Mr. Moto was created in 1935 by writer John Marquand to fill a specific slot in the popular fiction of the day. Earl Derr Biggers—the writer of a half-dozen novels about the Chinese-American detective Charlie Chan—had passed away. The editors of the Saturday Evening Post, which had serialized the Chan novels, were looking for a new and (hopefully) equally popular Oriental detective character.
So they sent Marquand to China to dig up ideas. He hit pay dirt with I.A. Moto, an agent of the Imperial Japanese government. Moto is a small, obsequiously polite man of many talents—including a cold-blooded willingness to cut your throat from ear to ear should he feel doing so was his duty to his Emperor. He would, though, apologize to you afterwards for the necessity of using violence.
The Moto novels are well-crafted and exciting spy novels. They’re written in a smooth, clear prose that both tells the story and provides a vivid sense of atmosphere. Moto is actually a supporting character in each novel. The lead character is an American expatriate (a different one in each novel) who gets inadvertently involved in something very, very dangerous. Often, Moto is his enemy. No Hero, the first novel in the series, involves an American pilot who ends up in a deadly race with Moto while trying to recover a secret formula.
Other times, Moto is working with the main character. In 1936’s Thank You, Mr. Moto, an American living in Peking becomes a target of assassination when it’s believed he has learned about the plans of a Chinese bandit to take over the city. The bandit is backed by a faction of the Japanese government. Moto shows up to help the American, defending the idea of Japanese imperialism, but belonging to a faction that wants expansion to be slower and less violent. Together, the two men foil the bandit’s schemes.
A series of eight Moto films were made between 1937 and 1939, with Hungarian-born actor Peter Lorre doing wonderful work in the lead role. In the movies, Mr. Moto is initially a successful importer who works as a detective both as a hobby and to look out for his own business interests. In later films, he becomes an active agent for the “International Police.” Ironically (considering his role in the novels), he is often working to protect Western political interests. These movies are fun, fast-moving B-movies, with well-constructed plots and great action sequences.
But World War II brought Moto’s career both on the page and on the screen to an end. It abruptly became impossible to have a Japanese hero (or even a likable adversary) in American popular culture. So the character was set aside for over a decade. Marquand would use Moto in a small role in the 1957 novel Stopover Tokyo, but it was on radio that the character would see the most action.
Had Moto come to radio in the 1930s, he probably would have been based more closely on the B-movies than the original novels. This was the usual pattern at that time. Boston Blackie, Charlie Chan, the Lone Wolf, Nick and Nora Charles, and others came to radio more closely resembling their movie counterpoints than their original prose characters. But World War II got in the way and Moto didn’t get to radio until 1951. By that time, the movies were long out of the public eye. So the radio series looked back to the original books for inspiration.
But drastic changes from the books were still necessary. Moto could no longer be working for a government that had ceased to exist. Nor would it be viable in a weekly series for the title character to play a supporting role.
So Moto was moved from Japan to the United States. In fact, he became a native-born U.S. citizen—it’s mentioned in several episodes that he grew up in San Francisco. The unswerving loyalty the original Moto felt towards the Emperor was shifted over to America. Moto was now an agent for an unnamed U.S. intelligence service, working to foil a variety of Communist plots.
The opening narration for each episode varied a little each week. One week, Moto is described as an “international agent extraordinaire—the inscrutable, crafty and courageous Oriental.” Another week, we’re told “Across the world, from Japan to Jersey, from Cape Horn to Murmansk, Mr. Moto is fighting the evils of Communism quietly, ruthlessly, courageously.”