The Innocent Spy

Diana Calthrop is a society beauty, escaping a loveless marriage by doing just a little spying for MI5. Ted Stratton is a working-class copper, poking with little passion into the death of a sad, middle-aged woman who was once a silent movie star. In an ordinary world, their paths would never cross, but World War II has turned the world on its head. When the two start chatting, they discover they have more in common than one might imagine. Both of them are running up against very peculiar and very solid roadblocks. Could collaboration help find ways around the obstacles? Set against a background of London at wartime, this novel, published in Britain as Stratton's War and first in the Ted Stratton series, won the Ellis Peters Award for Best Historical Crime Novel. Laura Wilson, who did quite a bit of research for this novel, writes that she based several of the characters in the book on real people, and embarked on the series with the goal of showing the "changing nature of England between 1939 and 1975 through the eyes of a London policeman during his working life."