6/21/2023 0 Comments Red Joan by Jennie Rooney![]() ![]() But this "whydunnit" generates plenty of suspense as well. ![]() "What drew me," Rooney explains as we talk in the top-floor bar of a West End hotel with a bird's-eye - or spook's eye - view of the city below, "was the actual story, not the genre of espionage fiction." She hopes that Red Joan "will be interesting to people who would normally say, 'I don't read thrillers.'" It will. Basically, she was saying that I had my reasons and that I would do it again if those same circumstances were to arise." "I just remember it so clearly: those pictures of her standing on the doorstop and saying - sort of - that she wasn't sorry. Jennie Rooney, as a Cambridge University history student who dived into the turbid archives of 20th-century intelligence under the guidance of MI5's official chronicler Professor Chris Andrew, read Norwood's story. Unmasked in files brought to Britain by defector Vasili Mitrokhin, the unrepentant "granny spy" was spared prosecution on the grounds of age. Melita Norwood had, over four decades after 1937, used her routine office job at the British Non-Ferrous Metals Association to pass classified information to the KGB and the previous Soviet agencies. In 1999, the 87-year-old "spy who came in from the Co-op" opened her front door in south London to face the waiting media. ![]()
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