Leo Perutz

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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. [1]

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.

[edit] 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.