McGerr, Pat - Legacy of Danger (1970)

Pat McGerr's Legacy of Danger is a series of spy stories written in the 1960's. The tales have much in common with the fair play puzzle plot school of detective fiction, in which McGerr spent the earlier part of her career. McGerr's heroine character is designed as fantasy for a female audience, with a genteel, upper crust young widow of a spy taking on counter espionage tasks, while socializing with Washington's elite. The well done atmosphere of the tales anticipates the later TV show Scarecrow and Mrs. King, in which an intelligent but non professional housewife takes on professional spies in Washington. Just as Amanda King had Scarecrow, a professional US spy who was her government contact, and who was always showing up in her life with professional efficiency and a hint of romantic involvement, so does McGerr's Selena Mead have Hugh, a painter working undercover for the Feds. Both Hugh and the Scarecrow were more than a bit condescending to the lady, as an amateur, and maybe as a woman, but in both cases the heroine is the one who ultimately shows the brains and gets the enemy spies.

McGerr's stories show some affinities with her earlier work, Pick Your Victim (1946). In that novel, the detectives had to search backwards over a long flashback narrative to sift out clues and identify leads. In the first tale in Legacy of Danger, Selena has to search back over her husband's last night, to find clues to the enemy agents who had him assassinated. There is also an emphasis, in both works, on looking at little bits of behavior to gain clues to a person's mental state and orientation.

In both works, McGerr's skill at describing institutions and the business side of upper class life is apparent: In Pick, it is life in a Washington foundation called SUDS; in Legacy, it is the upper reaches of the Government and espionage. McGerr's storytelling is less cynical and far more appealing in the later work, however. There are also traces in Legacy of Danger of the Had I But Known school of so-called "woman's writing", in which the heroine is always sensitively emoting over everything. Normally this drives me nuts, but here the heroine's feelings are limited to grief over the death of her husband, which is very understandable, and she soon settles down to rise admirably to the occasion. (Mixed metaphors can be fun.)

The title Legacy of Danger refers to the espionage position Selena inherits from her murdered husband. This is a trace of an even older tradition, the Edwardian one of a heroine working as a detective because of the man she loves, as in Orczy's Lady Molly of Scotland Yard (1910).

McGerr's mystery technique in the Selena Mead stories often focuses on the flow of information. What do people know, how did they learn it, how can info be passed along through secret codes, and so on. The spy background is a natural for enabling plots like this, because top secret information is part of the spy genre.

"Hide-and-Seek - Russian Style" (1976) is the most moving of the Selena Mead tales. It shows Mead making a personal commitment to the truth, beyond any claims of espionage.

Mike Grost