bloodygranuaile | Entries tagged with spies

The last book in my Ben MacIntyre mini-marathon for 2024 was Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal. This one brings us back to the ‘40s and World War II espionage stories, aka the good stuff. It is the story of Eddie Chapman, a career criminal turned spy turned double agent, and the general chaos he wreaked.

Eddie Chapman grew up at loose ends, was in the Coldstream Guards for a hot minute that he spent mostly being disciplined, started hanging out in Soho doing check forgery and other petty thievery, joined a gang of cat burglars called the Jelly Gang (so called because they used gelignite to break safes), and was eventually imprisoned in Jersey in the Channel Islands. During his imprisonment, Jersey was occupied by the Germans. Eddie and his buddy Tony Faramus, a hairdresser and petty criminal from Jersey, both ended up in a German prison in occupied France, where they offered to spy for the Germans as a means of getting out. The Germans took Eddie up on the offer, but not Tony, who disappeared deeper into the German concentration camp system over the years and was eventually liberated from Mauthausen-Gusen in Austria.

Eddie Chapman was then trained in spy stuff by a rogue’s gallery of Abwehr officials, the least monstrous of whom were old-fashioned German aristocratic snobs who thought Hitler was uncouth, and some of the rest of whom were fanatical Nazis. None of these people had the goddamn moral courage to actually resist Hitler’s regime, of course, no matter how much they seemed to want credit for finding it tacky. At any rate, Eddie developed what seems to have been a genuine friendship with his immediate spymaster, a highborn broke layabout named von Groning, although Chapman knew him only as Dr. Graumann. This friendship did not even a little bit prevent Eddie from spying on his spymaster as best he knew how, and running immediately to MI5 the second he was parachuted into England. From there he was carefully coached in transmitting all sorts of interesting disinformation mixed with harmless real information to the Abwehr. He had predominantly been tasked with blowing up a factory that manufactured Mosquito bomber planes, and with MI5’s help, was able to stage a fake explosion that successfully tricked the German reconnaissance planes into thinking the factory was toast and the Brits would start running short on Mosquitos any day now. Eventually he took an adventure-filled route back to Axis territory, spent some time in occupied Norway, got parachuted back to England, and fed his German masters more interesting disinformation. Unfortunately for Eddie, he eventually ran into that one thing that almost no person with a job is able to indefinitely withstand: a manager that really has it out for you. When Ronnie Reed was sent to liaise with the Americans, Chapman’s new casemaster had it out for him from Day 1. It took a while to maneuver Eddie into a situation where the rest of MI5 would go along with closing the case, but the little prig did, eventually, get Eddie sacked, at which point the war was nearly over and Chapman promptly returned to a life of crime and general shady business.

While this is certainly one of those books in which everyone seems sort of insufferable, it is no doubt grade A spy shenanigans.

In addition to the obligatory yearly pirate book I have a couple other genres that are rapidly becoming my Lakeside Reading Subjects, and one of those is shaping up to be “spy shit.” Last year I read Agent Garbo, about the prolific misinformation agent Juan Garcia Pujol, and this year I decided to get over my fear of “What if it isn’t as good as Operation Mincemeat” and dig into the other Ben MacIntyre book I own, which I’d picked up at a Harvard Book Store Warehouse Sale back in 2017: A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal.

Kim Philby is, apparently, the most impressive double agent in the history of spycraft. He was recruited as a Soviet spy as a college student and somehow managed to hide that he’d ever been involved in anything more left-wing than a bit of canvassing for the Labour Party, feigned a swing rightward after graduating, got himself hired as a journalist covering the Spanish Civil War, and then was old-boys-clubbed right into MI6 at the outbreak of World War II, where he not only fit right in but was considered a rising star. His star rose so high, in fact, that he became the head of British counterintelligence against the Soviet Union once WWII was over and the Cold War started in earnest. From this perch, and via his close personal friendships with other counterintelligence officers in MI6 and the CIA, he was able to almost singlehandedly fuck up every major British and American operation against the Soviets through the forties and into the fifties.

A Spy Among Friends is not a straight biography of Philby; it is almost as much a biography of Nicholas Elliott, Philby’s best friend in MI6. It is predominantly a book about friendship, and about friendships between spies, and the ways in which those friendships work (and, sometimes, don’t work). It’s also, of course, a story about some incredibly privileged and overpowered British gentlemen of the old school, and the way that the old British establishment worked to create this new crop of spies.

The result here is that it’s not really a book about politics or history–if you don’t already have a basic grasp of the European history of that time period, or what spies do, or the various ideologies at play, MacIntyre is not going to take the time to explain it to you–but more of a psychological study of MI6’s officers and culture, with the narrative history of the friendship between Philby and Elliott as its main case study. Personally, I found this a fascinating angle, but your mileage may vary. Rich British people at the height of the Empire were incredibly fucked up in ways that I think are very interesting, but I could hardly fault anyone else for being less than interested in plumbing the psychological depths of a class of people who have already been the center of attention in world history for so long. But I do think the look at the old boys who were doing such hyper-clandestine work is a worthwhile one for what it says about the effects of secrecy on people and the human limitations of suspicion and operational discipline.

