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.

In all Perutz wrote eleven novels, which gained the admiration of Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Ian Fleming, Karl Edward Wagner and Graham Greene.

[6] The Master of the Day of Judgement (1921) is a decidedly different mystery story about the circumstances surrounding an actor's death in the early twentieth century, and Little Apple (1928) concerns a First World War soldier's obsessive quest for revenge.

The title of his 1933 novel Saint Peter's Snow (published in English in 1935 as The Virgin's Brand[3]), which is set in what was then the present day, refers to a drug which induces religious fervour; the Nazis, understandably, did not care for it.

[6] Literary scholar Alan Piper described Perutz's work as typically containing "an element of the fantastic, with dramatic plots featuring confusing and conflicting interpretations of events".