the devil's hot-bed

HOTBED, n. For novel research, I’ve been reading a lot of nonfiction about espionage. Across several different books and historical eras, authors describe so many different cities as “a hotbed of spies.” So recently I’ve been wondering (1) can you have a hotbed of anything other than spies? And more importantly, (2) what the heck is a hotbed?

The original answer is that it’s a greenhouse! Or at least, it’s a garden bed enclosed in a glass frame, heated by fermenting manure. (The heat is important; it’s what differentiates a hotbed from a cold frame, another gardening term for an enclosure.) It doesn’t have to be house-sized. So anyway, the answer to my first question is that you can have a hotbed of plants.

Then figuratively, because it’s a place for growing stuff fast and profusely, you get your hotbeds of wickedness, or genius, or corruption, or fever, or crime. Usually what’s growing in the hotbed is something you don’t want. (“Genius” is the sole good thing among the OED citations. For the curious, that particular hotbed is Edinburgh.)

Also courtesy of the OED, here’s a wonderful usage in Irish writer Isaac Bickerstaffe’s 1769 comic play The Hypocrite (a descendant of Molière’s Tartuffe):

The seeds of wickedness..sprout up everywhere too fast; but the play-house is the devil’s hot-bed

Do not let your children see live theatre.

There’s also a particular US slang usage where a “hot-bed hotel” is a place that rents by the hour, and thus probably caters to sex workers and adulterers, which honestly feels very relevant to espionage, but is not, as far as I can tell, the origin for “hotbed of spies.”

As mentioned above, in things that are neither Romance nor romance, I've read a bunch of nonfiction about spies over the past few months. I mostly haven't written about it in this newsletter, with one exception, but I can't stop thinking or talking about either of the two books below, so here we are.

First up: Sonia Purnell’s A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II, a biography of Virginia Hall.

Hall is astounding. She's the bravest and most competent woman imaginable, constantly overlooked and undermined by her sexist male colleagues and yet still organizing secret networks of hundreds of French resistants, staying up all night to receive parachute-dropped supplies and send radio transmissions, escaping Nazis by fleeing on foot over the Pyrenees in winter even though she only had one leg and her prosthetic was literally falling apart. And then she went back into France to try to save more of her people!

And since it's Pride month, here's a little queer history. Meet Denis Rake. This man lived all this before joining the French resistance:

Denis Rake was a pudgy, bespectacled forty-year-old music hall artiste who had been brought up in a circus as a child tumbler when his opera-singing mother abandoned him at the age of three. As a bewildered boy during the First World War, he had been in Brussels when the Germans occupied the city and had found himself assisting the legendary nurse Edith Cavell, later shot for assisting some two hundred Allied soldiers to escape. As a young man he had been kept in luxury by a prince in Athens, who eventually broke off the then illicit liaison because he feared a political scandal. Perhaps because of his tumultuous youth Rake was "scared to death" of bangs and parachutes and refused to handle a gun. Resembling an old-fashioned grocer, he struck many as one of the more eccentric SOE [Special Operations Executive] appointments. But he volunteered, he said, because as he had neither parents nor wife he had "nothing to lose" and his rootless upbringing had made him unusually self-reliant...

You know you've lived a Life when "kept in luxury by a prince in Athens" is unworthy of its own paragraph.

Rake was a "pianist," code for a wireless operator, an extremely dangerous job. The Nazis would drive around Lyon in vehicles that could detect radio signals and could often find people within thirty minutes. If they pulled up, you had to hide your transmitter, a bulky machine that weighed thirty or forty pounds in the early part of the war, and then hide, flee, or bluff it out. Rake would murmur "pull yourself together, Duckie" to himself in times of high stress. When I read that, I thought, if this man dies in the war I'm gonna cry. And I am happy to give you the historical spoiler that he survived!

He did some daring feats and also made some questionable choices along the way:

He endured several interrogations and was imprisoned in a Nazi-run jail in Dijon before managing to escape in a stinking garbage pail with the help of a priest. He then headed up to Paris, where, incredibly, he lived in domestic bliss for a while with an aristocratic German officer whom he had met in a bar and who risked his own life by becoming Rake's lover. Rake was not to be distracted for long, however. He was determined to return to work and knew that to do so he had to head back to Lyon to fetch a new radio and set of identity papers...

