Mr. Moto Is So Sorry, The Mr. Moto Novels
The 4th entry in Pulitzer Prize–winning author John P. Marquand’s popular series of espionage adventures features an Australian mercenary, a Mongolian prince, and a Japanese spymaster
Eager to escape his complicated past, Calvin Gates boards a train bound for Inner Mongolia, where he plans to join an archaeological dig. Also en route to the Gilbreth Expedition is Sylvia Dillaway, a beautiful young artist with a fierce independent streak. The two Americans become unwitting players in a high-stakes game of international intrigue when Sylvia’s Australian guide gives her a silver inlaid cigarette case containing a coded message. With the clouds of war looming, various factions of the Japanese, Russian, and Chinese governments will stop at nothing to get their hands on the case—including murder.
Calvin and Sylvia’s only hope for survival is a fellow passenger, the charming and mysterious Mr. Moto. He is Imperial Japan’s top secret agent, and his mission is to ensure the safe delivery of the cigarette case to its rightful destination. To do so, he must protect the innocent Americans, but on a speeding train headed deep into dangerous territory, even his considerable skills might not be enough to save the day.
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.
