The first thing you need to know about Maria Isabella “Belle” Boyd (1844-1900) is that she refused to be ignored. After that, you need to know that the first thing about her informs the second thing about her, which was that she was one of the most successful Confederate spies, if not one of the [...]
“Hanna”
I’m not sure I have fully processed this movie about a genetically engineered super-soldier in the form of a teenage girl locked inside one damn twisted fairy-tale-esque nightmare, but here we go… The movie opens with a young girl in the Arctic tundra stalking an elk (or was it caribou?). She nabs her prey only [...]
Queen Elizabeth I
Definitely not a spy, but this monarch held an even better title, one of “Spymistress”. Americans tend to have this idea about England, where the country seems to preternaturally have its act together, however, not many Yanks know that at one time, The Great Empire once existed in a state of near chaos. Queen Elizabeth [...]
Stephanie von Hohenlohe
High profile people make the most interesting spies. Their fame and subsequent connections allow them access to places everyday schmoes can only dream of (like a certain Miss Baker during WWII). It makes me wonder though about Princess Stephanie Julianne Richter zu Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfürst (1891 – 1972), a high-society, Austrian of Jewish descent married into German royalty and [...]
Lana Kane “Archer”
I cannot believe I am about to blog about Lana Kane, aka sex-bomb super-agent of Archer‘s fictional spy-outfit “Isis”, but here we go… If you haven’t seen the anachronistic FX animated Series “Archer”, then you’re in for a treat. The show is snappy, dirty, raucous (great word – don’t get to use it very often), [...]
Lisbeth Salander “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”
A pint-sized hacker with a photographic memory and a dark past is the standout character is Stieg Larrson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and fills out a trio of books called The Millenium Trilogy (in the US anyway, in Sweden it is referred to as The Men Who Hate Women trilogy). Salander copes daily [...]
Millicent Bagot
Millicent Jessie Eleanor Bagot (1907-2006) could smell a rat at twenty paces and had an illustrious career as one of the UK’s premier spy hunters and what we now call Whistleblowers. The last decade has been full of Dame Whistleblowers so we should pay particular attention to the woman who made a career of sniffing [...]
Kate Beckett “Castle”
“We conduct the investigation based on the evidence we have, not on the evidence we need.” Stana Katic stars as Kate Beckett, a no-nonsense homicide detective and muse for crime novelist Richard Castle on the show of the same name. Beckett, of course, has a past of the murdered-mother variety that drives her in her [...]
Max “Mission Impossible”
Arms dealers must be fascinating people. The ultimate middle-men, they have to know with whom and what they are dealing with at all times. They must possess a thorough knowledge of geopolitics, be hard-wired to CNN, and possess proverbial cajones the size watermelons. That makes for a tough business and I always imagine the real [...]
Crowdsourcing 2.0
We’ve all heard the stories of police using Facebook to solve crimes but I love this story of how an Average Jane, or in this case, Mary Chapman of Brunswick, Georgia, used her Facebook community in her community to track down the man who broke into her husband’s truck. As a student I tend to [...]
