M. L. Huie
Auteur de Spitfire: A Livy Nash Mystery (A Livy Nash Mystery)
A propos de l'auteur
Crédit image: Brian Mullins photography
Séries
Œuvres de M. L. Huie
Nightshade (Livy Nash #2) 1 exemplaire
Étiqueté
Partage des connaissances
- Nom légal
- Huie, Michael L.
- Date de naissance
- 20th century
- Sexe
- male
- Lieux de résidence
- North Carolina, USA
- Études
- Wake Forest University
- Professions
- journalist
university teacher
actor
playwright - Organisations
- Actors' Equity Association
- Agent
- Carrie Pestritto, Laura Dail Literary
Membres
Critiques
Listes
Debut Authors (1)
Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 3
- Membres
- 56
- Popularité
- #291,557
- Évaluation
- 4.4
- Critiques
- 11
- ISBN
- 9
Most people would find proofreading dull after those exploits, but for Livy, it’s killing her. She’s furious and bereft, and nothing can assuage the pain. However, just when she’s at her lowest, a man with an aristocratic bearing and an air of the skirt-chaser tracks her down, offering a job in “journalism.” Livy suspects it’s an elaborate ploy of seduction, but she has nothing left to lose, so she goes to the address on the man’s business card. And when her would-be employer, Ian Fleming, pushes the Official Secrets Act form across his desk, Livy signs. She won’t be writing or reporting; she’ll be spying.
Regrets follow. Fleming tells her that the Frenchman who betrayed her and their group leader, whom she loved, belongs to a network very much alive and kicking. The British want the names of agents in the network, as do the Soviets and Americans, and her assignment is to go to Paris and obtain the list. Livy wants nothing to do with the traitor, let alone aid his prospects for employment by His Majesty’s Secret Service. But she accepts the job all the same (otherwise, there wouldn’t be a novel), whereupon Fleming sends her to charm school for two weeks, to file down her sass and her Lancashire manners and accent.
Those scenes are a lot of fun. Rest assured that our heroine will learn how to drink tea properly and mingle with diplomats, but plenty of sass remains. In Paris, she meets an American agent to whom she’s attracted, but that’s a trap, so she turns down his repeated offers to work together. When he complains that they both want the same thing, so why not? Livy retorts, “Really now, me mum raised me right.”
Another pleasure of Spitfire is the story. Reversals bloom on almost every page, it seems, and bear lasting fruit. Double-crosses (or, shall we say, shifting alliances) continually force Livy to scramble, and, as a result, she gets into and causes plenty of trouble. She makes mistakes, sometimes bad ones, but her gifts for tradecraft and her extraordinary courage carry her through. The boys may think she’s just a pretty nonentity, but a few of them wind up on their fat behinds, sometimes literally.
Huie spends little ink on scenery, just enough to give a flavor of postwar London and Paris. Sometimes I wanted specific rather than generic descriptions, but dialogue and action do the work, and Livy’s voice is irresistible.
I don’t understand why Livy likes the American agent; then again, she’s shown poor judgment in her life about men. I’m also not convinced by a particular, crucial double-cross, despite the amount of space that the narrative gives to explain it. On a pickier note, I can’t stand the word “impact” as a verb — it’s business-speak — and I doubt very much whether Englishmen and -women of 1946 would have used it. But pickiness aside, I enjoyed Spitfire, and I think many readers would too.… (plus d'informations)