Things get really interesting when a bunch of MI5 guys quite rightly suspect Philby but, importantly, 1) don’t have any proof and 2) are clearly also caught up in a resentful McCarthyite mindset that sees Reds under every bed. To top it off, Kim’s wife, Aileen, has basically figured out that he’s a Soviet spy, but she’s also got severe Munchausen syndrome and there’s only so many times she can ineptly make up “evidence” that he’s a Red, like claiming he’s run off to Moscow when he actually just went to the beach and was back home the next morning, before it really does become entirely sensible to discount her opinion as proof of anything. Thus, the bitter fight over the first round of Philby accusations–which basically operated as a test of how much each side would be embarrassed over a blowup–has a really interesting mix of predictable ranks-closing and class solidarity with a fairly solid argument that the folks accusing Philby should probably come up with something resembling a case against him if they wanted to put everyone through the ordeal of bringing a case against him, which, at that point, they hadn’t got. The absolute paranoia that consumed people on both sides of the fight when, several years later, the vague, unsubstantiated, and obviously resentment-driven suspicions of Philby turned out, in this one specific case, to actually be borne out turned into a real clusterfuck.

I feel like I had more to say here but I don’t have the book on hand to look through to jog my memory, as I left it behind in Maine so my dad could read it. I should get around to reading more of MacIntyre’s stuff; both books of his I’ve read have been really engaging.

I’m not reading as much YA these days as I used to, but my ace book club (yes, more book clubs) is reading Rosiee Thor’s debut YA sci-fi Tarnished Are the Stars, the premise of which seemed like a fun adventure read: court intrigue, spies and rebels, dangerous (or at least illegal) technology, lesbians, steampunky clockwork stuff in space. And it did in fact have all that, plus an aroace character (hence why the book club was reading it), and it was reasonably fun and entertaining. But I had some trouble really getting too into it, and I can’t tell how much of this is a “me outgrowing YA” thing and how much is just a “debut novel is a bit amateurish” thing, but bits of it just seemed underdeveloped/under-edited to me. Some of the language was a bit overwritten--not just in terms of overexplaining the emotional stuff in an occasionally maudlin way, which is pretty standard for writing aimed at younger readers, but also I distinctly recall early in the book running across a sentence that started with “Her gaze snapped to…” and being like “F, I hate it when people’s gazes/eyes/ocular jellies do things instead of the people just looking at stuff, is this whole book gonna be like that” and it wasn’t entirely but it was enough to keep me from really sinking into it. There was also some plot stuff that seemed sort of slapped together; there was some figuring out of riddles and clues that seemed less like solving and more like jumping to conclusions that happened to be correct (although the worst of these did turn out to be incorrect, which was nice), and I have some questions about the practicalities of the sneaking-around and avoiding-security that probably stem from me having too much personal experience in that field (there is realistic poor/uneven security and there is Well That’s Extremely Convenient poor/uneven security, and I regret that I can tell the difference). The assorted moral questions about identity and power and leadership were addressed in ways I felt were a bit heavyhanded, but the morals themselves are unobjectionable (I really cannot agree harder with lessons like “loyalty isn’t really a virtue if you are being loyal to absolutely terrible people”). Overall it was an entertaining steampunk adventure, a decent way to spend 3 hours of a rainy long weekend, but I would probably not especially recommend it to anyone unless they had some pretty specific asks like “Do you know any space adventure stories that are about heart disease?”

For reasons vaguely related to my new NaNoWriMo project that I hadn't actually expected to start writing anytime soon, I finally read Nicholas Rankin's Ian Fleming's Commandos: The Story of 30 Assault Unit in WWII, which I picked up at the Harvard Bookstore Warehouse Sale last year.

It took me a little longer to get through than I'd like, partly due to my being very busy and partly due to the writing being a bit drier than ideal, but I still finished it... about three weeks ago now, meaning it's not nearly as fresh in memory as it should be for me to be writing a review. It's been a busy few months.

This book is partly a biography of Ian Fleming but mostly a biography of the 30 Assault Unit, the Navy commando unit that he administrated in World War II, and a thorough cataloging of the things in the life of the 30 Assault Unit that were later used in the James Bond novels. It doesn't have as much of a strong narrative throughline as most of the other WWII spy books I've read, since it doesn't focus on an individual operation (the gold standard of WWII spycraft books that I've read thus far is still Ben McIntyre's Operation Mincemeat), and it doesn't quite focus on Fleming's life or career arc either, since there's so much great other stuff that was done by the rest of the 30AU and the Navy's intelligence operations generally. But it's still a really informative look into a lot of very cool stuff about WWII-era spycraft and especially counterintelligence--a main focus of 30AU's work was "pinching" machinery and documents that would allow the codebreakers at Bletchley to listen in on German messages. Near the end of the war, they also recovered a huge amount of the Third Reich's administrative documentation, which would prove invaluable in the aftermath of the war for figuring out what had gone on and proving it in the Nuremburg trials.

Despite being a little disorganized, it was a good read that I would definitely recommend for other people interested in that sort of subject.

