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Picture the scene. You’re the son of the late Archbishop of York, and constables have discovered you in Hyde Park “violating public decency” with one “Miss Thelma de Lava”. You give a fake name. Sadly this doesn’t work, because just four years ago you were the assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, recognised by every copper in London. Bribery fails too, so at trial you run the doomed defence that you were reporting for a book about vice.
Sir Basil Thomson fell from considerable grace when he was unsurprisingly found guilty in 1926. He had quit Oxford to train as a farmer in Iowa, improbably learnt Fijian to become the colonial prime minister of Tonga, and was a barrister and prison governor before taking over domestic intelligence at the Met’s special branch. He interrogated Mata Hari, and ran counterespionage operations against Irish and Indian nationalists. Yet his criminal conviction made him a pariah, leading him to start writing detective stories in that genre’s golden age.
Thomson’s novels aren’t remembered for their literary merit; the books benefit from a real policeman’s experience, but the prose is fairly leaden. His lasting legacy comes from famous fans: he inscribed two books to Kathleen Pettigrew, who was secretary to both Thomson’s friend, Sir Hugh “Quex” Sinclair, and Quex’s successor as head of MI6, Stewart Menzies.
Pettigrew went on to be the inspiration for Ian Fleming’s Miss Moneypenny (thanks are due to whichever editor vetoed “Miss Petty Pettaval”, the character’s name in the first draft of Casino Royale).
When Fleming was hired by the director of naval intelligence, Rear Admiral John Godfrey, in 1939, he likely authored Godfrey’s “Trout Memo” proposing 51 ideas for deceiving Nazi high command into moving troops out of Sicily ahead of an Allied invasion. Number 28 – “A Suggestion (not a very nice one)” – credited a Thomson novel called A Milliner’s Hat Mystery with the idea of planting fake documents on a dead body, which might wash up on enemy shores as though drowned at sea. This is the origin story of Operation Mincemeat.
There was a fictionalised film about this escapade in 1956 under the title The Man Who Never Was, inspired by the book written by Commander Ewen Montagu, who ran the...