The spy who loved too much

Normally, I wouldn’t bother to write about a mediocre book, but this is a rather special mediocre book.

Not much of a spy novel...

It’s called The Mystery of Tunnel 51, and the action’s set in British India in the 1920s. I write ‘British India’ not because I think India was ever British – it was always Indian and never more than under British administration – but because the main characters of the novel clearly thought of it that way. They are engaged in a bitter struggle to protect the British Empire against an implacable foe, in this case the ‘Russian Soviet’. It has somehow managed to build a huge network of ‘Bolshevik’ agents inside India.

That’s one of the threadbare tropes of the novel: creation of a paranoid atmosphere in which the ‘enemy’ is everywhere, with huge power to deploy its Machiavellian plots. This leaves the British administration out of account, though it would have given Britain a huge head start when it came to countering a foreign power’s intelligence activity.

But the book is full of clichés. The Bolsheviks turn out to be fiendishly cruel; fortunately, they are up against a couple of British agents who are fiendishly clever. So clever, in fact, that their leader, Sir Leonard Wallace, is able to see through all their diabolical subterfuges and turn them to defeat, usually at the eleventh hour. Sadly, he’s not quite clever enough to put the prisoners he captures under proper guard, so again and again they either escape or get themselves rescued by their dastardly accomplices.

This Wallace isn’t a mere agent. He is the Director of the ‘Intelligence Department’ back in London. Why the director is out in the field directly involved in a counter-intelligence operation thousands of miles from home isn’t made entirely clear, but who are we to question such decisions?

What kind of a man is Wallace? I’m sure it’ll come as no surprise to discover that he’s something of a superman. He’s not particularly tall and quite slight in build. He’s of extraordinary strength despite the build and despite having lost an arm – naturally, in the service of his country. Above all, he is supremely intelligent, always able to think himself into other people’s minds and be, in consequence, several steps ahead of them, wherever they may be going.

In addition, he’s a man of irreproachable domestic habits. His wife was, naturally, one of the most striking beauties of London, and the family they have built together is exemplary:

…with all her beauty, Lady Wallace was clever, sweet and charming, and she was as popular with her own sex as she was with her men friends. She adored her husband, as he adored her, and they were consequently an ideally happy pair, who jointly worshipped their small son Adrian, a merry little fellow of six.

The irony here is that the book is by Alexander Wilson. The BBC made an excellent series about his life, called Mrs Wilson. Some of the inspiration came from his granddaughter, the actor Ruth Wilson. As well as being one of the executive producers, she also plays her own grandmother, Alison. This, incidentally, produces a wonderful moment when Ruth Wilson, as her grandmother, meets a girl playing her.

Alexander dies in the first episode. After his death, and while she is preparing his funeral, Alison starts to make some puzzling discoveries about his past. In particular, she finds out that not only was she not the first Mrs Wilson, but also that Alexander had never divorced the woman to whom he was married when they met. Nor, indeed, was that woman his first wife – there was another before her, and she too had never been through a divorce.

So Alison quickly establishes that he had been a bigamist and then some. A trigamist? Nor was that the last of it, for towards the end of the series, a fourth wife appears who was also, to her knowledge, still his wife.

A quadrigamist?

Alexander Wilson: writer of sorts, spy of a kind, husband too often

In addition, Alexander Wilson was a genuine spy, who had worked for MI6. But then things had taken a strange turn. He had gone bankrupt, he had been gaoled for theft and, as Alison finds out, he had worked as a hospital porter. Was this all cover for his heroic work in the British secret service? Certainly, he always maintained that he was forced into some strange forms of existence to allow him to do his secret and dangerous work for the good of Britain and its Empire.

Except that MI6 doesn’t see things that way. Not all the papers on his case have been declassified yet, but what has been released suggests that he had been fired by the secret service as a result of having fabricated intelligence about the Egyptian Ambassador to London.

This may not come as much of a surprise, but it turns out he was quite the fantasist.

Unfortunately, the imagination on which he drew may have been fertile but it wasn’t particularly creative. Hence his mediocre Mystery of Tunnel 51. And a bunch of other novels I won’t be bothering with.

By the way, the novel ends as it should. I’m sure that’s not a spoiler as you are assuredly aware that such a book cannot end with anything but a British triumph. In any case, I’d be astonished if after this description you’d be inclined to read it. The ‘Russian Soviet’ is defeated and British rule in India is once more on a rock-firm basis set, no doubt, to last a thousand years. Which is ironic, since the book was published in 1928, just nineteen years before the British Raj came to its blood-soaked and ignominious end.

The TV series, on the other hand, is excellent. I strongly recommend it.