Catch Me A Spy is the kind of oddity you come across when you are prepared for a serious spy thriller, and instead get talky romance. Intrigued by the cover, I was expecting Cold War espionage but there is little action to speak of, and is so soft it's very hard to imagine a man wrote this, never mind two: George Marton and Hungarian journalist Tibor Meray.
At a high society wedding, Jessica married her new love John Fenton at Westminster Abbey - his business as a fur trader with Russia, it's no surprise she wore a fabulous ermine cape. On their honeymoon night, John is arrested by the Russians as a spy and sentenced to 19 years in a Siberian prison. Jessica vows to try any means to free her husband, concocting a plan to discover her own spy the British could expose and turn over in exchange. Why not? Ferreting out double agents should be real easy when her Uncle is a world-famous chemist and her family friend the head of MI 5. Using society connections, she attends diplomatic balls seeking random Europeans which could fit the bill, but only manages to keep running into a tall, handsome man with piercing eyes. He is the Hungarian Naval Attache - or is he? Hard to resist with those greenish-gray, disquieting, magnetic eyes, within a day or two she has basically forgotten her husband rotting in some Siberian jail and even begins to thwart the British governments efforts to investigate her new lover, whom she has just found out is actually Kazimierz Worosilski, a Polish journalist, and maybe, also, a little bit of a Soviet agent - or is he?
Naive and sheltered, Jessica is not a modern woman of 1969. It's hard to believe anyone would enter the world of espionage by trying to speed read history books and stalk random men in parks to chance upon a spy the government doesn't know about. She spends too much time fixing her hair and wearing long frothy white nightgowns under a golden yellow silk negligee open in front, her red hair falling in heavy curls over her firm, thrusting breasts. The flash across her mind as she was being unfaithful was fleeting in that fateful, terrible, triumphant moment.
With spies on both sides following her every move, and not much action for the reader, there is a surprise twist at the finale I had no idea was coming, so, they get points for that.
This is not fun enough to be a spoof, too talky to be a romance, and lacks the momentum a thriller requires. Not bad, not great.
This was filmed in 1971 as the comedy spoof To Catch A Spy starring Kirk Douglas and Marlene Jobert, retaining only the plot point of a woman marrying a man accused of being a spy, then they wrote a new script.
1969 / Paperback / 174 pages
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