Tinker Tailor Schoolmum Spy by Faye Brann

Licensed to kill but in thrall to the PTA, a choice between full-time home-making and a return to her former career in espionage faces Victoria Turnbull. After unwittingly passing an ‘audition’ at her friend’s paintball party,  she is recalled to active service and sent on refresher courses to update her technology skills and renew her weapons licence. Returning to work is challenging enough without having to keep a revolver, a stunner and a WASP injection knife out of reach of tiny hands. To make matters even more complicated, Vicky’s loving husband believes she used to travel the world to assess works of art, when in fact she was taking out the bad guys – in more ways than one. Having it all has never been so challenging.

Vicky Turnbull has never regretted giving up her career for family life in the suburbs. And apart from being outstandingly good at paintball, no one would ever know that in a past life she was an undercover spy and has been trained to kill a man with her bare hands. Not even her husband, and certainly not the other mums at the school gate. But beneath the school runs and bake sales, Vicky had never quite said goodbye to the past. So, when a newcomer on the PTA sets alarms bells ringing and the Joint Operations Intelligence Service comes calling, she’s determined to prove that despite her expanding waistline and love of pink gin, she’s still every bit the cold-eyed special operative. When the assignment gets uncomfortably close to home, Vicky must decide if she has got what the job takes after all, and if home is really where her heart is.

The comedic device of juxtaposition is used with brilliant effect in Faye Brann’s debut novel, which won the 2020 Comedy Women in Print [Unpublished] Prize. It is difficult to imagine a contrast greater than that between the worlds of bake sales and play dates on one hand and secret agents and bugging devices on the other, but Brann cleverly and convincingly combines the two. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’s humour is not the laugh-out-loud kind. Instead, observation and satirical comments are used to create a series of situations which will make the reader giggle. All the popular tropes of twenty-first century humorous writing for women are there, but with a twist: body confidence or lack of it, romantic relationships, house envy, boozy girls’ nights out, balancing home life with a career.

The school gate can be a scary place, but Vicky is protected by strong allies and her own sang-froid. She is the kind of woman who casually books a babysitter in the certainty that she and her husband will ‘find something to do with someone’ on the day, so infiltrating her daughter’s schoolfriend’s sinister parents’ palatial home is a doddle. I liked the character of Matisse Kozlovsky, and the way a friendship develops when she and Vicky both realise the other has hidden depths.

The story races along at a brisk pace, moving the action from suburban Putney via the Joint Operations Intelligence Service HQ in Whitehall to an impossibly glamorous venue in Dubai. Along the way, Vicky’s handler at JOPS suggests she needs retraining in subterfuge and strategic diplomacy. Her reply is classic. ‘I have three children. Subterfuge is a necessary tool in my house if I want to know anything that’s going on in their lives. Strategic diplomacy is what happens when I find out.’ Many mothers will agree.