E. Phillips Oppenheim

E. Phillips Oppenheim (1866–1946) was an English novelist, born in London and raised in Leicester, where he worked for twenty years in his father's leather business while writing in the evenings. Once he could afford to, he gave up trade and produced more than a hundred novels and fifty volumes of stories, most of them thrillers of international intrigue set among diplomats, millionaires and spies on the Riviera and in English country houses. The Great Impersonation (1920) is his best-known book; Mysterious Mr. Sabin and its sequel The Yellow Crayon are typical of his earlier work. He called himself "the prince of storytellers" and lived lavishly in France and Guernsey.