Fiona Figg is an agent with British Intelligence.
So is Kitty Lane but more on her in a bit.
The time frame for the stories of Figg's very funny and often quite thrilling adventures starts in 1916, two years into the Great War, and taking place, initially, in London. The Fiona Figg we meet at the very beginning is considerably different that the Figg we will follow soon after. A cheating husband and a now pending divorce and the feeling of uselessness mixed with a desire for revenge start all that: "I should have poisoned him" are the opening words she gives us and not surprisingly, the "him" is her philandering husband, Andrew Cunningham.
Figg is 24 years old at our introduction, four years married and now about to be no longer. She is employed as the "head filing clerk at the War Office's top-secret Room 40, helping to decode military telegrams and win the bloody - I mean, blasted - war". In the capacity, she is not supposed to get involved in anything other than paper shuffling and tea fetching. That is not like Figg at all. "I had a reputation for sticking my nose where it didn't belong. The men wouldn't admit it, but I'd helped them crack code and plan espionage on several occasions."
It would be her coming up with a way to reveal the infamous Zimmerman Telegram to the American authorities without letting them know the source or letting the Germans know their cypher had been broken that would get Figg considered as someone with a brain and put her on her new path in life. This would get her noticed but it was a couple months later that she offered to tail a suspected spy, pretending to be a male doctor while doing so, that solidified the change.
Figg is blessed (or cursed) with a photographic memory which she will use more than once in her job. She also has an admitted weakness for hats, which does not help as a spy but is interesting nonethehess. She owns more than a dozen hats already and is constantly on the lookout for an interesting one. She muses early on that "a hat added an air of mystery to even the plainest face" and she is of the opinion that she has one of the plainest faces possibly in all of London, a fact that will be used to help with the physician impersonation.
The first three adventures we have of Figg, she will be working largely on her own. After that she will find a kindred spirit and a sometime partner in fellow operative Kitty Lane, sufficient to warrant giving the newcomer marquee credit on the ongoing tales. When Figg first meets her, Lane is undercover as a young woman being pulled by her family away from a youthful tryst and Figg is surprised to be assigned as her chaperone. Imagine her surprise when Lane is prompted to pull a gun on Figg and tie her up to keep her from interfering with Lane's assignment. Lane explains that she grew up in the streets of London and Blinker Hall (famous MI6 Director) "caught me pinching his wallet and gave me another chance. He sent me to France for training and made me part of Operation Petticoat, an elite squad of girls working for the War Office".
Before too long Lane will become a co-agent of Figg and share quite a time.
Good Lines:
- Said by Fiona Figg about herself, "Never one to argue with a girl with a gun".
- Said by Kitty Lane about pretending to be infatuated with a soldier but not specific, "Throw a stick in any direction and you'll hit an American soldier named Billy".