Last Laugh, Mr. Moto, The Mr. Moto Novels
Japanese spymaster Mr. Moto travels to the Caribbean in search of a weapon with the power to determine the course of World War II
November 1940: In Kingston Harbor, ex–navy pilot Bob Bolles lounges aboard his cutter. After months spent drifting from port to port, his only ironclad rule is no alcohol before noon. But when an American businessman named Malcolm Kingman, his gorgeous socialite wife, and their Swedish butler charter the Thistlewood for a trip to the remote Mercator Island, Bob’s carefree life takes a dangerous and dramatic turn.
By the time he places the Kingmans’ strange accents and realizes what they hope to recover from the deserted island, it’s too late. He is caught in the middle of an international espionage plot with grave implications for the wars raging across Europe and Asia. To keep a powerful military secret from falling into the wrong hands, Bob must dig deep within himself to locate hidden reserves of courage. Easier said than done, as is outwitting Mr. Moto, a top secret agent of Imperial Japan who has been tracking the Thistlewood across the Caribbean Sea.
First serialized in the Saturday Evening Post, John P. Marquand’s popular and acclaimed Mr. Moto Novels were the inspiration for 8 films starring Peter Lorre.
John P. Marquand
John P. Marquand (1893–1960) was a Pulitzer Prize–winning author, proclaimed “the most successful novelist in the United States” by Life magazine in 1944. A descendant of governors of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, shipping magnates Daniel Marquand and Samuel Curzon, and famed nineteenth-century writer Margaret Fuller, Marquand always had one foot inside the blue-blooded New England establishment, the focus of his social satire. But he grew up on the outside, sent to live with maiden aunts in Newburyport, Massachusetts, the setting of many of his novels, after his father lost the once-considerable family fortune in the crash of 1907. From this dual perspective, Marquand crafted stories and novels that were applauded for their keen observation of cultural detail and social mores.
By the 1930s, Marquand was a regular contributor to the Saturday Evening Post, where he debuted the character of Mr. Moto, a Japanese secret agent. No Hero, the first in a series of bestselling spy novels featuring Mr. Moto, was published in 1935. Three years later, Marquand won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Late George Apley, a subtle lampoon of Boston’s upper classes. The novels that followed, including H.M. Pulham, Esquire (1941), So Little Time (1943), B.F.’s Daughter (1946), Point of No Return (1949), Melvin Goodwin, USA (1952), Sincerely, Willis Wayde (1955), and Women and Thomas Harrow (1959), cemented his reputation as the preeminent chronicler of contemporary New England society and one of America’s finest writers.
