My penchant for the spy novels of John le Carré, the crime fiction of Philip Kerr, and so on has been enhanced since I learned of the real and tragic story of Noor Inayat Khan, as well as the SOE and Ravensbrück.

A gripping fictional portrayal of espionage in World War Two Is

• William Boyd, Restless (2006)
  (well reviewed here, and Q&A session).

Here’s the opening:

When I was a child and was being fractious and contrary and generally behaving badly, my mother used to rebuke me by saying “One day someone will come and kill me and then you’ll be sorry”, or, “They’ll appear out of the blue and whisk me away—how would you like that?”, or, “You’ll wake up one morning and I’ll be gone. Disappeared. You wait and see.”

It’s curious, but you don’t think seriously about these remarks when you’re young. But now—as I look back on the events of that interminable hot summer of 1976, that summer when England reeled, gasped for breath, pole-axed by the unending heat—now I know what my mother was talking about. I understand that bitter dark current of fear that flowed beneath the placid surface of her ordinary life—how it had never left her even after years of peaceful, unexceptional living. I now realise that she was always frightened that someone was going to come and kill her. And she had good reason.

It was only in 1976, in the genteel setting of Oxford, that Sally Gilmartin finally felt compelled to make a series of revelations to her daughter Ruth, confiding her true identity as Eva Delectorskaya, who had worked as a spy for the British during the war.

Eva’s family had fled Russia upon the 1917 revolution, from St Petersburg and Vladivostok on to Tientsin, Shanghai, Tokyo, Berlin, and Paris. In 1939, while living in Paris, Eva was recruited for the British Secret Service, and trained at a secret mansion in Scotland, “an eccentric boarding school” for spies where she learned about codes, how to drive, shoot a gun, forge documents, tail suspects and evade those on her trail, and to speak like a young, middle-class, privately-educated English woman.

Warned by her suave mentor and boss Lucas Romer never to trust anybody, nonetheless, in wiki’s mot juste, Eva does indeed fall for him. After a mission in Belgium goes badly wrong, the plot thickens further in London. On the eve of Pearl Harbor, amidst the shifting, labyrinthine agendas of the German and Soviet secret services, Eva is part of a British mission concocting propaganda to persuade the USA to join the war—under cover of innocuous institutional fronts in New York and Washington, leading her to a gory betrayal in New Mexico.

Returning bereft to New York, finally trusting no-one, Eva makes an assignation in a cartoon theatre:

She waited two hours for Morris at the theatre, sitting in the back row of the near-empty cinema, watching a succession of Mickey Mouse, Daffy Duck, and Tom and Jerry cartoons interspersed with newsreels that occasionally contained news of the war in Europe. “Germany’s war machine falters at the gates of Moscow”, the announcer intoned with massive, hectoring insistence, “General Winter takes command of. The battlefield”. She saw horses floundering up to their withers in mud as fluid and gluey as melted chocolate; she saw exhausted, gaunt German soldiers with sheets tied around them as camouflage, numbly running from house to house; frozen bodies in the snow taking on the properties of shattered trees or outcrops of rock: iron-hard, wind-lashed, unmovable; burning villages lighting the thousands of Russian soldiers scurrying forward across the icy fields in counter-attack. She tried to imagine what was happening there in the countryside around Moscow—Moscow, where she had been born, and which she couldn’t remember at all—and found that her brain refused to supply her with any answers. Donald Duck took over, to her relief. People began to laugh.

Moving on to Canada, after Pearl Harbor she makes her way back to England. Shocked by further sinister betrayals, she carefully constructs a new identity:

It took her a day or two to calculate how it might just be done. In bombed-out London, she logically supposed, people must be constantly losing everything they owned. What did you do if your block of flats collapsed and burned while you were cowering in your basement shelter in your underclothes? You stumble out, dressed in pyjamas and dressing-gown, into the dawn after the “all-clear”, to find that everything you possessed had been incinerated. People had to start again, almost as if they had been reborn: all your documentation, clothing, housing, proofs of identification had to be re-acquired. The Blitz and now these night raids had been going on since September 1940, over a year, now, with thousands and thousands of dead and missing. She knew black marketeers exploited the dead, kept them alive for a while to claim their rations and petrol coupons. Perhaps there was an opening for her, here. So she began to scan the newspapers looking for accounts of the worst attacks with the biggest number of casualties—forty, fifty, sixty people killed or missing. A day or two later names would be printed in the papers and sometimes photographs. She began looking for missing women about her age.

Sally/Eva’s new domestic mask seems to have ensured her safety, but in a tense dénouement she enlists her daughter to confront the threat.

As the novel alternates the voices of the two women, the period detail is evocative, both for the war years and for 1976 Oxford (hire-purchase, malls, buskers, Hare Krishna, glue-sniffing punks). Ruth, a single mum, teaches English to foreigners—including Hamid, whom she later spots at a demo against the Shah. A sub-plot involves Ruth’s own relationship with Germany, with a vignette on the Red Army Faction.

Here’s a trailer for the all-star BBC TV adaptation of Restless (2012):

For those of us who grew up churlishly dismissive of our parents’ drab lives, neither knowing nor caring much about their personal stories, with our mutual “don’t talk about the war” pact, it makes an intriguing fantasy. I still have to assume my mother’s backstory wasn’t as colourful as that of Eva.

For crime fiction, see e.g. novels set in China, North Korea, Germany, Tibet, Russia, Hungary, LA (The big sleep, Bosch), and among the Navajo.