In which novel...

crawfordboon1

Hi everyone

Hoping if someone can help me out. Yesterday I had a flashback from a novel I read a few months ago. Can't remember the novel, but one particular scene stuck in my head. Now I can't remember where I read it!

The setting is the Secret Service or some similar foreign organisation. One of the protagonists needs to identify a suspect - I think he just has either a photo or a name /partial name to go on. He is able to do this because in the organisation there is an elderly lady with a phenomenal photographic memory, who can look at a picture of someone or see their name and remember exactly who they are and where they appear in the files. The protagonist then uses this to carry on chasing the suspect.

I have a feeling this was a Bond novel but I'm not sure. Could also have been a Frederick Forsythe like Fourth Protocol or Day of the Jackal. Certainly espionage was the background to the plot!

Can anyone help??

Sir Miles

I can't recall that from any Bond novel....

perdogg

crawfordboon1 wrote:

Hi everyone

Hoping if someone can help me out. Yesterday I had a flashback from a novel I read a few months ago. Can't remember the novel, but one particular scene stuck in my head. Now I can't remember where I read it!

The setting is the Secret Service or some similar foreign organisation. One of the protagonists needs to identify a suspect - I think he just has either a photo or a name /partial name to go on. He is able to do this because in the organisation there is an elderly lady with a phenomenal photographic memory, who can look at a picture of someone or see their name and remember exactly who they are and where they appear in the files. The protagonist then uses this to carry on chasing the suspect.

I have a feeling this was a Bond novel but I'm not sure. Could also have been a Frederick Forsythe like Fourth Protocol or Day of the Jackal. Certainly espionage was the background to the plot!

Can anyone help??

Was it the ODESSA File?

j.blades

This definetly did not happen ina ny bond novel for certain, i would like thought to get the title of the book sounds interesting.

Liam

The setup sounds definitely scurrile, a human directory to records? Could it be something from Deighton? Or, similar tones of absurdity, from Charles Stross?

Anyway, it certainly wasn't Bond.

Hitch2

That sounds like the scene from John Le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy where George Smiley visits Connie Sachs at her Oxford home.

(My member name is Hitch but I can't get a response from AJB, hence the new name. Grrr.)

Liam

Hitch2 wrote:

That sounds like the scene from John Le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy where George Smiley visits Connie Sachs at her Oxford home.

(My member name is Hitch but I can't get a response from AJB, hence the new name. Grrr.)

Oh yes, would be possible. Can't really say for sure, it's close to twenty years since I've read Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy the last time. Could also be Honourable Schoolboy or Smiley's People, I think she's in all three of them.