★★★★☆ If Virginia Hall was fictional, she would not be believable

A Woman of No Importance

Sonia Purnell

Fiction writers operate under certain constraints. Their characters and plots have to be believable. Pile the implausible too high, and critics and readers will complain. (Mea culpa.) Reality is not thus constrained. Thus, Virginia Hall, an American spy, a tall striking redhead who speaks French with an American accent, and has a wooden leg that she calls Cuthbert, who organizes Resistance forces in occupied France during the Second World War, and who assembles and leads a force of about 1000 Maquis (rural guerillas) that defeat the Germans and drive them out of Le Puy before the Allied invasion reaches it. (Cuthbert seems so gratuitous. I would shout to the heavens about a fictional spy with a wooden leg. But Virginia was real, and she really had a wooden leg, and she really called it Cuthbert.) And this is only one of Hall's exploits. Before that she was the Limping Lady of Lyon and the Abwehr and Gestapo were obsessed with her, but never managed to catch her.

Virginia wanted to be a diplomat, but the State Department had no use for a woman in any role other than secretary. She had spent happy years in France and, when it was occupied by the Nazis, wanted to help. At this time the SOE was trying to come online. SOE was a brainstorm of Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill -- its operatives were supposed to go into France (and other places) and wreak havoc. The higher-ups at SOE were not enthusiastic about hiring a woman (an American with a wooden leg, to boot), but they were, honestly, finding it almost impossible to find anyone, male or female, who might do the job. Virginia's US citizenship was an advantage, since the USA was formally neutral in 1940, and Virginia could enter France as a journalist.

And she was good! God, was she good! She was a sort of anti-James Bond. That is, in all the many ways that James Bond would have made an absolutely terrible spy, Virginia was his opposite. Sonia Purnell tells this story from her days in Lyon

As they chatted away in French, she was friendly, charming, and complimentary, and put [Peter] Churchill at his ease until in conversation he uttered the word “Angleterre.” She interrupted him midsentence to explain that he should never “name that place when we wish to speak of it. Instead we say chez nous—at home. The other word is apt to attract attention.” She delivered her rebuke in the same calm tone as before to avoid alerting the neighboring diners but there was no mistaking her seriousness. Churchill could not help noticing the smile had gone and a telling weariness had appeared in her eyes.

She was repeatedly let down by Bond-like male colleagues who thought too highly of themselves and who, not to put too fine a point on it, couldn't keep it in their pants.

Eventually she was exposed (brûlée -- burned, as they said in the biz) and had to flee France. She escaped through a snow-filled high mountain pass, keeping Cuthbert secret so that her guides wouldn't abandon her, her abused stump a bleeding open sore and Cuthbert's rivets working lose. From a hut on the pass she sent a now-legendary message to London, “Cuthbert is being tiresome, but I can cope.” She coped.

SOE would not send her back into France, since she was now thoroughly brûlée. She therefore made a lateral move to the OSS, the USA's new imitation SOE, whose head, "Wild Bill" Donovan, admired her. It was on this OSS mission that she mobilized the Maquis in Le Puy. After the war she moved to the CIA, which underused her because she was a woman. Her post-war story is sad.

A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II is not a novel. It is not even novelesque. It is nonfiction and Purnell is carefully factual. There is very little dialog (the conversation with Peter Churchill I quoted above is one of the few exceptions), and the tricks a novelist uses to engage interest in a story are not used. We are seldom or never told what Virginia thinks or feels. Having learned the hard way that loose lips could be fatal, Virginia was always secretive and closed off. Purnell's careful research (extending to interviews with many intelligence operatives and even arranging for the declassification of some of Virginia's files) is impressive, but her writing is dry and detached. The excitement has to come from the facts.

Really fascinating. In the right hands Virginia's story would make such a good spy novel, or even a series of novels. In the meantime, this nonfiction account will have to do.

A Woman of No Importance on Amazon

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