Books: The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax (1966)

"Mrs. Pollifax is an elderly widow who has come to find life dull and is almost ready to end it all out of sheer boredom. Inspired by a newspaper profile of an actress who began her career in later life, she decides to fulfill a childhood ambition and apply for a job as a spy at the CIA. Meanwhile, Carstairs at the CIA is looking for an agent who can pass as a tourist in order to pick up an important microchip in Mexico City. Due to a slight confusion, he thinks Mrs. Pollifax is one of the candidates and decides that Mrs. Pollifax is ideal; Carstairs decided this assignment carries so little danger that even one who is relatively untrained may be sent. So with minimum explanation, Pollifax is ushered off to Mexico City in Mexico to meet a bookstore owner/secret agent, exchange code phrases, leave with a book containing the microfilm. Of course, the courier mission does not go as planned, and Mrs. Pollifax finds herself in a prison in Iron Curtain-era Albania, facing harsh questioning and possible torture"

While I admit I have always been familiar with Dorothy Gilman’s Mrs. Pollifax novels (she wrote 14 of them, spanning the 1960’s through 2000), I never thought of them as spy novels, just your everyday murder mysteries featuring an aging widow in the vein of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple. But as I was doing research on Donald E. Westlakes Forever and a Death (which led me to A Spy in the Ointment), I stumbled upon a site that is dedicated to Westlake written by many of his long-time fans. The blogger talked about spy novels and referenced Gilman’s Mrs. Pollifax, which was released in the mid-1960s at the height of spy genre era. So I got a used copy, just to see if it was anything I might like. I found the book okay and but it’s completely unbelievable (but that was the magic of early to mid-1960s), as there is no way any agency CIA or FBI, would send such untrained octogenarian into such an unstable element that was returning micro film (a McGuffin straight out a Hitchcock film) from Mexico.

Still, The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax has some charm to it. Mrs. Pollifax is just the kind of grandmother anyone would love to have –very resourceful, intelligent, somewhat sly, and, who just happens to a secret CIA operative.  If taken as a complete fantasy, the book works (even as Gilman inserted a lot of real-life historical anecdotes about the country of Albania, Russia, and China), but over fifty years later, the magical aspect of how the book gets going made me roll my eyes.