Moss was educated at Rugby and the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, and was commissioned into the Grenadier Guards in 1905.
Thereafter Moss published roughly a book a year until the outbreak of the Second World War, his œuvre comprising novels, short story collections, verse, children's stories and works of non-fiction on European politics and military matters.
Although entirely forgotten today, Moss's works seem to have been extremely popular among general readers (if not always among critics) and influential among his fellow writers.
Defeat, which is made up of six thematically linked short stories dealing with life in Germany in the wake of defeat in the First World War, influenced the attitudes of a number of British writers towards Germany in the interwar period, including Graham Greene who attributed his pro-German sympathies in the early 1920s to Moss's stories.
Nevertheless, despite a prolific output between the wars and the popular appeal of his work, Moss never received plaudits from the critics, who tended to dismiss his fiction as sentimental and old-fashioned.