I started reading Elizabeth Bear's One-Eyed Jack: A Novel of the Promethean Age a little over a year ago, in the bathtub at Mohegan Sun.

It has taken me so long to finish the book not because it wasn't good, but because I have only read it in the bath — sometimes at casinos but also sometimes not, otherwise it would have taken me even longer, especially considering the last casino I stayed at only had a shower. My copy is now very water damaged.

Anyway. I had picked One-Eyed Jack for my casino bath reading because it's about the spirit of Las Vegas fighting to keep his city from being annexed by the spirit of Los Angeles, so it seemed topical.

There are actually two spirits (or genii) of Las Vegas: the One-Eyed Jack, who has one normal eye and one magical eye he keeps hidden under an eyepatch; and the Suicide King, otherwise known as Stewart, who seems to have a magical ability to kill himself and then resurrect again. Jackie and Stewart are boyfriends in addition to sharing the job of genius of Las Vegas. This seems like it would break a lot of workplace regulations but it looks like being a magical symbol isn’t a very well-regulated field considering all the other stuff that goes down in this book.

Jackie and Stewart eventually form a coalition with several interesting characters, including two ghosts of different John Henrys, some "media ghosts" of unnamed TV spies, and vampire Elvis (though this vampire Elvis is very different from the vampire Elvis of the Sookie Stackhouse books). The antagonists include Angel (the genius of Los Angeles, in the form of a young ingénue), a character known only as “the assassin,” a Promethean Mage, and the ghost of Bugsy Siegel.

I was a bit confused about who precisely all these people were, since I am not much up on my ‘60s TV spies — nor on my Las Vegas history, really, although I do at least know who Bugsy Siegel is. But once I got used to identifying the spies by their descriptors instead of names, it was all easy enough to follow.

The book takes place mostly in 2002, and as is usually the case, I still find it a bit jarring to realize how long ago the mid-2000s were and how much it really was a different era — it makes me feel old — but it’s impossible to miss because stuff in Vegas changes so fast that, even without ever having been there, I know a bunch of the properties mentioned in the book have since shut down and new ones opened; also, Jackie wears black leather cargo pants because he is terribly cool, and it’s become hard to remember that there was a time when cargo pants really were cool and not just a shorthand for sartorial laziness. Other bits of the book take place in 1964, because that’s when all the media ghosts come from. The time travel isn’t flashy; it just sort of happens—there’s enough ghosts in the story already that visiting the ghost of 1964 isn’t that big a deal.

Since this is a spy story I don’t want to talk too much about the plot but suffice to say that, in keeping with the general theme, it, like a game of poker, features long stretches of quietly waiting and thinking about things (I don’t believe poker is ever boring) interspersed with moments of high drama that vastly change the dynamics at the table. (Poor Angel spends the first three-quarters of the book chipping up relentlessly only to spew off her entire stack in one dumb play. Been there done that; it’s awful.) All the disparate threads and meticulously solved riddles finally come together near the end to put a fast-paced and deceptively simple end to the conspiracy.

One of the unifying principles of how magic works in this book is that it relies very heavily on symbolism and stories and beliefs, reminding me a lot of Discworld if the Discworld books were about twelve thousand percent more serious. Genre savviness is important for our heroes to figure out what is going on. Gaming-related symbolism abounds, which is fitting, because gaming-related symbolism abounds in English writing anyway, only this time it’s all looked at a lot more closely than usual.

Like the other Elizabeth Bear books I’ve read, this was pretty weird and I think I’d have to read it again to figure out some of the weird stuff I didn’t get the first time around, but I’m probably not going to because I have at least three unread Elizabeth Bear books on my shelf at the moment. I always like her stuff but it tends to end up taking me a lot longer to get through than I think it’s going to.

I recommend it to anyone who likes metafictional genre-savvy stuff. Pairs well with a Lush bath bomb, a nice hotel room, and an adult beverage.

As the most recent dictator of the newly installed rotating dictatorship for my writing group's book club, I decreed that the next book we'd be reading after Sorcerer to the Crown would be Seth Dickinson's The Traitor Baru Cormorant, which was just published this fall and which I had heard enthusiastic, if vague, good things about. It promised a lot of political intrigue--which it delivered, in spades.

The premise of the story is that young Baru Cormorant lives in a nice little tropical island society that is taken over by a foreign power called the Imperial Republic, colloquially known as the Masquerade, because its agents wear masks when acting in official capacities. The Masquerade seems to be based largely on the early modern European empires that conquered most of the globe from the 1500s through 1900s, but keyed up to be even more sinister, with four centuries of stuff happening within a generation or two and every element of chaos that marked real-world colonialism reworked as a deliberate and calculated act of empire. The Masquerade is powerful not so much for its military might--although it has that, relying most heavily on its Navy--but also because of its more insidious weapons: bureaucracy, cultural annihilation, plague, trade, paper money, racism, sexism, repressive mores of sexual purity, and eugenics. Also citrus juice and salt.

In case you are not getting the picture yet, this book is about colonialism. And not just regular levels of about colonialism, either; this book is SUPER ABOUT COLONIALISM. It is about, like, all the colonialism that has ever happened and how and why.

