Queen and Country

I first met Tara Chace in early 2001. When I met her, she was in Kosovo, looking down the scope of a sniper rifle at the head of a rogue Russian general. I watched her use that sniper rifle to liberally redistribute the man’s brains over the surrounding area, and then I watched her get shot as she escaped. With a bullet wound in her leg, I watched her get past a military checkpoint without arousing suspicion and then drive 62 kilometres before seeking medical attention.

You might say that she got my attention.

I’ve followed Tara’s exploits for almost ten years now, through the Queen and Country comics and novels, all written by Greg Rucka, so it was with my heart in my mouth that I opened the most recent novel Queen and Country: The Last Run, because if reading Queen and Country has taught me anything, it’s that absolutely no-one in it is safe. The novel opens with her realising that she’s getting a bit too old, and a step too slow, and tendering her resignation. And then, shortly thereafter, she is forced by political circumstance back into the field for the titular last run, a mission that she and her superiors know is almost certainly a trap. And this novel marks an end of sorts to Queen and Country, anything could happen, and indeed, everything does.

Back in 2001, Tara Chace’s job title was Minder Two in the Special Section at the UK’s Special Intelligence Service (you’d know it as MI6) – the Special Section being composed of three “minders” – intelligence agents with the skills to be dispatched all over the world on highly dangerous short-term espionage assignments. She was, if you like, the female James Bond, except that to describe her as such is to sell her, and Queen and Country, short. Very short.

James Bond presents a macho fantasy – a ludicrous, over the top cartoon of a man, who contends with threats entirely absent from the real world – megalomaniacal super villains with absurd doomsday devices with which they hold entire countries to ransom. Queen and Country presents the reality: squalid deeds done in alleyways, a world where the greatest threat comes from bureaucrats in Whitehall who are only too willing to disavow Tara and her colleagues when things go bad. And they do go bad, all the time.

The story described above would be the end of a Bond movie – the rogue general is defeated, and we watch Bond float off into the sunset. For a Queen and Country story, it’s only the beginning – the rest of the story sees MI6 attacked in their home in reprisal, and Tara being hunted on the streets of London, while her own government deny her adequate means to defend herself, and leave her “protected” by men whose goal is not to keep her alive, but to use her as bait. Because that’s the reality that James Bond doesn’t show.

That’s the first Queen and Country story. The second one sees Tara back in the office, getting a psychological evaluation, because, after all, she has just killed a man in cold blood, then found herself more or less hung out to dry by the people who ordered her to do it, and there’s some concern that it might have affected her in some way. Of course it has, but not in a way that makes her unfit for duty, and she knows it.

And there’s a duty she really wants to be part of – the other Minders are being sent on a mission in Afghanistan. In a comic written in early 2001. Tara, is of course, incensed about the treatment of women under the Taliban, and would like to do something to bloody their nose. But, of course, she can’t go. It’s much easier to put together a cover identity for a male agent that will let them get the job done.

Just to make that as clear as I can for you: this is an espionage thriller with a female lead that was talking about the Taliban, and their treatment of women, before September the 11th 2001. Tell me that doesn’t pique your interest.

(An amusing aside: Queen and Country may be the only comic where, when a new artist rendered Tara as a typical-for-comics pneumatic blonde in a revealing wardrobe, the readers wrote in to complain. Happily, her new endowments did not have any effect on Tara’s level of competence, or any treatment she received, and the next artist on the book returned her to her usual proportions.)

Queen and Country is as much about the cost of espionage as it is about espionage itself. It’s about the damaged personalities of the people who engage in it, and the further damage the work piles on them. It does not flinch away from depicting Tara, or her friends, as damaged goods; it does not pretend that they are good people fighting for an always-just cause. It understands that the reality of their work is usually that they don’t get to defeat the bad guy and head off into the sunset for sex with an attractive young thing. When sex appears in these books, it is as real as the rest of the work, and appears in a number of different ways – a desperate seeking for a little human warmth, an act of self-hatred, and here and there, an act of love.

Queen and Country is among the very smartest thrillers you will get to read, and should be available in collected editions from any good comic shop. If for some reason you don’t like comics, then I promise you, each of the three novels – A Gentlemen’s Game, Private Wars, and now The Last Run, is perfectly rewarding in its own right.

And no, I’m not going to tell you if Tara Chace survives the end of her own series. I haven’t even told you about the friends and lovers she loses along the way. Read the books and find out about her life.

Alasdair Watson can be found blogging at http://www.black-ink.org.