Why do we like what we like?

On the first page, Mrs. Pollifax’s doctor – in 1966 – diagnoses her with depression. Her husband has died; her adult children have moved away. Although she volunteers and participates in the garden club, she feels she has outlived her usefulness. The doctor suggests that she take up something she’s always wanted to do – and she replies that she always wanted to be a spy.

The doctor laughs, prescribes an anti-depressant – the type of anti-depressant they described in the 60s – and sends her on her way. Her whole life, Mrs. Pollifax reflects, people have tended to find her cute and laugh at her, even her late husband called her his “silly goose” and her children find her adorably silly. But Mrs. Pollifax is not silly – she just sees the world a different way.

A few pages later, Mrs. Pollifax finds herself in her apartment building’s roof garden, staring down at the ground below. Only the timely intervention of a nosy neighbor snaps her out of a 2022-type plunge off the building.

So she thinks, why the heck not give it a shot, and heads for Washington DC to visit the CIA where, through a series of misunderstandings, she finds herself selected for a courier mission, launching a globe-trotting career that spans decades. Her success results from three main things: 1) people tend to underestimate her, just as her husband and her children and her doctor do; 2) she genuinely cares about people, and does her best to be a “credit to America” by being kind to most people; 3) she refuses to give up, maintaining a positive attitude, even when there seems to be no reason to believe that things are going to work out.

Although her age isn’t given, based on what we learn about her, we might estimate that she is in her late 50s/early 60s, maybe her mid-60s. Characters in mystery series don’t age the same way that their readers do – Jane Marple and Hercule Poirot started out “elderly” and remained that age, with slight aging, for more than 50 years. Mrs. Polifax seems to get younger throughout her series, taking up karate and becoming a black belt; falling in love and marrying again.

The Mrs. Pollifax series was part of a trend at the time – Mrs. Pollifax, the Rabbi who…, the guy in the Cat that Ate Danish Modern – older people who felt unwanted and unneeded, and applied their skills and experience in different ways. The bookstores shelved Mrs. Pollifax in Mystery, but these books weren’t mysteries – they were spy novels. The only mystery was how Mrs. Pollifax was going to get out of whatever jam she had found herself thrust into this time.

I always wondered what real spies thought about these books (if they even thought about them at all). I downloaded a book, Spies, Lies, and Algorithms by Amy Zergart that talks about how the various “intelligence” agencies have used media to influence how they are perceived by American Society. I haven’t read it yet – didn’t make it out of the introduction, but I’ll get there some day, so many books, so little time – and I wonder if she talks about how they are presented in fiction (I believe she does talk about how they are presented in movies). Darn, now I’ll have to move this up my “read me” list, and I’m already midway through two other eBooks, and am just not traveling enough.

Mrs. Pollifax is a guilty pleasure for me. This isn’t great literature (not that I read “literature” anyway); they don’t change your mind on anything, or make you think you might change something about your life.

But they are fun reading. And Mrs. Pollifax literally kicks ass, in a very sweet and gentile way.