It is unsurprising, therefore, that it is also largely about money.

It used to be something of a given that fantasy books were terrible about money. Everything cost One Gold Piece when you remembered that people are supposed to pay for stuff occasionally; where that piece came from was rarely explained much; characters were generally either Poor or they were Noble (and therefore rich) and this difference was illustrated largely through lifestyle. Lately, this has been changing. Huge chunks of the A Song of Ice and Fire books feature discussion of debts and budgets; Tamora Pierce's Beka Cooper books deal much more with everyday realities of living paycheck to paycheck than her earlier books did; The Hunger Games deals explicitly, if not in super mathy detail, with Panem's mercantilist economic system and how it keeps the Districts poor and the Capitol rich. I want to say that ever since the global economic crash, finance has featured more heavily in all sorts of genre fiction as being a thing that is Big and Dramatic and Dangerous and Will Fuck You Up. It is also just possible that I am reading better, more thoughtfully written books now that I am older than I was in 2008 and have less tolerance for stories where Stew just pops up out of thin air.

Either way, The Traitor Baru Cormorant is pretty much the fantasy book the most about money that I've ever read. Baru, after years of diligent studying in the new Masquerade schools that are definitely not based on the U.S. and Canada's boarding schools for Native American children at all, is made the Imperial Accountant to another of the Masquerade's colonies, a clump of squabbling duchies known collectively as Aurdwynn. Being Imperial Accountant is a very important post because money is very important. Being Imperial Accountant of Aurdwynn is tough because Aurdwynn has a tendency toward rebellion, and Baru needs to put down the latest brewing rebellion--using the power of the purse--to prove that she is worthy of going to Falcrest (the home country of the Masquerade) so that she can learn everything about power and accumulate it for herself, a thing she wants to do because she wants to be able to liberate her homeland from the Masquerade. Baru is deeply committed to the idea that the best way to destroy the master's house is from the inside with the master's tools; unsurprisingly, the Aurdwynn rebels disagree, and whether or not it's possible to do so is one of the driving questions in the book.

The other driving questions in the book at any given time are 1 "Is the power of money more or less powerful than (insert whatever else the other person is using)" and 2 "What the hell side is everybody on," something that just gets more and more complex as the book goes on, all the way to the last page. By the end of the book it's not entirely clear what all the sides are, and I don't want to go into it any more than that, but there are so many layers of intrigue that I think I'd have to read the book again knowing what I know now to double-check if it all makes sense or if there are plot holes, since at the moment I've just been turned around too many times. It's a very intricate, literary sort of book; in this instance, I'm using "literary" to mean that basically all the characters are terrible, the main character included, and everyone is very serious all the time, and the role of the individual within nearly any social issue you care to name is explored (spoiler: the individual is always miserable). The only character who makes any jokes is Baru's secretary, Muire Lo, who is very understatedly following in the wonderful tradition of the dryly sarcastic butler type.

I think this'll make fun book group discussion fodder because of all the THINGS HAPPENING that I can't really go into here because spoilers. For the moment, though I have two last random thoughts:
1. I like that the Masquerade's sexist bullshit is a seamless mix of real-world sexist stereotypes and the opposite of real-world ones. The Masquerade is all like "Women are given to abstract thought, so they're less emotionally stable and also better at navigating and mathematics." Sounds at least as vaguely plausible as the shit we believe!
2. Scurvy features heavily in this book, which would be great and all grounded 'n' stuff except that I listened to the Sawbones episode about scurvy like a week ago and it's a terrifying creepy disease and every time the book mentions it my teeth and toes hurt. Aieeee. Drink your orange juice, kids.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Hamilton soundtrack

A few weeks ago I had the delightful experience of seeing Gail Carriger at a tea party/book signing at the Brookline Public Library, where I picked up the newest installment of her delightfully madcap steampunk Finishing School series, Waistcoats & Weaponry.

In this one, Sophronia Temminick and a number of her companions plot to escort Sidheag Maccon, Lady Kingair home to her werewolf pack in Scotland, after The Thing happens with Lord Maccon that we had learned about in Alexia’s series, where he goes off to become Alpha of Woolsey. Before this, of course, there is a masquerade ball where, among other ridiculous things, all the household mechanicals go nuts and begin to sing “Rule, Britannia!” and Sophronia gets accidentally secretly engaged to Dimity’s younger brother Pillover.

Over the course of the action-packed adventure to Scotland, in which Sophronia, Sidheag, Dimity, fashionable twit Felix Mersey, and sootie Soap steal a train full of crystalline valve frequensors and their old enemy, vampire drone Monique. They run into diverse problems they must overcome, including low fuel, flywaymen, Dimity’s lamentable lack of cross-dressing savoir-faire, and Felix’s father. In between climbing things, hitting people, and practicing her espionage, Sophronia also has to deal with a lot of tangly difficult mental and emotional issues, such as the obligatory love triangle she’s got herself stuck in with Soap and Felix; whether she wishes to accept Lord Akeldama’s patronage when she finishes; and trying to figure out what the vampires, the Picklemen, the mechanicals, and other interested parties are up to.

