Secret file – 01 – Tana Standish, psychic spy

On November 26, The Prague Papers are released. This book is published by Crooked Cat. It is based on a manuscript handed to me by an MI6 agent, Alan Swann. It needed some knocking into shape, as it had been a collaborative effort by a select group of agents, all intent on telling the story of Tana Standish, psychic spy, whose career spanned 1965 to 1988. They asked that her story be told as fiction.

As a result, the forthcoming novel The Prague Papers is the first adventure to feature Tana Standish and is mainly set in Czechoslovakia in 1975.

 

 

Certain information was divulged in order for me to write the book; yet some has been concealed to date. Certainly, her past and attributes are dealt with in more depth in the book. Here is a brief outline of information that I have gleaned so far.

Tana was born on May 12, 1937 in Warsaw. At the time of the uprising of the ghetto in 1942, she was five years old. She had two brothers, Mordechai and Ishmael, both now deceased. She was adopted by a British couple in 1942, but her adoptive father Lieutenant Hugh was killed ironically in a car crash two years later. Her mother Vera never remarried.

At the time of this novel, she is thirty-eight.

She joined Edinburgh University in 1955 and read Psychology, gaining a BA (Hons) in 1958. Thereafter, she worked for the Parapsychological Research Unit, Northamptonshire – 1958 to early 1965; during this time, she travelled to the US and the USSR, among other countries, to give talks on memory.

Besides possessing psychic abilities, she has a photographic memory.

Her hair is auburn, sometimes black and sometimes brunette. She has intelligent wide eyes with faint lines at the corners.  Eye-colour varies with the light – sometimes topaz, sometimes green or grey. Her nose is aquiline, her forehead high with two pronounced lines when concentrating. She has known grief but can still laugh, her mouth being sensuous; her chin is round and firm, perhaps ‘determined’, and she has high cheekbones.  Her voice is resonant or sensuous, dependent on the situation. She has kept herself fit and possesses strong muscular shoulders and arms and is generally well-toned.

 

 

The episode in Czechoslovakia is her eleventh mission since joining a special adjunct of MI6. I don’t know why this particular mission manuscript was the first to be chosen for me work on. I can only hope that details of her earlier missions will be conveyed to me at some future date.

The Singapore Signal – 1965

The Naples Note- 1966

The Izmir Intelligence - 1967

The Odessa Objective – 1968

The Pilsen Portfolio– 1968

The Karachi Code - 1970

The Elba Errand – 1971

The Gibraltar Gathering - 1972

The Mombassa Message - 1973

The Hong Kong Cover – 1974

The Prague Papers – 1975

Since my first meeting with Mr Swann, I have been entrusted with a further three manuscripts, pertaining to Iran, Afghanistan, and Argentina. The Tehran Text will be released in 17 February by Crooked Cat.