John P. Marquand’s classic espionage series features Imperial Japan’s most skillful spy and the cloak-and-dagger intrigue of Asia between the world wars.
In Your Turn, Mr. Moto, the abrupt cancellation of a transpacific flight strands World War I flying ace Casey Lee in Tokyo, leaving him with little choice but to accept a lucrative job offer from Japanese secret agent Mr. Moto. The mission begins on a steamship bound for Shanghai, where Casey’s fellow passengers include Mr. Moto and Sonya, a beautiful exile from White Russia. When a Chinese man turns up dead in Casey’s stateroom, the trio is caught up in a dangerous game of subterfuge, the outcome of which might just determine the fate of their nations.
Set in 1930s Peking, Thank You, Mr. Moto, follows Tom Nelson, a jaded American expatriate, as he tries to help a gorgeous art dealer clear her name and find the real killer of a British ex-army officer trafficking stolen goods. The search leads Tom and Eleanor Joyce straight into the clutches of General Wu Lo Feng, a notorious warlord from the North who has surreptitiously entered the city. Tom and Eleanor’s only hope for survival is Mr. Moto, but can they trust the enigmatic spymaster—or are they pawns in a secret plot with stakes as monumental as they are sinister?
In Think Fast, Mr. Moto, a Honolulu gambling establishment has become a key strand in a web of political and financial intrigue stretching all the way to the Far East. Sent to convince his cousin, Eva, to close the casino, Wilson Hitchings uncovers the plot and realizes just how much danger his family is in. He and Eva have no choice but to trust Japanese secret agent Mr. Moto, who claims to be in Hawaii on a similar mission. With a cast of shady international characters tracking their every move, this unlikely trio could be facing odds far too long to beat.
First serialized in the Saturday Evening Post, the popular and acclaimed Mr. Moto Novels, which were the inspiration for eight films starring Peter Lorre, provide some of the most compelling and realistic depictions of spycraft in early twentieth-century fiction.
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.