My biggest issue with this book is the sad lack of Genevieve Lefoux. No book should fail to have at least a cursory Vieve cameo in it. There had better be some Vieve in Manners & Mutiny.

Carriger seems to get a bit deeper into the numerous shitty social issues of Victorian society with each books, and the results are often kind of awkward, although I think they’re supposed to be awkward. But the fact remains that the stuff that affects the protagonists directly (mostly sexism, although in Alexia’s case there’s also anti-Italian prejudice) is less awkward to read than the stuff that affects other characters and it’s the protagonists who put their foot in it, which happens with some frequency, as the protagonists for both series are straight white gentry ladies. Sophronia’s handling of her obligatory love triangle between Felix and Soap is particularly uncomfortable, because Soap is obviously ten billion times more awesome than Felix, partly because he is a pretty cool dude and partly just because he isn’t Felix.

As usual, the best part about this book is really neither the plot nor the social commentary, but the delightfully absurd language. The worldbuilding is so whimsical it makes Harry Potter look like gritty contemporary realism, and everything has beautifully ridiculous names, both of which reach their epitome in Sophronia’s illegal pet mechanical mini dachshund, Bumbersnoot, who eats coal and occasionally is forced to go undercover as a lacy reticule. Everyone goes around saying things like “I don’t know who you are, but I respect the courage of any man who goes around wearing satin breeches that tight” which I don’t think is an actual thing you were supposed to say in polite Victorian society but who cares. It’s basically complete fluff, but it’s complete fluff with steel-bladed fans and teen girls kicking the asses of pompous adults, which is definitely my favorite kind.

I can’t wait for the fourth one already, especially since I am still very concerned about Professor Braithwope’s mental health.

Today in “utterly delightful things,” I started reading Gail Carriger’s Finishing School series the same way I began reading her Parasol Protectorate series—in a cute rustic cabin in Maine. Her stuff really is grade-A vacation material—light, fluffy, and hilarious.

The Finishing School series is a YA series that takes place in the same universe as the Parasol Protectorate series, perhaps some thirty years earlier. The first book, Etiquette and Espionage, follows fourteen-year-old tomboy and klutz Sophronia Angelina Temminick as she is packed off to Madame Geraldine’s Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality, or Quali-Tay, depending on how annoyed the speaker is. Sophronia soon discovers that she is a “covert recruit”, which basically means that she didn’t know about the true nature of Mademoiselle Geraldine’s until she got there. The true nature, of course, is that the young ladies of quali-tay are actually being trained in espionage and subterfuge, of which “learn all the expected social graces of proper useless ladies” is an important part of their cover.

At finishing school, Sophronia makes friends, such as the bubbly Dimity—descended from a line of evil geniuses, but who actually wants to just be a regular proper lady—and a younger Sidheag Maccon, Lady Kingair (who is, if possible, even more awesome than in the other series), and Sophronia makes enemies, such as the beautiful but absolutely petty Monique de Pelouse, a senior who got demoted to debut after Sophronia had to rescue her during her “finishing” assignment. Monique has also hidden something known only as “the prototype,” and they keep getting attacked by flywaymen who want it, so Sophronia takes it upon herself and her friends to figure out what the prototype is of and where it is hidden.

If you know anything about Gail Carriger’s other novels you know there will be at least one dandy vampire, at least one hot werewolf, some dirigibles, and a lot of food. All these are indeed here in abundance. There are also a lot of robot maids and butlers. I really, really want a robot maid, by the way. I refuse to do all the cleaning for three adults myself, but it’s wildly annoying to come home every day to three people’s worth of mess. (Ideally the other two adults would clean but we’re only fifty years or so into that societal revolution, so I can’t really plan on that for the next several decades, apparently.)

The novel also continues Carriger’s gift for comedy-of-manners style absurdist humor, mimicking the affected tone of the best in awkward Victorian humor.

There is also a mechanical sausage dog called Bumbersnoot.

Underneath the seemingly random assortment of awesome nonsense, this is a good solid entry into the tradition of fun, feminist-friendly YA books that I am particularly devoted to. The secret agent finishing school setting provides an opportunity to have lots of different female characters with lots of different opinions on what they want to be doing with their lives, and in which they are encouraged to get up to all sorts of interesting doings of stuff. (This includes one girl who is not a student—a nine-year-old Genevieve Lefoux, niece of mad scientist teacher Beatrice Lefoux. Vieve is already cross-dressing and already having fabulous taste in hats.) Sophronia also breaches questions of class and race when she makes friends with a bunch of the sooties, the working-class boys who run the engine room in the enormous dirigible that constitutes the school. The head of the sooties and possible romantic interest for later in the series is Soap, a Black boy from South London who is always up for Sophronia’s ill-advised adventures and engages in friendly street fighting with Sidheag.

Overall this was the sort of book that makes me want to make friends with the author and have tea parties with her, although I’d be worried about not making the tea well enough. Alternately, I’d love to attend Madame Geraldine’s, although I’m not sure how good I’d be at the fighting stuff (I am terribly bad at fighting) and I might be too Irish to really be considered “of quali-tay.”

