Eddie Brown, the World's Most Reluctant Spy
4 total works
Religious mania is the cause celebre, fertility the ultimate weapon in this spoof of the espionage game. Eddie Brown, former schoolteacher, is the unwilling agent for a third-rate branch of the British Secret Service. Having been promised a holiday after his most recent disaster, Eddie is less than thrilled to find himself catapulted into the Soviet Union-where he lands smack in the middle of a subversive collective stud farm that specializes in harbouring antisocial types and printing pornographic literature. Required to undertake a most unusual mission and save the farm from disclosure, Eddie does his inimitable second best.
Eddie Brown is confused. He knows he is debonair, suave, cultured, intelligent and fatally attractive to women. Why, then, does Life keep coming apart in his hands? For reasons which the government is not yet prepared to disclose, Eddie - ex-schoolmaster and fluent Russian linguist - is a member of the Special Overseas Directorate. Known to initiates as the S.O.D., this is an organisation specialising in industrial espionage and it is, incidentally, on Our Side. Spying is a very nerve-wracking business and when Eddie is entrusted with a perfectly simple courier job, he does rather tend to see sinister figures lurking under every bed. He responds in a typically Eddie way, using his initiative in situations where a modicum of elementary horse-sense might have been more appropriate. Before he knows what's happening, his primary mission of delivery a small parcel to an address in Vienna sinks without trace and Eddie finds himself flashing around Europe, hopelessly in league with a gang of kidnappers. The kidnappers' victim is Miss Muriel Drom, the daughter of Eddie's boss at S.O.D.
At first Miss Drom is strangely resistant to Eddie's charisma but eventually as they get to know one another and face death side by side, her attitude undergoes a mysterious change. Finally ...Well, everybody loves a happy ending, don't they?
At first Miss Drom is strangely resistant to Eddie's charisma but eventually as they get to know one another and face death side by side, her attitude undergoes a mysterious change. Finally ...Well, everybody loves a happy ending, don't they?
The Chinks in the Curtain features the return of that most reluctant spy Edmund Brown, first met in Sour Cream with Everything. Returning ignominiously from Russia to England, he is dispatched to Paris to discover why a source of information has dried up. He infiltrates the household of a Russian emigre through the salacious, if somewhat skeletal, embraces of the Prince's niece. There he uncovers a plot to restore the old regime to Russia, hatched by the Prince and a Rasputin-like priest whose motto is "Give God something to forgive you for." But the underlying sinister implications of the plot elude our hero until the eleventh hour. Joyce Porter irreverently juggles the familiar paraphernalia of midnight tiptoeing, hidden microphones and conniving seduction into a hilarious travesty of the spy story.
Well, what would you do - if you were a bored sour-grape schoolteacher with an accessible but quite unattractive bird called Nora Schwindlingfisch and the secret service suddenly recruited you? Run like hell! But what if they won't let you ...not if you happen to speak fluent Russian and look the spitting image of a British spy in Russia. Before you can so much as yelp you're trained and off on an iron-curtain mission - with a brassy, mountainous blonde called Crystal as your 'wife' ...This is the saga of reluctant-spy Brown on his hair-raising secret assignment - besieged by vast hungry women, cradled by danger, scared stiff and browned off with the whole thing ...