Queens of the Typewriter: Secretaries in Books

 

SECRETARIES IN BOOKS

 

A passing mention of fictional secretaries set us off: readers and commenters came to join me in thinking about the role of secretaries in books. That original book was My Brother’s Killer by GM Devine.

Another push came from a new book by SJ Bennett – her series of detective stories featuring Queen Elizabeth II has taken a leap back in time to 1956. (I included the series in an article I did for the i newspaper about the best books about the Royals, around the time of the Queen’s death.) The new one, A Death in Diamonds (2024), features a junior secretary at Buckingham Palace, who moves up to the role of Assistant Private Secretary to the Queen, and explains the difference that capital S makes. The more contemporary books in the series feature a different APS who would never have been a typist… The books are highly recommended.

So who is the best fictional secretary?  One name (probably rather obscure for some people) was easily top of the list – so many people picked her out and wanted me to mention her:

1) Miss Corsa in Emma Lathen’s John Putnam Thatcher mysteries. Her every appearance a delight, Rose Theresa Corsa is the winner before we even start. The series features in these blogposts.

You have to read the books to get the full benefit of the characterisation – what in lesser hands might be stock characters and predictable jokes turns out differently in Lathen's work. The plots are always interesting, but it’s the buildup of the characters over the series that really does it (rather like Ellie Griffiths I would say).

[From now on, the secretaries in my list are not in order of popularity, just how they came to me and the readers]

2)   Miss Lemon, Hercule Poirot’s secretary, might seem the obvious choice from Agatha Christie, but I can’t honestly get very interested in her, and am going to go with Miss Blacklock from Murder is Announced: a great favourite title with me and many other deep-dyed Christie fans.

Miss B had a long fruitful career working for a businessman, a great man of finance – and has this description:

‘It was a big coup, and a very exciting one; daring, as all his schemes were; but he just hadn’t got that little bit of cash to tide him over. I came to the rescue. I had a little money of my own. I believed in Randall. I sold every penny I had out and gave it to him.

It did the trick. A week later he was an immensely wealthy man. After that, he treated me more or less as a junior partner. Oh! they were exciting days.’ She sighed. ‘I enjoyed it all thoroughly.’

It's a memorable passage, and surprising for two reasons, one being that you wouldn't think Agatha would have known so much about it. It is a feat of imagination for a woman who didn’t do that  kind of work at all.

3)   More votes came in for another rather niche choice: Sophie the Bishop’s secretary in Phil Rickman’s excellent Merrily Watkins series of  books. (it’s always surprising to me that I have only featured one of the books – All of a Winter’s Night, here – along with a brief mention of Midwinter of the Spirit in a post about Boy Bishops.) She is a formidable and impressive character and I very much agree with those readers who put her name forward.

4)   Blog friend Sovay said this: If/when you do post about Secretaries in Books, I'd like to nominate Phoebe Gunther in The Silent Speaker by Rex Stout, confidential secretary to the late Cheney Boone of the Bureau of Price Regulation, for her remarkable tenacity, audacity and imagination in support of her boss's aims. Even Nero Wolfe is impressed.

5)   A very nice one: Sovay also remembered the Temporary Typist at the New Square Chambers in The Sirens Sang of Murder – one of Sarah Caudwell’s wonderful and all-too-brief series of books involving legal shenanigans and a group of splendid young lawyers solving crimes. Lilian is described as a secretary later in the book. At the beginning we find out that she is ‘the specific legatee, under the Will of her deceased uncle, of a complete set of the works of the late Captain WE Johns’. Well! Biggles a great favourite round here. Lilian is not much of a character to be honest, but she does play her role in the case.

6)   Biggles lead us straight to James Bond – oh yes he does, see my thesis spelled out here. I still have not discovered the answer to the questions ‘Why does James Bond need a secretary? And what does she do all day?’ Consideration of this here. She dressed nicely and knows how to get semi-legal drugs sent round to the club. And expenses I suppose.

While we're on Bond's finances, Moonraker contains interesting details thereof, and I am going to shamelessly copy my comments here:

“If he comes into unexpected money, this is what he plans:

He thought for a moment and then wrote carefully on a memorandum pad headed ‘Top Secret’:
1. Rolls-Bentley Convertible, say £ 5000.
2. Three diamond clips at £ 250 each, £750.

Bless. It’s like my son’s Christmas list when he was 8.”

7)   JK Rowling – in the Cormoran Strike books, (written under the name Robert Gabraith) Robin first joins the private detective firm as a temp, ‘sent by the agency’, although she works her way up to a much bigger role in the firm. The series of books are very much set in real time, with dates given, and outside events from the real world being mentioned. But it is still my contention that the world JKR describes – particularly in the first book  The Cuckoo’s Calling – is not where it is claimed: it is as London might have been 25-30 years before, when JKR was a young person. Grimy small business with a flat above in Soho, going up the stairs to their office, using  your A-Z, temps from the agency – it all smacks of the late 70s/early 80s to me. (And I quite rudely suggest that JKR’s grasp on actual life for a 20-something in London in those later years is pretty slim – fair enough, how would she know?)

8)   Back in the day, there was a massive distinction between secretaries and typists, but for this post I wasn’t going to distinguish.

So will also mention the typists in Pym’s advertising agency in Murder Must Advertise, gossiping over their typewriters (‘Well I’m not one to talk as you know’ says Miss Rossiter) and the ladies of Miss Climpson’s agency, including the brave lady who takes a job in the solicitor’s office in Strong Poison. (both books by Dorothy L Sayers of course).

9)   And Annabelle and Midge, the New York stenographers in the Dorothy Parker story The Standard of Living, who spend their free afternoons on Fifth Avenue, imagining how they would spend the money should they suddenly come into some (James Bond could chat away with them). Parker describes them as ‘conspicuous and cheap and charming’ in their thin bright dresses. And haven’t we all had that moment of imagining what we’d do with a massive windfall, and then realising  it wouldn’t quite be enough (or is that just me and Dorothy P?)

 

 I will end with this btl exchange with blog reader Adrian Dominic - he puts it so well:

“I'm not certain if this is another trope from the times, but the sense that the secretary was actually more organised than the people she worked for reminds me of my early working days in the mid 1980s when a lot of older women working as secretaries clearly were as talented as their (then) predominatly male bosses.

I answered: “those under-used women: as you say, when you start thinking about that (entirely correct) trope 'oh I couldn't manage without her, she runs my life' it leads you to think about wasted talent and lack of recognition.”

 So let’s give those secretaries the recognition they deserve. There must be many more of them: please add yours in the comments.

 An Australian office in 1929, from the Library of NSW.

Picture shows a group of 1960s secretaries, at Aalto university in Finland: 

Group of 3, National Library of Australia, 1940s.

 Young woman in her power suit - 1980s fashion magazine.

1960s colour picture from the San Diego Aviation Archives, a favourite resource of mine.