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This oddly cozy spy thriller has some similar qualities as Gilman’s The Tightrope Walker: crisp writing, a sheltered and depressed heroine discovering that both her life and her own capacities are far greater than she imagined, and a generous view of humanity despite a fair amount of murder and mayhem.
Mrs. Pollifax, a sixty-something widow with grown children, is quietly depressed. Her life lacks meaning, and also lacks joy. Taking inspiration from an unexpected question from a doctor, she shows up at the CIA and suggests that they hire her as a spy; due to a conglomeration of coincidences and accidents, they actually do hire her, but as a one-time-only courier for a mission which requires someone who absolutely cannot be recognized, and which shouldn’t be dangerous. Needless to say…
While dated in some ways, it’s more due to language than worse things; the large of array of non-American characters generally prove to be a lot more individual and less stereotypical than one might expect. Like the Indian guru in The Tightrope Walker, they all have their own quirks and agendas, all the way down to the cameo by a family of Albanian goat-herders and their herd of goats that Mrs. Pollifax reluctantly hides within.
The sensible, not quite unflappable but certainly hard-to-flap Mrs. Pollifax is a great character, and it’s an immense pleasure to see her in a sequence of escalating dangers in which she is both a fish out of water and a fish who was always meant to be in water, and never got a chance till now.
This was delightful and I am delighted to know that there’s plenty more where it came from.
The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax (Mrs. Pollifax Series Book 1)
Mrs. Pollifax, a sixty-something widow with grown children, is quietly depressed. Her life lacks meaning, and also lacks joy. Taking inspiration from an unexpected question from a doctor, she shows up at the CIA and suggests that they hire her as a spy; due to a conglomeration of coincidences and accidents, they actually do hire her, but as a one-time-only courier for a mission which requires someone who absolutely cannot be recognized, and which shouldn’t be dangerous. Needless to say…
While dated in some ways, it’s more due to language than worse things; the large of array of non-American characters generally prove to be a lot more individual and less stereotypical than one might expect. Like the Indian guru in The Tightrope Walker, they all have their own quirks and agendas, all the way down to the cameo by a family of Albanian goat-herders and their herd of goats that Mrs. Pollifax reluctantly hides within.
The sensible, not quite unflappable but certainly hard-to-flap Mrs. Pollifax is a great character, and it’s an immense pleasure to see her in a sequence of escalating dangers in which she is both a fish out of water and a fish who was always meant to be in water, and never got a chance till now.
This was delightful and I am delighted to know that there’s plenty more where it came from.
The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax (Mrs. Pollifax Series Book 1)
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She also wrote a whole bunch of kids' books, most of which I have never found, and a bunch more standalones like _The Tightrope Walker_. I really liked _Thale's Folly_ and _A Nun In The Closet_, which doesn't mean the others aren't worth it. _The Clairvoyant Countess_ is a fixup of some short stories about, well, a clairvoyant countess, and ISTR that _Kaleidescope_ is about the same person.
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https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/works?fandom_id=134718
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Thanks for the links! Ooh, they look great. I will see if I can transfer them to my Kindle via USB. For some bizarre reason that only works about 40% of the time. (For others: normally I email files, but that unexpectedly just stopped working.)
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Re: Kindle - AMAZON, WHY ARE YOU SUCH A CLUSTERFUCK. Incidentally, I have had a zillion more issues with my new Paperwhite than with my old first-gen Kindle. The first-gen one crashed on me maybe once or twice; the new one, I have to reboot every few weeks because it won't wake up.
If you drag files over by hand, do you go ahead and put them in the nested folder where all the book files live? I've never had that not work on mine, but Kindle being what it is, it wouldn't surprise me if it suddenly stopped working, either.
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Re: new Paperwhite: fuuuuuuck. I will eventually have to but a new one and I am not looking forward to this.
Re: Mrs. Pollifax: did you read The Tightrope Walker? If not, you should read it. It's even more like that.
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Overall I have actually been happy with my new Kindle, but I'm still keeping the old one for now. I'm also annoyed that all my folders didn't transfer over when the new one synced with Amazon and downloaded my stuff, so everything is a giant mess that I haven't cleaned up yet. (I also had the old one just EAT my folders one time when I accidentally let the batteries run down to 0, which was also very annoying. At least the books were still there.)
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I'm so glad!
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Different author, different century, but you might also be amused by All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses an Eye by Christopher Brookmyre. (A really good contemporary Scottish crime/thriller author, with a couple of spin-off SF novels, his backlist is only recently showing up in the US kindle store.) This one may actually be his Mrs Pollifax tribute novel, if Mrs Pollifax was a modern Glaswegian granny who got mixed up with freelance spies and creepy international arms dealers because of a taxi pick-up gone wrong; luckily it's a stand-alone, so you might be able to stop after just one ...
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she is both a fish out of water and a fish who was always meant to be in water, and never got a chance till now
Yes! :D I love that she's on the one hand entirely naive (and earnest and eager!) about all this craziness in the spy world, but on the other hand she's not stupid and she's not even slightly unobservant, and she actually has quite a lot of relevant experience because she's been handling small crises while raising children and running a household and volunteering for decades. She has a pretty sophisticated view of other people, in terms of considering "would this insult their dignity" or "I wonder if they're thinking X right now", and her own emotions are really well-drawn. She feels real, and sympathetic, and heroic but in an approachable way. And also hilarious and brave. I loved the parts about how she'd always been rebellious and irrepressible in her own way (that line from her son about how she hadn't done anything surprising or explosive for a while and he was getting worried about her!) and the bit about how she'd never been good at submitting.
She's slightly Tookish, basically. I just really liked her, and am not sure I've met a protagonist quite like her before.
The CIA setup and the way it brushes up against awful shit in Latin America made me go :/ at times, but more because I knew there was shit going down (that the CIA was doing) that neither the author nor the character would have known about. So it's not the author approving of all that, it's just the CIA as an excuse for ridiculous spy shenanigans.
I hope the Albanian lady likes the jacket and gets lots of use out of it. :D
(And I've got the next two books too!)
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The Albanian lady got the jacket AND the purse! I'm sure she'll keep them well away from the goats.
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Where else was that lady going to end up with a Guatemalan jacket? Those things are gorgeous (and probably v. useful in Albanian winters too). I imagine she knows all about keeping things away from goats (and their smell).
Hilariously, in the next book, Mrs P is thinking back on all this as a great lark. I'm like, don't you remember how insanely difficult that escape was??? But maybe the memory draws a kindly veil over these things afterward. :P
I do wonder if she'll run into Farrell in later books again. (Poor guy! He survived so much shit. Which is another interesting thing, that this book manages to be cozy and friendly while some pretty epic bad stuff goes down. It's an interesting combination, and I think makes Mrs Pollifax's general morals and kindness stand out and seem more serious?)
*sleepy and tipsy and should go to bed, but yay!*
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That is a great description of Mrs. Pollifax.