Date and time: Tuesday 18 April, 6pm
Venue: The National Library of Scotland
Acclaimed spy novelist Aly Monroe will talk about the changing role of the spy in fiction. Drawing on her own Peter Cotton series of spy novels set in the 1940s, she will discuss writing espionage fiction that imagines the secret undercurrents of history.
Aly Monroe is the acclaimed author of the Peter Cotton series of spy novels set in the 1940s just after the end of World War II. The underpinning of the series is an examination of the post-war decline of Britain’s importance in the world as a colonial power, something the country is still trying to come to terms with today. The British were trying not to disappear in the post-war power shifts and reorganisation of the intelligence world. In 1945 the OSS was disbanded and the CIA had not yet been formed. The various different UK and US intelligence agencies were engaged in a ferocious power struggle. In the midst of this complex forging of allegiances, Peter Cotton, a young British intelligence agent, learns that your own side, and your allies, can be as harmful to you as the ‘enemy’. Aly has spoken at festivals throughout the UK, as well as in the USA, has contributed to articles for various newspapers on different spy writers and recently appeared in an Andrew Marr documentary about the history of Spy Fiction, in the series ‘Sleuths, Spies and Sorcerers’.