[1] His father was director of the Atlantica Shipping Company and the family name was nobilified to de Polnay in recognition of his service to the Hapsburg monarchy.

His father later served briefly as Minister of Food Distribution in the Friedrich government in August 1919, then traveled to the United States in 1921 as a trade emissary of the Horthy regime.

[2] Peter de Polnay and his siblings were largely raised and educated by various governesses and spent time in Switzerland and Italy.

[3] In January 1926, he was arrested for his involvement in a conspiracy organized by Prince Ludwig Windisch-Graetz to forge 30 million in French franc notes.

[5] He joined his younger brother Ivan in Argentina and the two travelled and took a variety of jobs, usually ill-paid and short-lived, an experience he later wrote about in Fools of Choice (1955).

[6] He then travelled to England, bought a red Bentley, drove to the French Riviera, and quickly lost his fortune gambling at the Monte Carlo Casino as he later described in A Door Ajar (1959).

De Polnay became increasingly devout in his last two decades and Catholic themes of guilt and confession play a larger role in his later novels.

After the war, he settled into a fairly predictable pattern of finishing one book in time for the summer holidays and another just ahead of the Christmas season.

Of his 1947 novel The Umbrella Thorns, which drew upon his experiences in Kenya, Hamilton Basso wrote in The New Yorker, "Mr. de Polnay's characters are grown-up men and women who have gone through a good deal of battering in the process of living their lives, but they refuse to take refuge in those adolescent inclinations, sentiments, and emotions which make so many 'serious' novels read as if they had been written by melancholy sophomores.

Isabel Quigly wrote that his 1973 memoir The Moon and the Marabou Stork "gives the impression of having been written on the backs of old envelopes and posted off without correction or arrangement.

"[12] In the same year, Christopher Wordsworth wrote of The Price You Pay that "Mr. de Polnay's stringent control of the tricks of his trade can't disguise the flimsyness of this novel.

W. H. Allen & Co. also published six novels that de Polnay wrote using the pseudonym Jessamy Morrison: The No-Road (1963); The Wind Has Two Edges (1964); The Girl from Paris (1965); Rusty (1966); The Office Party (1967); and The Widow (1972).

Most of the Morrison novels dealt with lesbian and homosexual themes and de Polnay may have used the pseudonym to avoid problems with the Catholic Church.