Perutz, Leo, 1882-1957

Leopold Perutz (2 November 1882 – 25 August 1957) was an Austrian novelist and mathematician. Born in Prague, 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 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. During the 1950s he returned occasionally to Austria, spending the summer and autumn months in the market town of St. Wolfgang in the Salzkammergut resort region and in Vienna. He died in the Austrian spa town of Bad Ischl in 1957. 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 Judgment as one of the thirteen best non-supernatural horror novels.