whose townhouse served as the new Republic's first Presidential mansion. He was educated in England, but lasted just a year at Harrow and only matriculated at - not graduated from - Merton College, Oxford. He spent his twenties and thirties predominantly in Paris (during which time he visited Russia) mixing with writers, painters and musicians while living off what was originally a substantial inheritance. He had been an intimate of the Prince of Wales and an acquaintance of Victor Hugo, Guy de Maupassant, Charles Yriarte, Algernon Swinburne, Robert Browning, Walter Besant, etc. It was Yriarte who introduced him to Maupassant and he, "left an interesting if unreliable account of their escapades in the Paris underworld and some amusing details of the Frenchman's habits and conversations."

Coming to London, he used the pseudonyms "X.L." or "Sigma" to write satanic horror fiction for The Pall Mall Magazine published by Viscount Astor between 1893 and 1914. But, in 1901 he forged a document under the signature of a representative of Astor's estate office which entitled him to be paid handsomely for authoring society novels. Field used the document in an attempt to raise a loan but was arrested and sentenced to 3-months in prison. After his release he embarked on a career posing as a 'gentleman' financial advisor to the improvident upper classes, whereby he perfected a technique that combined money-lending, extortion, fraud and blackmail in varying degrees as each situation required.

He was most famous as the Sitwell family's "éminence noire," responsible for involving Lady Ida Sitwell - mother of the authors Osbert Sitwell, Sacheverell Sitwell and Edith Sitwell - in a long-running financial scandal, which began in 1912. It took two years before she was able to successfully sue him for fraud and breach of duty. But, in the following year, for her part she herself was imprisoned for three months, and Field was sentenced to 18-months hard labor at Wormwood Scrubs Prison for conspiring to defraud Mrs Frances Bennett Dobbs, an elderly eccentric and very wealthy American lady then living in Streatham with no family but who was rumored to have owned half of Regent Street.

Osbert Sitwell described Field's, "stunted, stooping, paunchy body... carried a heavy head... with a beak like that of an octopus, which spiritually he so much resembled, and a small imperial (pointed beard) and moustache that were dyed, as was his hair, a total and unnatural black." He ruined countless lives, always targeting women, and if they were married he betted on the principal that their husband's would eventually pay out and never talk of it rather than deal with the embarrassment of having the facts come to light. By 1912, even though he was an undischarged bankrupt pursued by a small army of creditors, he still managed to live in comfort at the Grosvenor House Hotel in Mayfair. But, karma eventually caught up with him and when he died alone on August 7th, 1925, he was lodging in a single room at 84 Tennyson Road in Kilburn, northwest London. He left his entire estate - by then valued at just £13 - to his "foster-son" of unknown identity.

His first book - Aut Diabolus Aut Nihil & Other Tales (Methuen & Co., London 1894) - translates to "The Devil or Nothing". In the preface he wrote, "the only real portrait here is that of His Satanic Majesty Himself... all the (other) characters are sketched from life (and are) intimate friends of mine," which was enough to convince many of his readers that the stories were real-life accounts of European diabolism. His other early books included: The Limb: An Episode of Adventure (A.D. Innes, 1896) and Personalia: Intimate Recollections of Famous Men: Political, Literary, Artistic, Social, Various (authored by "Sigma" and published by Doubleday, Page & Co., New York, 1903). He is best remembered today for the three books in which he recalled a host of scandalous stories that took place within European high society, much sought after by collectors: Things I Shouldn't Tell (published anonymously by Eveleigh Nash & Grayson, London, 1924); Uncensored Recollections (published anonymously by Eveleigh Nash & Grayson, London, 1924); More Uncensored Recollections (published anonymously by Eveleigh Nash & Grayson, 1926).