An Unlikely Agent

Jane Menczer

Polygon, £8.99

Review by Alastair Mabbott

IF YOUR tastes run to old-fashioned Buchanesque stories pitting plucky Brits against scurrilous foreign agents threatening to bring down the established order, Jane Menczer has just the thing. Her debut novel, An Unlikely Agent, opens in 1905 to show us spinster Margaret Trant, who lives with her ailing, crabby mother in a London house shared with several other lodgers and a sullen landlady.

Margaret and her mother have gone down in the world since the death of her father. For the past 10 years, she has been working for a Mr Plimpson as his secretary but Plimpson announces that he is having to sell up and move to new premises in Deptford. Knowing that her mother would never contemplate moving out of St John’s Wood, Margaret reluctantly resigns and starts looking for a job nearer home.

A series of strange and not at all coincidental circumstances direct her to a secretarial post at a secret government organisation called Bureau 8. A spying outfit with its own homespun charm, Bureau 8 is made up of a slightly eccentric assortment of characters presided over by an avuncular chief. Having inherited a taste for detective stories from her father – she keeps crime magazines hidden under a floorboard in her bedroom – and sometimes fancying she sees indications around her of mysteries begging to be investigated, this is a dream job for Margaret. Although her work is at first mainly restricted to typing out coded messages, it’s a once in a lifetime opportunity to let her inner secret agent break through her shell of timidity and indecisiveness.

At the point she joins their ranks, Bureau 8 is preoccupied with the threat posed by a secret society known as the Scorpions, which had flourished in the 1880s and now appears to be making a comeback. In the course of their investigations, Margaret gets the chance to show that she’s made of the right stuff. But, as bombs go off and witnesses disappear in a flurry of cyphers and secret symbols, a disturbing trend emerges. Margaret realises that many of their lines of enquiry lead back to her employer, Mr Plimpson, and even her late father.

After a certain point, it becomes clear that Menczer is not one for red herrings or extraneous plot threads: every character, every detail, is going to be tied into the main plot somehow. Though this does rather limit the number of surprises she can pull off, and threatens to turn the latter part of the novel into a box-ticking exercise, it doesn’t significantly impair the enjoyment. There’s a lot of fun to be had in finding out exactly how it all fits together and in watching the novice spy gamely fumble her way through her first case.

A few violent scenes aside, it’s charming piece of work. Even the word “damn” is censored, and the Bureau 8 team, with their refusal to employ methods involving “inhuman ruthlessness, brute force and crude manipulation”, seem a quaintly old-fashioned intelligence service even by the standards of 1905.