While William LeQueux was the father of the espionage novel, E. Phillips Oppenheim made the genre his own. Like LeQueux, Edgar Wallace, and many other mystery novelists of his generation, E. Phillips Oppenheim was a prolific writer. The author of more than 150 books, Oppenheim produced only one truly classic mystery novel, The Great Impersonation (1920) over the course of a career that spanned fifty-eight productive years.

The so-called Prince of Storytellers, Edward Phillips Oppenheim was born in London on 22 October 1866, to Edward John and Henrietta Susannah Budd Oppenheim. Oppenheim's father, a leather merchant, later took his family to live in Leicester, where the future novelist attended Wyggeston Grammar School, leaving in December 1882 to go to work for his father. Although he continued his connection with the leather business until he was forty, he began writing early, in his spare time. His first novel Expiation (1887), with its publication partly subsidized...