The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax, by Dorothy Gilman

[rachelmanija]

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)

Comments

[sholio]

I'm so glad you liked this one! I thought you would. She's got such a great inner life, especially in this book - I love her transition from depressed widow to finding out who she was really meant to be. Incidentally, the fic I've written for it only requires this book for context.

https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/works?fandom_id=134718

[rachelmanija]

Yes, I loved her inner monologue, and how while everything she did was plausible given who she was, you could see how naturally adept at spy work she was (she examines the map in the book and uses it to figure out where they are), and how her limits keep getting pushed farther and farther by circumstance (Farrell's leg is broken and the Genie is both old himself and not a trained spy either).

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.)

[sholio]

Yeah, given what kind of book it is (and especially for being written in the 60s) I thought she was really plausible as a character; her inner life is really well developed.

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.

[rachelmanija]

Hahaha. Yes, I do. I have no idea why it only works sometimes when I do it the exact same way every time.

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.

[sholio]

I have a vague feeling that I read Tightrope Walker a number of years ago, but I don't actually remember anything about it. I'll have to see if the library has it! They do have a bunch of her books.

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.)

[julian]

Gosh, that was fun. Thanks for the link (and the writing of it).

[sholio]

Thank you! :)