At any rate, it is time to check out the sequel, Curtsies and Conspiracies!

A few weeks ago I broke my streak of not blowing all of my disposable income on books, and acquired a rather large stack of volumes over the course of one weekend. I put it to the Internet which I should read first, and the Internet wisely selection Ben MacIntyre’s Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory.

The subtitle here is not kidding when it calls Operation Mincemeat a bizarre plan. It is very, very bizarre. The short version is that it was a plan to dump a body off the coast of Spain carrying fake documents that would then be passed to German intelligence. The fake documents were to state that the Allies were gearing up for major invasions of Greece and Sardinia and pretending to plan an invasion of Sicily. This would then draw German defenses away from Sicily and towards the other targets, allowing the Allies to plan and invade Sicily like they wanted.

This plan came out of a small, extremely top-secret room in the British intelligence system, and involved a lot of improbably happenings and an extremely colorful cast of characters. The endless parade of deeply strange people is probably my favorite aspect of this book, to be honest—you couldn’t make these people up if you tried. Many of them were very good at making up other people, though, including the fictional soldier Bill Martin.

Something that I probably should have known already but didn’t, is that a rather large chunk of people involved in intelligence and spying during the world wars then went on to write mysteries and spy novels. This includes the creator of the fabulously unrealistic James Bond, Ian Fleming. Apparently, spying in the first half of the twentieth century was much crazier than spying in the second half of it, because John le Carré these dudes were not.

Ian Fleming may have actually been the first person in British intelligence during World War II to bring up the idea of planting documents with a dead body, although such a “haversack ruse” had been used in World War I as well. But Operation Mincemeat specifically—the plan to spread disinformation regarding the invasion of Sicily—was thought up and developed predominantly by two men, Charles Cholomondeley and Ewen Montagu.

Montagu is the somewhat more prominent character in this book, although it is stressed that he and Cholmondoley were pretty equal partners in cooking up the scheme—Cholmondoley was much more secretive of a person, though, and never talked about his part in the scheme to other people even after the war ended. Montagu, however, was the author of the “official” government version of the affair that was released after the war—one in which Cholmondeley was referred to by a pseudonym at his own request—and a lot of the “new” information in this book comes from Montagu’s personal papers. I was quite okay with Montagu being at the fore, though, because he makes a great protagonist. I also developed kind of a history nerd-crush on him. A perfectionist workaholic with a flair for dramatic storytelling; a lawyer who loved arguing, had no patience for pomposity, and could appreciate a good lie; co-founder of the Cheese Eaters League at Cambridge; this middle son of a wealthy Anglo-Jewish banking family is fabulously entertaining to read about and eminently likeable. His sense of humor comes through in all his personal and official documents, and occasionally got him in trouble in court. His family was nearly as colorful as he was—his wife Iris spent the war in New York secretly running anti-Nazi propaganda through the front of “British passport control”; his brother Ivor was a committed Communist and Soviet spy. Ivor was also a table tennis nut, to the degree that MI5 thought that the table tennis thing must be some sort of sinister front, and managed to miss all his actual spywork because they were so busy trying to figure out what the table tennis thing was covering up.

Other fun characters include coroner Bentley Purchase, who obtained the dead body used in Operation Mincemeat and who had the cheerfully morbid sense of humor that you find among forensics people; Jock Horsfall, a myopic car-racing fanatic who refused to wear glasses and helped transport the body to Scotland in the middle of the night (almost crashing at least twice), and Bill Jewell, the suicidally brave captain of the storied submarine Seraph. Part of the reason this book goes on for 400 pages even though the plan itself took only a few months to put together is that Ben MacIntyre doesn’t skimp on giving us wacky anecdotes and humorous character sketches about everyone we run into—the undertaker who helped smuggle the body, the pompous forensics expert consulted on what kind of corpse was needed, a whole network of German and British and Spanish spies in Huelva, agents in other aspects of British intelligence that planted supplementary information to make Mincemeat look believable (including the amazing story of Agent Garbo, who started counterspying for Britain on his own volition well before Britain actually hired him to do so), the War Office secretaries, and various soldiers, spies, generals, and civilian aides, both real and fictional. An alternate title to this book could have been Was Everyone In the Forties Weird or What? Some readers might find this a bit meandering; I found it all wildly entertaining.

I would recommend this book highly for people who like their nonfiction highly detailed and somewhat wide-ranging; people looking for a concise narrative of only the most important bits should probably just read the Wikipedia article on Operation Mincemeat. This reads almost like a novel, although one of the more leisurely-paced ones stuffed full of worldbuilding and backstory that tends to characterize fantasy more than the spy novel these days.

When I was at Readercon over the summer, I attended a panel where Scott Lynch introduced himself as the author of the “increasingly non-fictional” The Republic of Thieves. Knowing absolutely nothing about the Gentlemen Bastards series or the whole thing where the publication date of this book had been pushed back by a few years, I assumed that The Republic of Thieves must be some sort of political dystopian book about, like, corruption and oligarchy and banking fuckery, or something.

I was extremely confused when I first figured out what the Gentlemen Bastards series actually was.

