Helen Fry
Helen Fry in conversation with Barnaby Jameson on his spy book ‘Codename: Madeleine’
Summary
Helen Fry in conversation with Barnaby Jameson KC on his bestselling, inspirational debut novel Codename: Madeleine, based on the true story of Noor Inayat Khan, brave spy & wireless operator in France who defied the Nazis to become one of the bravest agents of WW2. Barnaby Jameson KC is a barrister and expert on terrorism.
Helen Fry
Helen Fry has authored and edited over 25 books covering the social history of the Second World War, including British Intelligence and the secret war, espionage, and spies, as well as MI9 escape and evasion. She is the foremost authority on the “secret listeners” who worked at special eavesdropping sites operated by British Intelligence during WWII. Helen is the official biographer of MI6 spymaster, Colonel Thomas Joseph Kendrick. She has also extensively written about the 10,000 Germans who fought for Britain during WWII. Helen has appeared in a number of documentaries and has provided advisory services for TV and drama. She also appears regularly in media interviews and podcasts. Helen is an ambassador for the National Centre for Military Intelligence (NCMI) and serves as a trustee of both the Friends of the Intelligence Corps Museum and the Medmenham Collection. She works in London.
Barnaby Jameson
Barnaby Jameson KC is a London-based barrister. He has been involved in some of the most notorious terrorist cases of the century, including plots to overthrow governments, plots to assassinate politicians, and terrorist bombings in the UK and overseas. His work has brought him into contact with clandestine agencies around the globe. Away from court, Barnaby is found kite-surfing in the Atlantic off Essaouira, Morocco, or in the wine-dark waters of the Aegean.
Well, if I may answer, I think it’s a brilliant question and one of the freedoms you are given as a novelist or be it working with real characters is that first of all, dialogue becomes very important as the questioner observes. So not only do you get the freedom to express how you believe your protagonist or other characters would’ve spoken in real life. It’s not just that. You also get the internal dialogue. And as readers will appreciate if they delve into the book, but part of it is actual dialogue. But towards the end of the book, there’s Noor’s internal dialogue and her dialogue with her father, albeit deceased, which becomes I think quite an important part of the book. And so I think the questioner really beautifully, if I may say so, lights on a great privilege that I’ve been given or slightly given myself, which is using dialogue to express the story in a way that you couldn’t hope to do if you were writing a biography, both dialogue with other people and the internal dialogue when you are all alone in a prison cell or the internal dialogue when you’re subject to torture.
Yes. In answer to your question or the question is yes, you can go to the Amazon, there’s an Amazon page for the book and you can either buy the paperback or the Kindle edition or you can go to a different page and get the audio book read by Olivia. So it is in all of those formats. If you search, you know, “Codename: Madeleine” Kindle edition, you should get it. To make matters even more complicated, somebody did do a book with the same title, but it’s “Code Name” two words, which is more of a historical look at Noor’s life. And so to make everything even more complicated, there is a book of a similar title floating around in the ether, but we don’t talk about it.
Yes, I do. That’s its doppelganger. I think that that is based, I haven’t read it. I have to be completely honest about that. I haven’t read it for deliberate reason. I think that that book relies quite a lot on a lot of source material, a lot of letters and diaries that were written by Noor and other members of her family. And I think it’s very deeply ingrained with Sufism, which I’m not an expert on, but I have come to learn a little bit about it. And so my book differs because it’s written as a novel. It does have source materials, but it’s not footnoted in a way that this other book would be. And while the other book really goes in, I think to the nuts and bolts and great detail in terms of Sufi beliefs, I allowed myself as you know, Helen having read the book, some references to Sufism and Noor’s Sufi beliefs. But I’ve tried to make it a strand of the book without getting completely overwhelmed because it is an enormously complex and beautiful subject. But for reasons that you will appreciate, there is a Sufi mystical theme that runs through the book, but it’s one of a number of different themes.