Thank You, Mr. Moto, The Mr. Moto Novels
Stolen art, murder, and international intrigue—the 2nd installment in John P. Marquand’s popular espionage series is an evocative portrait of 1930s Peking
Tom Nelson, a jaded American expatriate, stumbles into a deadly conspiracy as tensions between Japan and China threaten to escalate into all-out war. When a British ex–army major trafficking in stolen goods is murdered, the beautiful American art dealer Eleanor Joyce is implicated in the crime. The search for the real killer leads Tom and Eleanor straight into the clutches of General Wu Lo Feng, a notorious warlord from the North who has surreptitiously entered Peking as part of a secret plan with global implications.
Feng will stop at nothing to silence the American pair. Their only hope for survival is Mr. Moto, a secret agent of Imperial Japan who is onto the general’s scheme. But can Tom and Eleanor trust the enigmatic spymaster, or are they fated to be pawns in a plot whose stakes are as monumental as they are sinister?
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.
