The Chinks in the Curtain

The Chinks in the Curtain features the return of that most reluctant spy Edmund Brown, first met in Sour Cream with Everything. Returning ignominiously from Russia to England, he is dispatched to Paris to discover why a source of information has dried up.

He infiltrates the household of a Russian émigré through the salacious, if somewhat skeletal, embraces of the Prince's niece. There he uncovers a plot to restore the old regime to Russia, hatched by the Prince and a Rasputin-like priest whose motto is "Give God something to forgive you for." But the underlying sinister implications of the plot elude our hero until the eleventh hour.

Joyce Porter irreverently juggles the familiar paraphernalia of midnight tiptoeing, hidden microphones and conniving seduction into a hilarious travesty of the spy story.