Miss Lambert Steps Aboard Danger

This is a comic spy-caper, love story and memory piece set mainly in Britain in 1938, with an epilogue in 1959. It is narrated much later by Richard Hadley, looking back on the strange few days when he met Miss Lambert, became entangled in espionage, and briefly mistook adventure and danger for destiny.

The novel opens with Richard reflecting that people in the old days were not necessarily less expressive than people now; they simply had different ways of expressing feeling. In this world, people often sing to one another in public, using improvised or semi-improvised songs to say things that ordinary speech cannot easily hold. Songs are not just entertainment. They are confession, argument, flirtation, consolation and morale.

Richard has recently returned to London from Canada and is living rent-free in a relative’s elegant Portland Place flat. One afternoon after a music-hall matinee, he encounters Miss Lambert in the lobby of his building. At first she appears to be a stylish, mysterious young woman in trouble. She says she has stolen, or rather recovered, a bracelet that rightfully belongs to her grandmother, and that men are following her. She asks Richard for shelter. Richard is sceptical, but she sings to him, and the combination of charm, urgency and performance wins him over.