Oddly enough, it turns out that The Republic of Thieves largely is about corruption and oligarchy and using massive amounts of money to illegally bork up elections, but simultaneously, that was the most wrong I was about anything that entire summer.

To start with the basics: The Republic of Thieves was published in October. It is the third book in the Gentlemen Bastards series. It is exactly 650 pages long; you could kill someone with the hardback. But you wouldn’t want to, because the cover art is too sumptuous to get blood on. Also, my copy is personalized and autographed, so nyah nyah.

The book opens with Locke dying a horrible bleedy death due to the poison he was given in Red Seas Under Red Skies, and he’s even more of a whiny, suicidally self-pitying mess than he was at the beginning of that book. Jean is again doing the If You Die I’ll Kill You Myself angry caregiver thing, and does a fabulous bit of psychoanalyzing Locke (he diagnoses him with a death wish, complete with awesome German-analogue name for it).

Locke is saved from his horrible bleedy death at the dramatic last minute by a Bondsmage of Karthain, one of the terrifyingly powerful band of sorcerers who have been messing with Locke and Jean ever since they mutilated the Falconer. This Bondsmage lets us know that there are political factions within the Bondsmage society, and she is of the team that has not been the one actively fucking with Locke and Jean. She is also the Falconer’s mother. She offers to unpoison Locke in exchange for Locke and Jean helping the political party backed by her faction win a majority of seats in the upcoming elections for the Konseil, Karthain’s governing body.

The opposing party also has a shady campaign advisor backed by the opposing faction of Bondsmagi. The shady campaign advisor turns out to be Sabetha Belacoros, former Gentleman Bastard (or Gentlewoman Bastard), the one and only lady Locke has ever had any sort of romantic interest in. She is also the only lady who has ever been able to trounce Locke in trickery, thieving, and general rogueishness—essentially, she is his Irene Adler, but with more swearing.

The book switches back and forth between this storyline and “Interludes” from Locke’s youth, mostly involving a summer when all the Bastards, now in their mid-teens, are sent off to an absolute clusterfuck of a theatrical company in Espara in order to learn ACTING. They put on a rather fabulous-sounding ancient Therin play called The Republic of Thieves, about a prince who is sent to put down a crime ring and instead falls star-crossedly in love with its fabulous lady-thief leader, Amadine the Queen of Shadows, and nearly everyone dies. During this summer, Locke and Sabetha have an awkward and bickering-filled start of a romance while working together to build like four different elaborate cons in order to keep the clusterfuck of an acting company operating.

As usual, all of the cons in both timelines are completely delightful—heavy on both fast-paced action and sneaky cleverness, with plentiful side helpings of wonderful swearing and insults. It’s one of those books where the main distraction is trying to stop and memorize lines for future use. (The second main distraction is stopping to drool over the food and then go get a snack and a beer.) (In completely unrelated news, I am mysteriously out of beer.) The entire GB lineup falls squarely into the Loveable Rogues category, but they are all distinct (and distinctly fun) characters.

Especially Sabetha.

I admit that, as we’ve only seen Sabetha as Locke’s Mysterious Red-Headed Fixation Object so far, she would turn out to be a flat or Manic Pixie Dream Girl-ish type of character. I should not have worried. Sabetha is a great character—she’s courageous, but entirely aware of (and, yes, afraid of) the dangers that she and the other Bastards face. Like Locke, she’s incredible clever and skilled in various kinds of shenaniganry, and, like Locke, this doesn’t prevent her from getting into real, interesting conflict and trouble. She’s much more socially aware than the rest of the Bastards in certain ways—she’s got an excellent grasp of the GB power dynamics, for example—and, as a result, she’s deeply cranky and suspicious of everyone and everything. She’s incredibly bitchy and difficult in a way that speaks to me on a deep level. Some of this has to do with what is basically exhausted cranky feminism; more personally, Sabetha is extremely choice- and agency-conscious and is extremely wary of ideals of fate, inevitability, destiny, etc. in romantic love. She is unwilling to get pinned down into a relationship just because That’s How It Works or The Universe Says So or whatever. The result of this is that she keeps running away from Locke and then I am sad for Locke because he is our awesome viewpoint character but at the same time I am like “I feel u, girl! Go have adventures!” Also, I think for a lot of properly socialized ladies, and particularly shy ones like me, there is an element of power fantasy in bitchy lady characters. The fantasy of freely telling people what you think of them without stopping to deflect and minimize conflict at every turn is an alluring one. (Witness the popularity of the Dowager Countess Grantham even amongst very liberal women, despite her being an archconservative entitled bigot.) (Plus, fantasizing about being an asshole is much less dangerous to one’s health than, say, dating the tactless dude assholes who say all the things you’re too nice to say to people.) (This is your official answer to Why Do Nice Girls Date Assholes. You can stop asking now.) ANYWAY, BACK TO SABETHA. She is not above using Feminine Wiles™ to con people if that’s how they would most effectively be conned, and she doesn’t apologize for it, but it’s not her only trick. She curses just as delightfully as the rest of the GBs. She can apparently rig an election like nobody’s business. You guys, I am like this close to making an Honest Book Copy submission for this book just because I think the current copy does a weaksauce job of wibbling about how awesome Sabetha is.

