​Codename: Madeleine

One of our leading silks in counter-terrorism is proving to be just as adept as a historical fiction novelist with this extraordinarily powerful and impressive debut spy thriller based upon the true life and times of Noor Inayat Khan. The first entry in his Resistance series makes it clear why the heroine of this astonishing story captured his imagination.

Khan was born in Moscow in 1914 to an American mother whose husband was an Indian professor of musicology and a pioneer of Sufism. Shortly before the war, they had left their temporary home in Moscow for London before settling in France in 1920. After the death of her father at the age of 44, Noor took on responsibility for her mother and three siblings, going on to study child psychology at the Sorbonne and then music at the Paris Conservatory under the renowned teacher and conductor, Nadia Boulanger. 

Barnaby Jameson KC skilfully charts her remarkable journey as a composer for harp and piano and writer of poetry and children’s stories until it takes a dramatic turn with the outbreak of the second world war.

Like so many others, her family fled France to England and in 1940, she joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, before going on to become the first female wireless operator to be sent into occupied France as a recruit of England’s Special Operations Executive.

As Jameson chronicles Noor’s clandestine operations working alongside the brave members of the French Resistance and SOE, his evocative and compelling writing brilliantly brings to life Noor’s encounters with colourful character upon character. Stand-out among many are the charismatic barrister Francis Suttill, codename Prosper, and his former client from the Old Bailey, master forger Lionel Redknapp, whose vocation is soon put to invaluable use.

I cannot recommend this brilliantly imagined retelling of Noor’s life more highly, in print or the audiobook magically read by the wonderful Olivia Williams.

Happily, I understand a second book in Jameson’s Resistance series is imminent.

Eliot Woolf KC is a barrister at Outer Temple Chambers