Evelyn Anthony: R.I.P.

Spy Thriller Writer Evelyn Anthony dies at 92. 

From the NYT:

Evelyn Anthony, a best-selling British novelist who transitioned from historical fiction to espionage thrillers, becoming one of the first female writers to explore the spy genre, died on Sept. 25 at her home in Essex, northeast of London. She was 92.

As her writing career began in the early 1950s, Evelyn Ward Thomas took on the pseudonym Evelyn Anthony (for St. Anthony, the patron saint of lost items). The name stuck, first on the short stories she wrote for magazines and then on novels that reimagined the lives of monarchs, most of them British.

... in the late 1960s Ms. Anthony turned to telling suspenseful stories about Cold War espionage, entering a field dominated by men like John le Carré, Ian Fleming, Eric Ambler and Len Deighton.

“What made me change from historical novels was getting to know people who had been in the Special Operations Executive and MI5 during the war,” she said in an interview in 1991 with the British newspaper The Observer, referring to a secret British force that undertook sabotage missions against Hitler’s Germany and the British domestic security agency.

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