Best books on female spies: Author Patricia Nicol suggests novels featuring intelligence agents
- Patricia Nicol shared a selection of books portraying female spies
- Kate Atkinson’s Transcription tells of a mission to infiltrate UK Nazi sympathisers
- Elizabeth Buchan’s I Can’t Begin To Tell You follows resistance to the Nazis
There is a discreet private members’ club in central London, which, since its inception in the Forties, has welcomed women members on an equal, even vaunted, footing.
In my teen years, it was a treat during shopping expeditions with my mother, to retreat to the calm of its chintzy sitting room for a restorative cup of tea.
Sometimes we might encounter an elderly, intelligent-eyed foreign lady there, rightly being treated with the greatest reverence — a former wartime Special Operations Executive (SOE) operative.
Back then, in the late Eighties, as despots fell, walls and ideologies crumbled, that club and those women with their hair-raising tales of derring-do, seemed to represent a bygone world. If only.
Author Patricia Nicol shared the best novels on female spies including Transcription (pictured left) and I Can’t Begin To Tell You (pictured right)
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From Soviet-style assassins in Salisbury to the disappearance of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, intelligence and counter-intelligence are increasingly in the headlines. They remain the stuff of entertainment, too: James Bond will not return until 2020, but my husband and I have binge-watched both the BBC’s Killing Eve and Amazon’s Jack Ryan.
There are certainly plenty of female spies in contemporary fiction. Kate Atkinson’s latest novel, Transcription, follows the wartime and post-war adventures of Juliet Armstrong, plucked from obscurity to monitor, then infiltrate, a fifth column of UK Nazi sympathisers.
Atkinson has tremendous fun showing Juliet’s excitement with the play-acting and props: ‘She was to be a spy. At last.’
Elizabeth Buchan’s I Can’t Begin To Tell You features Kay Eberstern, the British-born wife of a Danish landowner, who, spurred by fury at her husband’s passive attitude to Nazi occupation, joins the resistance.
Mick Herron, meanwhile, explores contemporary espionage in his droll Slough House series, which follows a group of disgraced secret service operatives enduring a Kafkaesque internal exile. Recovering alcoholic Catherine Standish is a particularly poignant character. On screen it can seem glamorous, but Herron makes it clear what a lonely, corrosive career, espionage can be.
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