The Secretary follows a British woman working for M16 who goes undercover in the British embassy in Moscow, where she starts an affair with a journalist also undercover while searching for a possible traitor. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

Lois Vale is a fictionalised version of my late mother, Joy, and I wrote the novel as a tribute to her. My parents met in Moscow at the height of the Cold War, and my sister and I grew up with tales of their romance tailed by the KGB and how they would dig listening devices out of apartment walls. Her 1958 diary was a wonderful find; it was clear she had deliberately left it for us. In her 80s, she had finally admitted to me that she had worked for MI6, though I had long had my suspicions. The diary made sense of the stories she had shared and put them in context. She actually did have a German journalist boyfriend for a while in Moscow, and always spoke fondly of him. I based the structure of the novel broadly on events in the diary, from her initial train journey from Helsinki to Moscow on the night express, to her trips to Vienna and the Black Sea. Though the spy story in the novel is complete fiction, it is rooted in contemporaneous historical fact.

The characters in The Secretary are very complex. What is your process for creating such in-depth characters?

I tried to be as truthful as possible. I always had a lovely relationship with my mother and as I grew up we became close friends and confidantes. I knew, admired – wished I had – her qualities. Writing her character was a question of doing her justice. She was interesting to be with, always elegantly self-effacing and calm, with flashes of sharp humour, and conversations with her were memorable. I drew on years of remembered conversations to build the characters around her; though almost all of them are entirely imaginary, some spring from her observations of people she mixed with in Moscow and subsequently in embassies across the world, and others come from my own reading, fiction and non-fiction, about that era.  

What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?

The unsung and underestimated role of women in intelligence in the 1950s is a crucial aspect of the novel. Also the question of loyalty and betrayal: how loyalty may not be reciprocated, and how there might even be a moral component of betrayal.  

What is the next book that you are working on, and when can your fans expect it to be out?

I’m working on the third novel in the fun French cozy mystery series I write with my husband Rob under the name Serena Kent. Death in Provence and Death in Avignon came out in 2018 and 2019, so this next episode has been a long time coming, interrupted by my determination to bring The Secretary to fruition. After all the delays, I don’t dare promise imminent publication!

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