Greek princes and Nazi officers risking it all for love of Denis Rake! What a man.

I also read Ben McIntyre’s A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal, which made for quite the pairing with the biography of Virginia Hall. She had to work so much harder than any of these men!

Anyway, A Spy Among Friends is a psychological portrait of the friendship between Nicholas Elliott and Kim Philby, upper-class British besties who get into MI6 with zero vetting because their dads know the right people. They spend their days drinking cocktails and gossiping in hotel bars, never encountering a moment’s doubt from anyone in the British government, even though one of them (Philby) is a double agent who, between WWII and the early 60s, blows at least 25 major operations and racks up a body count in—conservatively—the hundreds. Personally, if Stalin purged my two beloved spy mentors, I think I would start to doubt my commitment to the Soviet cause? But that's just one difference between Kim Philby and me.

These are both great reads, especially if your coping strategy for living with encroaching fascism is Learning About Bad Times In History, as apparently mine is. Both of these I bought secondhand from Thriftbooks.

My other coping strategy is to read fiction that helps me believe good things are still possible and life is worth living, so let's get back to hot beds and talk about small-r romance. Here are two delightfully bonkers, horny books, one of my essential needs in life:

Space for More (m/f/f, all cis and bi, sci-fi) by Emily Antoinette. Eden Mori, a human doctor who’s never been away from home or had sex, arrives at the space station Spire and immediately finds herself accidentally embroiled in spy shenanigans she’s not qualified for, but hey, at least she’s working with a pretty alien named Mezli. Eden and Mezli are supposed to entrap Mezli’s estranged mate Phelix, a doctor who might be involved in a dangerous conspiracy. So they’re definitely having sex for espionage purposes and not just because being around each other drives them out of their minds with lust. For the monsterfuckers among us, I salute you, and it may be relevant to your interests that Phelix and Mezli each have four arms, and some other parts of their anatomy are also doubled. I can attest that it’s already difficult to keep track of limbs when writing a regular human threesome, so I think we should award Emily Antoinette some kind of medal. In addition to achievements in sexiness, this book also handles the emotional struggles of all three main characters beautifully, and there’s action in the spy plot. An all-around great time. Indie published; free download from Amazon in 2024.

Fan Service (het? m/bi f, both cis, contemporary, fantasy) by Rosie Danan. If you are in the demographic of queer weirdos who grew up in online fandom spaces, obsessing over niche CW shows like Supernatural or MTV's Teen Wolf, you may be entitled to compensation—in the form of this romance novel, which sees you and loves you. Alexandra Lawson’s small Florida hometown describes her in four words (gay, goth, vegan, bitch), which is why Alex spent her formative years staying the hell away from them and moderating an internet fan archive for The Arcane Files, a show about a werewolf detective. Devin Ashwood, the actor who plays said werewolf detective once insulted her at a convention, breaking her heart. Years later, when Devin’s a washed-up has-been who starts actually turning into a werewolf, mimicking the show’s lore, he turns to her for help. He doesn’t remember her, and neither of them can really believe what’s happening, but she needs his money badly enough to investigate. Naturally this involves all kinds of deliciously trope-y forced proximity—he simply must take an ice bath and risk hypothermia!—and of course, for some reason, Alex smells really, really good to Devin’s werewolf senses. This is endearingly silly, but still hot. An excellent combination. I love Rosie Danan. Library ebook.

I've been writing Word Suitcase for six years now! In Year VI, I devoted two newsletters to my love of Sherry Thomas and one really long one to Graham Greene. I appreciated Judith Ivory (and butts), Ursula K. Le Guin, CLR James and Alix E. Harrow, and investigated calques and rude gestures. I have a great time writing this newsletter. Thanks for being here!

(Previously: Year I, Year II, Year III, Year IV, Year V.)

I'll be back in your inbox on June 29.