There is also a cute but sadly small cameo by Regal the ship’s cat, which was still enough for my own cat to develop an absolute vendetta against this book, and she spent the better part of three days constantly maneuvering to sit on the pages so I could not read them. I have pictures.

The book ends on the OMINOUS NOTE of a deeply dangerous and complete assbag of a character being not as dead or disempowered as we had previously thought, so I’m sure The Thorn of Emberlain will contain lots of excitement in the form of creepy painful things happening to Locke and everyone around him. CAN'T WAIT.

We're on to the part of the journey were things get weird--Queen Tammy here stops writing in quartets. Fetch my smelling salts!

In this case I think it works because you can really only let spy stories get so big before they become either slow and unsurprising or too complicated to follow. So two books works well for the Trickster series, otherwise known as The One About Spies.

Our heroine in this series is Alianne of Pirate's Swoop, only daughter of legendary Alanna the Lioness, who is now crabby and middle-aged, and former Rogue King of Corus George Cooper, now Baron of Pirate's Swoop. Aly is clever and very into games and puzzles and winning and that sort of thing, and since her daddy is King Jonathan's chief undercover agent and her granddaddy Miles of Olau is his chief spymaster, this means that Aly has been learning to break codes and other fun spy stuff since she was in the cradle. Aly basically enjoys spy stuff and goofing off and that is it, leading to many family conversations like this;

ALY'S PARENTS: You're a grown-up now and you should pick a career.
ALY: I want to be a spy!
ALANNA THE KING'S CHAMPION, PROFESSIONAL HAVE-PEOPLE-TRY-TO-KILL-YOU-ER: No! That is dangerous.
ALY: Fine then, I my career is to goof off and have fun.
GEORGE AND ALANNA: No really please pick a profession, any goddamn profession at all EXCEPT SPY.

After one too many of these conversations, Aly goes sailing until she feels better, and is promptly captured by pirates and sold into slavery in the Copper Isles. The Copper Isles is a massive political clusterfuck of a country, with serious tensions between the raka (native Islanders) and the luarin (descendents of the white people who conquered the Isles three hundred years ago), and a lot of laws designed to disempower and punish the raka for pretty much everything, a highly unstable monarchy (there's insanity in the royal line but it's an absolute monarchy so when the monarch has a breakdown there's nobody who can make them get treatment... this is not even their main problem), a large slave economy (slaves can be of any race, which makes things even more complicated), a large mixed-heritage population (which does nothing to ease the tensions between the raka and the luarin), and a bunch of other stuff. To top it all off, there is a divine element in the conflict, with the original patron god of the Isles, the Trickster god Kyprioth, planning to take the Isles back from the luarin gods Mithros and the Great Mother. Aly is one of his chosen tools to accomplish this.

This is where things get a little awkward as it is kiiiiind of a Special White Person Rides In And Saves All The Brown People From The Bad White People story, although it does deviate from your basic white-guilt-assuaging Pocahontas or Avatar storyline in a couple of important ways. Aly is not the general/leader of the raka rebellion, nor is she their candidate for queen--she has a specific set of skills, in this case her extensive spy training, and she becomes part of the rebellion strictly as its spymaster. The rebellion has several raka leaders and their candidates for Queen are half-raka and half-luarin, descended from royal lines on both sides, in accordance with an old prophecy. Aly also doesn't really do the "switching sides because she's so enlightened that she realizes she's on the side of the Bad Guys"--she's not connected with the Island luarin ruling classes; Kyprioth pretty much just yoinked her out of a totally different country and gave her an assignment. She also doesn't marry the mysterious-brown-people's chief's beautiful daughter or whatever; she instead hooks up with A DUDE WHO USED TO BE CROW. Which means he looks like a grown-up guy but HE IS ACTUALLY THREE. I think Tamora Pierce wrote up this romance to shut up everyone who was complaining about how Alanna and Daine each ended up with dudes several years older than themselves. That said, Nawat really is kind of adorable, because he is a Tamora Pierce Sassy Animal, and they are the best.

I think I would feel more comfortable with this series if there were more viewpoint switches and it didn't use Aly as Our Viewpoint/Bridge Character. Even though that actually kind of makes sense on this one, because readers, regardless of our real-life ethnicities, will probably be more familiar with Tortall and with Aly's fabled parentage than we will with the Copper Isles, since they are made-up places and Tortall is the one that there are other books about. But I still think that a more ensemble-cast approach might have benefited this story just to make it smell a bit less Great-White-Savior-y.

That complaint aside, YAY SPY REVOLUTION! I do love me a well-done spy story. And this one is well-done indeed! There are badass teenage girls and multiple conspiracies in varying degrees of seriousness and all sorts of politics and there is lots of Women Being Friends And Allies With Each Other and there is even An Awesome Stepmother, which I appreciate, because stepmothers are not always evil and this is rarely acknowledged in stories. Also there are Sassy Animals and lots of clever dialogue, as usual. I think I have been insufficiently appreciative of Pierce's clever dialogue in my past, and I will seek to incorporate more of her lines into my life.