In a New MI6 Chief’s Name, a Striking Blend of Fact and Fiction

“Condor” author James Grady finds joy in Blaise Metreweli’s appointment as “C”—and more blending of current facts & conspiracy fiction.

Are we sure which one is real?

THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT’S CHOICE of a former career spy by the name of Blaise Metreweli to run MI6 climaxes a symphony of espionage facts & fiction that goes back decades.

Its most obvious chord made The New York Times and other major news outlets, and thus probably resonated with those who follow actual news not alternative facts — aka “lies” — flooding social media. 

“Bond, James Bond,” the most famous spy for everyone, was inevitably invoked. 

The Bond novels and movies rocketed to fame starting with author—and former British spy—Ian Fleming’s first novel in 1953, Casino Royale. The ensuing Bond movies’ opening segment is perhaps the cinematic world’s most famous movie clip: 

The audience peers through a moving, rifled barrel of a gun. The movie’s lead actor steps into sight circled by that firearm bore, whirls—and shoots the audience!  

Usually early in the Bond movies, our 007 license-to-kill hero links up with “Q,”  Her Majesty’s espionage armorer and tech support guru.

MI6’s new head, the Times said, “was most recently the director of technology and innovation, a position commonly referred to as Q.”

Fact meets fiction with a bang.  

And there’s this: The name of MI6’s new “C” ( not “M” as in the Bond sagas) is her name: Blaise Metreweli.

Blaise. As in Modesty Blaise, a spy character created by author Peter O’Donnell.  As they say, you can’t make this shit up.

Starting in 1963, Modesty appeared in comic strips and books, 11 novels, two short story collections and three films for movie and TV audiences. 

Probably the most widely seen cinematic Modesty is 1966’s eponymously titled full length British comic thriller starring Italian actress Monica Vitti and English actor Terence Stamp.

The movie is not very good.

But that was not the end of her movie life. Modesty got a silenced machinegun koof-koof-koof cameo in a major American movie: Quentin Tarantino’s great 1994 Pulp Fiction shows an on-the-run Bruce Willis machinegunning a black suit & white shirted hitman John Travolta as the latter steps out of the bathroom….holding the novel Modesty Blaise.

Her huge fan Tarantino has for years tried to create a new Modesty movie. 

Political and social histories usually ignore Modesty as a role-breaking feminist character, even though she is a savvy kick-ass boss throughout the comic series . According to her backstory, she survived rape as a war refugee. Led her own crew. Recruited a career criminal, Willie Garvin, who not only becomes her platonic best friend but chief of staff, making them formidable, independent allies of MI6. 

Blaise Trail

A woman running MI6 ops named Blaise. And here’s a third facts & fictions bang! From the June 17 Times story: 

“Among the delicate issues Ms. Metreweli will confront is how to deal with the C.I.A. while . . . President Trump is in the White House….”

It goes on: “Mr. Trump’s sympathies for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia have raised questions about whether allies should share sensitive intelligence with the United States. In 2018, Mr. Trump famously sided with Mr. Putin against his own intelligence agencies on the question of whether Russian operatives tried to fix the 2016 presidential election.” 

Now that was a step through the fact-fiction looking glass if there ever was one.  Real life  seemed to be shape-shifting faster than a fiction master could keep up with it. But in 2020, two years after Trump bowed to Putin in Helsinki, one thriller writer gave it a shot. 

A former U.S. Army paratrooper, James A. Scott, came out with The President’s Dossier, an espionage thriller starring an ex-CIA operative contracted to confirm something like the real life so-called Steele Dossier (the infamous grab bag of alleged Trump entanglements with the Russians compiled by a former MI6 agent) and the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation (which followed up other leads into Trump maybe being compromised by Russian spy-agency-controlled whores and money laundering schemes with Russian oligarchs in resorts and casinos).

The President’s Dossier received respectable blurbs and reviews, one calling it  “a thrilling and chilling spy fiction” (though it was also called too complex—and is). In any event, the novel did not jump onto the national bestseller charts and thus into our public’s overall cultural consciousness.  

I wonder: Was it because Trump’s shocking affinity for Putin was (as Mark Twain put it) “stranger than fiction”—or because, as media conglomerates and others were learning year by year, the wannabe dictator was becoming famously, viciously vindictive?

Treachery Trail

Fiction plumbing themes of high level political subversion and treachery for modern audiences go back to 1959’sThe Manchurian Candidate, Richard Condon’s novel-to-Frank Sinatra movie about a Joseph McCarthy-like Russian puppet-American politician. Then came 1962’s  Seven Days In May, by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II, about a right wing military coup. Three years later came Knebel’s Night Of Camp David, about D.C. insiders dealing with a president who has gone “stark-raving mad.”

But reach back even further, to Sinclair Lewis’s anti-fascist It Can’t Happen Here, a thinly fictionalized novel that chronicles the rise of a southern populist who demogogues his way to the White House then seizes dictatorial powers. Nearly a century after it was published, it’s finding a new audience. “Over eight decades later,”  David Corn wrote in Mother Jones last year, “the ghost of It Can’t Happen Here haunts American politics.”

Bang! Bang, bang, bang! The sounds of facts and fiction colliding, from the White House to a real Blaise ensconced as “C” in London, no doubt make you shake your head. ###

James Grady’s first novel, Six Days Of The Condor, became the iconic Robert Redford thriller 50 years ago and in 2018, a TV series. In July, Grady will publish his new novel American Sky.