66. Thank you, Mr. Moto by John P. Marquand

I picked this up and another Mr. Mot Bantam paperback from a nicely-curated antique store in Vancouver that had an interesting collection of paperbacks (chosen almost entirely for aesthetic reasons as the otherwise friendly owner had not actually read any of them and had never heard of Ross MacDonald!).  I was a bit desperate for good paperback finds at that point so justified to myself that I needed to read a Mr. Moto book or two.  I did find a nice paperback of Margaret Millar's An Air that Kills and a Mary Stewart (The Moon Spinners) that I hadn't read before.

Thank you, Mr. Moto was a strange read.  Marquand was a successful novelist; he even won a Pulitzer, so I want to give him his due as a writer. It's hard, though, to find any merit in this book beyond its existence as a very specific manifestation of I guess what is called Orientalism.  It's not that the bizarre mix of trying to be progressive (in the 1930s) by arguing that all Chinese people do not actually look alike while constantly marvelling at China's (and particularily Peking) fundamental unscrutability is so bad that I am morally condemming the book.  Rather, the characters and the plot are basically dull and mostly passive.  It's just a boring story in an environment, pre-WWII Peking with all the various colonial powers machinating, which should be anything but.

The protagonist is professional expat Tom Nelson who hasn't gone native but is too satisfied with his life of doing nothing in China.  He gets involved with another young single woman with a slight questionable reputation (comes from good stock, but is staying on too long in China without getting married or something) who had been at another expat's house the night he was murdered.  There is some mystery around his death but no real suspense.  It feels like the plot is an excuse for Marquand to go on and on about the mysterious Chinese character, on which despite the many words, he really doesn't say anything.  Did he even ever go to China?

You may be wondering, what the hell does this have to do with Mr. Moto?  He shows up early but is only tangentially involved in the plot that turns out to be an alliance of an extreme Japanese nationalist and a warlord who are plotting to take over Peking.  He indeed speaks in that stereotypical way where he is contstantly thanking and apologizing but somehow we are told he is also extremely effective.  The end of the book is a standoff with the warlord where the plucky woman grabs his gun and thus foils the plot.  Moto is there and talks a lot, but seems to do very little and what he does do is off screen.

I can live with some old school "benevolent" racism in my 20th century fiction.  I can critique it but still find value in the rest of the text.The problem with Thank you, Mr. Moto, is that there really isn't much going on with the rest of the text so the racism is the only thing that stands out. And even this is not very interesting.  I would welcome an ethnocentric discussion of Chinese culture from an expat living in Peking in the 30s if it brought something interesting to the table.  Marquand's portrayal here is simplistic and limited; it honestly feels like he just made it up based on whatever popular cuture on China he was exposed to.  I'll be hard-pressed to read the second one I bought.