A secret society of European idealists has a new leader, and the American who married their most dangerous member wants him out. Oppenheim kept his father's leather books for twenty years and wrote at night, then produced a hundred and fifty novels of embassies, sleeping cars and men who are never quite what their passports say - the man who invented the modern thriller's furniture.

E. Phillips Oppenheim (1866-1946) was an English novelist who began his career while working in the family leather business in Leicester, publishing his first novel in 1887. He went on to write over one hundred novels of espionage and international intrigue, including The Malefactor, The Kingdom of the Blind, The Illustrious Prince, The Vanished Messenger, and The Yellow Crayon.