Spy caper set in Swinging 1960s London

16th May 2025

Mrs Spy by M J Robotham, spy caper set in Swinging 1960s London.

Maggie Flynn is not your average MI5 spy. She is the mother of a teenager, she lives with her own mother. Her husband has died. She trails people of interest across London and files reports. She is a “Watcher”. One day she is given a job looking after Yuri (not his real name but then she tells him that she is called Nova). He is a safe house behind Tottenham Court Road and undoubtedly a Soviet spy. He reveals something to her that knocks her off balance, information about her husband that only someone who knew him directly would be able to reveal. And as she mulls over the significance of her new information, she knows that there is something here that needs her scrutiny.

Buy Now

And thus she and Frank, her doughty companion, set out on quite the adventure.

Setting is well researched in terms of time and place. There is the buzz of Beatlemania, the shops along the King’s Road make a vibrant outing for Maggie and her daughter (pop in to Mary Quant’s Bazaar ..”with all its vibrancy, colour and the carefree chatter of females with money in their pockets…“). Her daughter is desperate to get tickets to see the Fab 4, can Maggie oblige?

The early 1960s were a hotbed of spying activity. The Cold War was raging, Burgess and Maclean had been outed as British Intelligence officers spying for the Russians, and the Profumo affair was still rumbling on. In the Author Note, Robotham shares details of the TV programmes that fuelled her enthusiasm for the era via re-runs of TV programmes like The Avengers, The Saint, the Man from U.N.C.L.E.

A very well paced and entertaining novel of espionage intrigue, set firmly in the 1960s, and it is beautifully transportive in terms of time and place.

Tina for the TripFiction Team

Buy Now

Join team TripFiction on Social Media:

Twitter (@TripFiction), Facebook (@TripFiction.Literarywanderlust), YouTube (TripFiction #Literarywanderlust), Instagram (@TripFiction) and Pinterest (@TripFiction) and BlueSky(tripfiction.bsky.social) and Threads (@tripfiction)

Subscribe to future blog posts