Exclusive interview with author Stella Rimington about her ninth novel featuring super-spy Liz Carlyle
Rating: 3 stars
by Gabrielle Pantera
“I had always been an avid reader of thrillers, spy stories, mysteries and books of that kind,” says Breaking Cover author Stella Rimington. “What struck me was that the whole genre seemed to be male dominated. James Bond, George Smiley, Lord Peter Wimsey, John Buchan’s gentlemen spies. I thought it was time to rescue the genre from the men, to have a heroine. That’s how Liz Carlyle was born.”
Rimington knows how government intelligence works, operates and how investigations are undertaken. She’s a former M15 agent, and was the first female Deputy General of MI5. Her plot idea is strong. This is the ninth book in the series.
The novel begins with civil rights activist Jasminder Kapoor being saved from a mugger by Laurenz Hansen. She gives him her number. They start dating. He’s not what he seems. When Kapoor gets a communications job at MI6 her troubles start. Meanwhile at MI5, Liz Carlyle and her fellow agents are trying to protect Russian dissident Sergei Patricov, who lives in England. Liz Carlyle faces threats ranging from terrorism to espionage and subversion. Unable to talk about what she does, she finds it difficult to form new relationships outside her world of secrets.
Rimington joined MI5 in the early 1970s by chance. “In those days British Intelligence had no formal recruitment process,” says Rimington. “Recruitment was by a tap on the shoulder, which is what happened to me when I was in New Delhi, India. I was there as the wife of a British diplomat and was targeted for a job as a part-time clerk and typist to the small MI5 office there. When we returned to London I was accepted as a full time employee and found I had joined a male-dominated organization. Women, even those with degrees and previous careers, as I had, were limited to the role of assistant to the men.”
Women at MI5 took a stronger role in the early 1970s, recruiting and running human sources, and handling investigations and operations. “Liz Carlyle is a modern female MI5 officer, who takes for granted the advantages we won for her in the 1970s,” says Rimington.
“But, she still resents being patronized by men and bites back if and when it occurs…as it still does from time to time. Liz is a sparky, sharp, intelligent woman who likes to get to the bottom of problems and is not easily deterred. But, like everyone who works in a secret organization, she has a rather unsatisfactory private life.”
“In Breaking Cover, I have moved away from terrorism, which I have dealt with before in several books,” says Rimington. Breaking Cover combines two issues which are of current concern to MI5 and Western Intelligence services in general. One, the conflict between the civil liberties with individual privacy, and the work of security agencies to monitor the communications of those who are a danger or threaten us in an increasingly complicated digital world. Two, the increasingly aggressive stance of Putin’s Russia towards the West.
Breaking Cover is the ninth in a series of books featuring Liz Carlyle. The first book in the series was published in 2004. But Rimington’s first book was her autobiography Open Secret, published in 2001. “When I first left MI5 I was contacted by several publishers wanting to publish my memoirs,” says Rimington. “I declined on the grounds that there was nothing I could write that wasn’t too secret to publish. After a few years I realized there was considerable interest, particularly amongst women in the work-life balance. I was a classic example of managing the seemingly impossible, a single parent with two daughters and a career in the secret world which was very far from a nine-to-five job. So in writing my autobiography that’s what I focused on, though its publication still caused something of a storm.”
Rimington lives in a historic village in Norfolk with her Labrador Molly.
Breaking Cover (Liz Carlyle Novels) by Stella Rimington. Hardcover: 368 pages, Publisher: Bloomsbury USA (July 26, 2016), Language: English, ISBN: 9781632865267 $31.00.
