skygiants | (no subject)

At least a year ago and possibly two,

genarti enthusiastically recced me the Mrs. Pollifax books and sold me pretty much right away by telling me that they were about a sweet little old lady SPY. HOWEVER I nobly and valiantly held off on diving for them because I was already in the middle of two mystery series' at the time and wanted to finish them before I picked up anything else.

But now I have finished those two series, which means that it is Mrs. Pollifax's turn! And WHAT A TURN IT IS.

Basically, widowed senior citizen Mrs. Pollifax wakes up one morning and says to herself, "My life is essentially meaningless right now and I am bored of the Garden Society. What could I do to spice things up? I know! I will JOIN THE CIA."

So she books it down to Washington DC and wanders politely into the CIA building to present her resume. And the CIA, being currently rather in need of an innocent tourist type, is just like ". . . okay!" and promptly sends her off to Mexico to buy souvenirs for her grandchildren and also pick up secret documents. Hijinks, of course, ensue.

The first book, The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax, gets her LOCKED UP in a SECRET DUNGEON in ALBANIA, where she promptly befriends all the jailors and gets them to take her for nice walks and give her guidebooks. (Meanwhile, her James Bond-esque Super Agent CIA sidekick is tortured for information. Mrs. Pollifax is like 'um, sorry about that . . .') The most notable thing about this one is that I totally ship Mrs. Pollifax with the elderly RUSSIAN AGENT who helps her escape for Purposes Of His Own; in fact Gen had told me there was a series love interest and I sort of hopefully asked her if he might be it. He is not. :(

So that was fun, but I loved the second book, The Amazing Mrs. Pollifax, even more! First of all it features not one but TWO awesome elderly-lady spies, since Mrs. Pollifax gets sent to Istanbul to rendezvous with a double agent who after a long career as a femme fatale would JUST LIKE TO RETIRE if people would just stop hunting her around Turkey, jeez. Second of all, hilariously, Mrs. Pollifax has been taking KARATE LESSONS in between her Garden Club meetings, so every so often she just takes out an unsuspecting villain with a karate chop that inevitably knocks them unconscious. YES, IT IS THAT EASY. Third, instead of an Experienced Agent, her sidekick on this one is a blundering British photographer who gets tied up in the whole thing completely by accident, and makes hilariously shocked faces every time Mrs. Pollifax casually orders someone about at gunpoint or makes plans to dispose of the dead body in her car. "And you seemed like such a nice old lady!" And to be fair, she really is, it's just that she's a nice old lady who's unusually unflustered by dead bodies popping up in the back of the car. (Even her superiors are constantly like "OH NO! WHERE IS THAT POOR OLD LADY? SHE'S DISAPPEARED, AND WE'VE ONLY FOUND . . . HER FLORAL HAT." And then she pops up weeks later with a cheery note and they're like "?????")

The books were written in the '60s, and it is worth warning for occasional awkward racism - although so far it's usually been subverted - and totally unsubverted shiny-eyed sentiments about the POWER of DEMOCRACY and the EVILS of COMMUNISM. They also wholeheartedly embrace the tropes of the Globe-Trotting Adventure Novel; everywhere Mrs. Pollifax goes is very scenic and exotic and exciting. Then again, the books are largely from Mrs. Pollifax's perspective, and before becoming a CIA agent the poor woman had spent her whole life in New Jersey, so I suppose this is reasonable really.