Leo Perutz

Leopold Perutz (November 2, 1882 – August 25, 1957) was a German language novelist and mathematician. He was born in Prague and was thus a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He lived in Vienna until the Nazi "Anschluss" in 1938, when he emigrated to Palestine.

According to the biographical note on the Arcade Publishing editions of the English translations of his novels, Leo was a world-class mathematician who formulated an algebraic equation which is named after him; he worked as a statistician for an insurance company. He was related to the biologist Max Perutz. [ [http://www.nature.com/nsmb/journal/v9/n4/full/nsb0402-245.html Max Ferdinand Perutz OM FRS] , obituary by Alan R. Fersht.]

During the 1950s he returned occasionally to Austria, where he eventually died. He wrote his first novel, "The Third Bullet", in 1915 while recovering from a wound sustained in the First World War. In all Perutz wrote eleven novels, which gained the admiration of Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Ian Fleming, Karl Edward Wagner and Graham Greene. Wagner cited Perutz' novel "The Master of the Day of Judgement" as one of the thirteen best non-supernatural horror novels. [N. G. Christakos, "Three By Thirteen: The Karl Edward Wagner Lists" in "Black Prometheus: A Critical Study of Karl Edward Wagner", ed. Benjamin Szumskyj, Gothic Press 2007.]

Overview

Perutz' novels are short, elegantly written and are usually historical novels combining fast-paced, crisply told adventure with a metaphysical twist. "By Night Under the Stone Bridge" is an episodic work whose separate stories are bound together by the illicit love shared, in their dreams, by a Jewish woman and the Emperor Rudolf II. In the posthumously-published "Leonardo's Judas", da Vinci's quest for an appropriate face to give the betrayer in his "Last Supper" is interwoven with the squabble between a usurer and the merchant to whom he owes money. The title of "Saint Peter's Snow", which is set in what was then the present day (1932), refers to a drug which induces religious fervour; the Nazis, understandably, did not care for it. "The Master of the Day of Judgement" is a decidedly different mystery story about the circumstances surrounding an actor's death in the early twentieth century, and "Little Apple" concerns a First World War soldier's obsessive quest for revenge.

Novels by Perutz in English translation

(Dates of publication are for the original German-language editions)

* "From Nine to Nine" (1918)
* "The Marquis of Bolibar" (1920)
* "The Master of the Day of Judgement" (1921)
* "Turlupin" (1924)
* "Little Apple" (1928)
* "Saint Peter's Snow" (1933)
* "The Swedish Cavalier" (1936)
* "By Night under the Stone Bridge" (1952)
* "Leonardo's Judas" (1959)

References

External links

* [http://www.biblint.de/perutz.html Brief biography in German]
* [http://www.violetbooks.com/REVIEWS/jas-perutz.html Appreciation by Jessica Amanda Salmonson]