Many women worked undercover during the world wars, but we know the names of only a few. Like men in the secret intelligence services, many went to their graves never revealing their roles. This blog series highlights a few that inspired me while writing At the Table of Wolves.
Painting of Virginia Hall at work as a spy. It’s displayed at the CIA in their fine art collection.
Virginia Hall.
The Gestapo badly wanted to apprehend this American spy, sending out an order saying, “She is the most dangerous of all Allied spies. We must find and destroy her.”
Virginia Hall was infamous as “The woman with the limp,” as she had a wooden leg, the result of a hunting accident. Read More…
Born in Cairo to Hungarian parents and raised in Budapest, Marika Rokk got her start in show business in Paris, performing in the Moulin Rouge cabaret.
The first inspiration came from William Manchester’s biography of Winston Churchill. I’m especially interested in the World Wars (and their lead-ups)–times with amazing contrasts between self-sacrificing idealism and staggering villainy. I had previously dealt with the historical period of the 1850s in England and India for my fantasy A Thousand Perfect Things, and was looking for a different, largely unexplored, time period for my next fantasy.
Veteran SF/F author Kenyon turns to historical paranormal fantasy in this compelling recreation of an alternate 1936 Britain rife with espionage, intrigue, and moral ambiguities. Idealistic young journalist Kim Tavistock, raised in America but now settled into her father’s stately home in Yorkshire, grapples with the suspicion that her father may be, like many of his aristocratic class, a Nazi sympathizer. King Edward will soon abandon the throne for “that woman,” Wallis Simpson, who is herself dangerously close to Erich von Ritter, a character loosely based on the seductive real-life Nazi agent Joachim von Ribbentrop. Kenyon adds enormous fuel to this smoldering prewar scene with the bloom, a sudden appearance in 1918 of psychic talents affecting about one in 1,000 people. It’s suggested that this manifestation was produced by the mass trauma of the Great War. Kim’s psychic gift is spill, which causes others to reveal their deepest secrets to her. The Nazis are a decade ahead of the British in finding military uses for psychics, and Kim is drawn into a quixotic attempt to foil a Nazi plan for invading England, risking her heart and her life in the “tawdry, morally wretched” game of spying. Kenyon’s finely tuned historical atmospherics and her sure-handed development of even minor characters make this novel a superb adventure, worthy to launch a distinguished historical fantasy series. (July)
