Move Over Marta Hari - Here comes the Middle Aged Spy by M J Robotham

Breathless, the KGB man stumbles onto the crowded train platform, the prickling of his skin signalling that he hasn’t yet escaped the shadowy figures on his tail. He scans rapidly for any likely spooks in the sea of faces: the middle-aged man in a mac, head buried in the evening newspaper; the woman dressed to the nines for an evening date and applying more lipstick with the aid of her compact; the brightly-dressed juggler heading home after a day’s toil in street theatre. Our KGB boy sweats. Experience says it could be any one of them. But which will give the signal to out him as an enemy of the British state and curtail his freedom for good?

Behind all three candidates, a sweet old dear on a bench pack away her knitting into a tired holdall, stands and totters unsteadily across the platform, forcing First-Lieutenant Petrov to remember his ingrained manners and step aside.

‘Thank you, young man,’ the old woman rasps quietly as she passes, ‘but I’m afraid you’ve been made, Alexei.’   

Fact, fiction or somewhere in between? Popular culture would have us believe that female members of the spy world are more often that woman dressed to impress: young, slim, and lithe – think The Avengers feisty Emma Peel, Goldfinger’s Pussy Galore (plus a whole troop of ‘Bond girls’ thereafter), and even Scarlett Johannson’s modern take in Marvel’s Black Widow. They pack a punch but are, first and foremost, sexy and alluring for the screen. In day-to-day espionage, however, I’d argue the leather catsuit has a tendency to stand out a tad. Far better that your furtive member of the Security Service is of average height and weight, with non-descript features and a wardrobe from Marks & Spencer. Someone you wouldn’t glance at twice at, let alone clock their motive or the secret camera tucked in their shopping bag.

As a huge fan of spy fiction and a newbie author in this genre with Mrs Spy, I thought long and hard about what the covert world demands. My own creation of MI5 Watcher Maggie Flynn is no spring chicken: 45, slightly squat, and even on a good day would benefit from a visit to the hairdresser. At all times, she lugs around several hats and at least one half-finished knitting project, making her nigh-on invisible amid the kaleidoscopic London of the 1960’s. No-one can recall the dowdy ‘ole biddy click-clacking away in the background.

Maggie is my fiction, but she is not – as it happens - too far from reality. While history and myth have painted the celebrated Mata Hari as the archetypal female spy in her belly-dancing garb, she is in the minority. As far back as the first world war, British intelligence employed a swathe of older women to place themselves next to German railway tracks. While gossiping and knitting, they were quietly logging every troop movement or military carriage in their complex stitch pattern. The subsequent ‘coded’ sweaters were sent back to England for analysis as a bizarre form of Morse. Post-war, the East German secret police – the infamous Stasi – employed thousands of older women as ‘block monitors’, spying on residents while sweeping apartment corridors in a bid to flush out enemies of the communist ideology.

And individually, it seems, dowdy aligns with the devious. Short and stout, Daphne Park was likened by colleagues to Miss Marple and even described herself as ‘a fat missionary-type.’ She was also one of MI6’s most successful overseas spies, running agents in Hanoi, Moscow, Zambia, and the politically incendiary Congo throughout her long career, once hiding a dissident in the boot of her ancient Citroen CV. Her effectiveness was put down to her open and unassuming manner, a million miles from a sultry siren.

Similarly, eighty-seven-year-old Briton Melita Norwood caused a media frenzy when she was exposed as the Soviet’s longest-serving spy in 2017, having passed atomic secrets in the 1930’s and beyond. Later dramatized in the film, Red Joan, Melita’s shocked neighbours in her suburban street admitted they didn’t suspect a thing from the benign-looking grandmother. The list doesn’t end there: ‘mumsy’ American TV cook Julia Childs worked for the CIA, and the US’s illustrious wartime agent Virginia Hall went as far as knocking out several teeth in disguising herself as an old peasant woman, successfully dodging capture in Nazi-occupied France.

Where life leads, fiction often follows among John Le Carre’s most memorable characters in his iconic Smiley series is Connie Sachs, an ageing, eccentric alcoholic, and expert on Soviet intelligence. Brilliantly brought to life on screen by Beryl Reid and Kathy Burke, Sachs is said to be modelled on a real-life MI6 Watcher Millicent Bagot.

Inspired by this army of unassuming spooks, Mrs Spy sees my own Maggie Flynn waging her war against infiltration from both east and west, proving once again that ordinary trumps outlandish in the murky world of espionage.

Take a leaf out of Maggie’s book: if you want to blend in, be more bag lady!

 

Mrs Spy by M J Robotham, is published on May 15th by Aria/Head of Zeus, available in hardback, digital and audio. 

Maggie Flynn isn’t your typical 1960s mum. She’s a spy, an unsuspecting operative for MI5, stalking London’s streets in myriad disguises. Widowed and balancing her clandestine career with raising a Beatles-mad teenage daughter, Maggie finds comfort and purpose in her profession – providing a connection to her late husband, whose own covert past only surfaced after his death. But Maggie’s world spins out of control when a chance encounter with a mysterious Russian agent triggers a chilling revelation: he knew her husband. And what’s worse, the agent suspects someone on home soil betrayed him. As Maggie searches for answers, she’ll question everyone – and everything – she thought she could trust. In the murky and perilous world of espionage, can she outsmart those determined to keep her silenced?

M J Robotham can be found on Instagram @Robothammandy and on X @mandyrobothamuk