John P. Marquand's Your Turn, Mr. Moto (1935)

 "Yes," Mr. Moto nodded, "yes, I think you do, so I may be correspondingly frank.  A paper, a plan, to be exact, has been abstracted from our naval archives.  It is probably now in the hands of some power.  My government is simply anxious to learn what power.  If you can find out for me that the United States navy is familiar with the plans of a certain new type of Japanese battleship, that is all I wish of you.  Do you understand?"

John P. Marquand, Your Turn, Mr. Moto (1935, republished by Penzler Publishers 2020)

When the author of the Charlie Chan novels, Earl Derr Biggers, died in 1933 The Saturday Evening Post was looking for someone to write similar stories about another Asian and Marquand, known as the author of popular middlebrow novels (his The Late George Apley won the Pulitzer Prize in 1938), took the job.  Your Turn, Mr. Moto was serialized first and then published in 1935.  Mr. Moto was a somewhat inscrutable Asian but was not much like Charlie Chan; Moto was a spy for Imperial Japan. His appearances in the novel are rather brief, as he tries to get American aviator Casey Lee to help him by promising him a plane to fly from Japan to the U.S., after the cigarette company who was the original sponsor of the flight canceled it when Casey gave a drunken press conference. Aiding first Moto then Casey is the exotic Russian Sonya Karaloff, who is trying to retrieve a secret formula her late father has hidden in China, something the Chinese wheeler-dealer Wu Lai-fu is also interested in. The story moves swiftly and sometimes violently through Japan and China, as Casey flees for his life though the portholes of ships and the windows of nightclubs.

Mr. Moto, played by Peter Lorre, was in a number of movies after the Charlie Chan movies petered out at poverty row studio Monogram; the best of the Mr. Moto movies were directed by Norman Foster, later an associate of Orson Welles.  The movies were not closely related to the books, with Moto becoming more like Charlie Chan.  The last Mr. Moto movie with Peter Lorre was in 1939; a final one starring Henry Silva was made in 1965.