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Your Turn, Mr. Moto

Page 17

by John P. Marquand


  “What you don’t know won’t hurt you,” Driscoll said. “The Orient is different from America. I shall want you to lunch with the Admiral tomorrow, and then you will probably have to write this out, because it is important. There’s no need for you ever to know how important. When you write it, you can say anything about me you like, but I should like to have you make one addition. I might have treated you better, Casey. We were both of us excited that other day, and let’s forget it. And there’s another thing—you might go and call on Wu Lai-fu. I think he’d like to see you.”

  So this is as far as I am going to go and further, perhaps, than I had anticipated. I have finished a narrative which is difficult to believe, now that I am away from the place where it occurred and may never see that place again.

  “Don’t worry,” Driscoll said, “anyone who has been out here can understand that anything can happen. You ought to be grateful to the Orient.”

  Perhaps I am—at any rate when I think of Sonya.

  About the Author

  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.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1935 by John P. Marquand

  Cover design by Andy Ross

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-1633-9

  This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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