All this talk about Russian spies (the Novichok attacks in the UK, the daily revelations about Trump and the Russians, the Putin summit, the arrest of a Russian spy in Washington who infiltrated the NRA, and the final series of the Russian spy drama The Americans) has made me want to read about spies again.
Not too long ago I picked up Felony and Mayhem Press's reissue of Reginald Hill's The Spy's Wife (which was nominated for an Edgar Award in 1981, though it lost out to Dick Francis's Whip Hand) and a few Sundays ago I sat down with a cup of tea and started it. I know Hill is best known for his Dalziel and Pascoe series of police procedurals but I had never read him before.
The book opens with a housewife doing the dishes one morning when her journalist husband suddenly returns home from the train station, runs upstairs, returns with a small case, and drives off again, only saying to her, without any context, "I'm sorry." She does not know what to make of this. Half an hour later, a man rings her doorbell looking for her husband, Sam Keating, the defense corespondent for The New Technocrat. This is when she learns that her husband is a spy and has probably defected. This is a complete shock to her as she had no knowledge her husband was a Soviet spy. The agents questioning her don't believe she could be married for so long to a spy and not suspect it and as they are questioning her, in the second interesting twist in the book, Molly Keating discovers her inner spy and deflects these questions about her husband with skills she never knew she possessed.
I was expecting this story to develop into her tracking down her husband or something like that but what I got was far more (to me) interesting. Instead of turning into some sort of chase, Molly leaves her home in the southeast of England and goes up north to Doncaster and her parents (where the book starts to feel like something by Alan Bennett - which I very much liked but I suppose feels out of place in a spy novel). As she continues to deal with the British security agents who are trailing her to see if Sam makes contact, Molly finds herself having to look after her parents (her mother needs a hysterectomy and her father needs looking after as he is the sort of man who can only fend for himself at work and not at home). She also has to fend off her old fiancee, his new wife, and a journalist who is after her story before news breaks of Sam's spying and defection . Transformed by these events, she no longer acts like a timid housewife - she becomes something like a highly trained agent using the role of a housewife as cover.
After spending much of the book in Doncaster, we eventually get to the foreign chase part of the book. And a very good ending. Can't say too much more because I don't want to spoil it. On the whole, this was a very good book. Hill doesn't deliver a straightforward spy novel - instead it is something much more like a detailed look of at a woman who turns out to be married to a spy and what happens when his double life comes crashing down. I suspect most female readers would not be surprised to read a book about the domestic things women are expected to deal with but for your average male reader, this comes as a surprise. And a welcome one.
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