My book club has its December meeting tomorrow, so I thought I would pop onto the blog and share what we read for November before I forget everything. I am so glad I take notes at every meeting. For November, we had to read books set in a different time period from the books we read for October. Since the books I read for that month took place in 1912 and 2022, I decided to read more of the books in the Mrs. Pollifax series. Several of the books follow Mrs. Pollifax in the 1970s as she does courier work for the CIA. Since she didn’t start work for the secretive organization until her 60s, Emily Pollifax escapes most spies’ notice. However, she still manages to get into some dangerous situations.
I read the first book, The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax, back in May and decided I needed to continue the series. The Amazing Mrs. Pollifax follows Emily as she leaves on an impromptu mission to the Near East (Istanbul to be more precise) to try to help a defecting Communist safely leave the country. In the process of meeting up with this woman, Mrs. Pollifax collects an eclectic mix of people as they elude enemy agents across Turkey. While some parts of the story seemed unrealistic, I still had a great time reading this book. Some of the appeal of Mrs. Pollifax is the preposterous scraps she gets herself into and the ingenious ways she gets herself out again, all while wearing her signature over-the-top hats. I would like to give this book 5 stars, but the parts with the CIA guys and one of the tagalong characters had a lot of swearing in them. I do not know if this reflects the times or tries to show characters being worldly, but it often took away from the story for me. I still enjoyed this book more than the first.
I continued on with the series for November and read The Elusive Mrs. Pollifax. Carstairs calls on the talents of Mrs. Pollifax again, this time to deliver eight forged passports to Bulgaria. She goes on her mission armed with an amazing new hat with the passports concealed within it. A chance encounter with a group of traveling youth distracts Emily from her main mission when one of the young men is arrested upon their arrival in Bulgaria. Mrs. Pollifax spends her trip evading the strict travel company and unknown agents in order to deliver the passports to the underground, help the wrongfully imprisoned young man, and plotting other forbidden activities. Although less swearing pops up in this book, I did not enjoy it as much as book #2. Emily seemed more like a hardened agent and less like the naïve grandmotherly type from the other books. I still rated this book 4 stars and read more of the series.
Other books my friends read, not necessarily for the reading challenge, included:
- The Hollow Tree by James Brogden
- The Bullet That Missed by Richard Osman
- The Haunted Bookshop by Christopher Morley
- Psmith in the City by P. G. Wodehouse