Exclusive interview with author Clare Mulley and a review of her new novel about Churchill’s secret agent Claire Granville
Rating: Three Stars
By Gabrielle Pantera
“While I was researching Christine’s story in Poland, I came out of the Warsaw flat where I was staying to head off to an archive,” says The Spy Who Loved author Clare Mulley. “A German Wehrmacht officer climbed off his motorbike and came charging at me, with his machine gun in his hand. He jabbed his gun towards me and started shouting. It was terrifying.” However, it was only a reenactment, part of a TV drama being filmed.
“I thought I had somehow slipped back to 1940 or, perhaps more likely, I had simply lost my marbles,” says Mulley. “It was pretty shocking and I was nearly in tears. But Christine, part-Jewish and a British special agent, went undercover into Nazi-occupied Poland several times, and was arrested more than once, and yet she always kept her nerve and talked her way out of trouble. She was very cool, and very courageous.”
The Spy Who Loved is a novel based on the life of Maria Krystyna Janina Skarbek. Born in Poland, the daughter of a Polish aristocrat and a wealthy Jewish heiress, in 1930 she was runner-up in the Miss Poland Beauty pageant. In 1939 she and her second husband, a Polish diplomat, were in South Africa when Germany invaded Poland. They came to London, she joined the British Secret Service, and changed her name to Christine Granville. British secret service gave all their spies code names. Hers was Willing, reflecting her willingness to do anything, including to have sex, to help the cause.
Virtually unknown today, Granville was the first woman to work for Britain as a special agent in the Second World War. “Christine is believed to have been the inspiration for Vesper Lynd, Ian Fleming’s first Bond girl,” says Mulley. “But I think she is much more Bond than Bond-girl. Always center stage, successfully undertaking missions in three different theaters of the war, and saving the lives of many of her male colleagues and lovers.”
Mulley tells Granville’s story through others’ eyes. There are rich details, some fact, and some of it fiction. It would have been fantastic if the story was woven from Granville’s point of view. There’s more than enough factual detail to tell a fascinating story.
This book has inspired an hourlong TV program by The History Channel, in which you can see Mulley talking about Christine. Mulley is a biographer, and says she’s fascinated with real life stories. “My first book was a biography of the extraordinary founder of the international charity Save the Children, and is called The Woman Who Saved the Children. That won the British Daily Mail Biographers Club prize. Poland awarded Mulley the national Bene Merito medal at the Polish Embassy in London for her latest book. Universal Pictures has bought a film option on the book. Mulley has also contributed to The Arvon Book of Life Writing, and written introductions to other books.” She writes reviews for The Spectator, and History Today magazine.
Mulley lives in the ancient market town of, near Cambridge. It is only an hour from London. She spends much of her time in the archives of the Imperial War Museum and in the British Library. She was born in Luton.
Mulley’s website is www.claremulley.com and lists all her forthcoming book events on it. She tweets as @claremulley and is on facebook. On 28th of each month she writes a story for www.thehistorygirls.com.
The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville. Trade Paperback, 480 pages, Publisher: St. Martin’s Griffin; Reprint edition (May 27, 2014). Language: English, ISBN-13: 978-1250049766 $16.99
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