I am currently reading (and thoroughly enjoying!) Black Roses by Jane Thynne. It tells the story of a young actress called Clara Vine who travels to Berlin in 1933 in the hope of being cast in a feature film and becomes involved in a circle of Nazi wives including Magda Goebbels. She meets an undercover British intelligence agent called Leo Quinn and is recruited to spy on her new friends. Clara is soon caught in the battle between duty and love. The publishers approached me to ask if I would like to host a day of Jane's Black Roses blog tour and the answer was a resounding YES! Below Jane explores the rise of the females spy, I'm sure you will agree it is fascinating stuff!
FEMALE SPIES
When I was
at university, one thing everyone secretly hoped for was the discreet tap on
the shoulder from an aged tutor - the legendary invitation to sherry that was
supposed to signal a job offer from the British secret services. Stories
abounded as to just who had received the call – a Bulgarian girl in my year who
spoke seven languages was said to have been approached – but it never happened
for me. Nowadays, though, the covert
sherry invitation is way out of date. Current recruitment for MI6 takes place
via full page national newspaper advertisements, and the one thing they make
abundantly clear is that the intelligence world is not an all-male preserve.
The most recent advert bears a picture of a sexy, twenty-something woman
sitting in a café with a cappuccino, with the caption, ‘As for the white, male
stereotype, the truth is we don’t care what sex you are.’ |
| Jane Thynne |
In film and
fiction too, the female agent is having a field day. Characters such as Carrie
Mathison in Homeland, Eva Delecktorskaya in William Boyd’s Restless, and the
CIA agent Maya in Zero Dark Thirty, are all part of a surge of interest in
women spies, not to mention non-fiction accounts of SOE heroines like Christine
Granville, Churchill’s favourite spy. As part of my research I asked certain
people ‘who should know’ whether there was any quality that made women
especially suited to espionage, and they told me that women’s superior powers
of empathy are exceptionally useful when it comes to recruiting and
communicating with agents in the field.
Yet none of
this occurred to me when I wrote Black Roses! Set in 1930s Berlin, my heroine,
Clara Vine, is an Anglo-German actress who is drawn into Nazi high society and
comes to spy on them. The book came about because I was always fascinated by
the Nazi wives, and how it would feel to be married to a man who gradually
became a monster. The wives were close up to the action, they were privy to all
the feuds and gossip, of which there were plenty in the Third Reich, and they
had some pretty dramatic secrets of their own. It was stumbling across the
explosive secret of Magda Goebbels, wife of Hitler’s Propaganda Minister, that inspired
me to write the first in the Clara Vine series.
And the idea
of a woman like Clara spying on the private lives of the Third Reich wasn’t
far-fetched. Pre-war, there were several English visitors who moved freely in
German high society and agreed to spy on their hosts. They performed a very
valuable service because British intelligence had been caught
on the back foot by the Nazis’ seizure of power, being up until that time
totally obsessed with the threat of Communism. The British establishment was
divided, and while many senior figures like Winston Churchill realized the
threat of the Nazi regime, others were intent on keeping Britain out of
Hitler’s European wars. So the information which those visitors to Germany
brought back about Hitler’s true intentions was invaluable.
As a
novelist, I discovered that an actress/spy also proves the ideal protagonist,
both because the metaphor of role-playing is an obvious one for a spy, but also
because espionage involves those same qualities of close observation and
heightened perception that writing does. It could be said that all writers, in
a way, are spies, carrying their secrets close throughout the
narrative, observing the way people speak, and act, and conceal their feelings,
and above all trying very hard to weave a convincing tale.Thanks so much to Jane for taking the time to write this feature and to Rik at Simon & Schuster for arranging this. Please check out the rest of Jane's blog tour below:
