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Popular Culture Review
eagerness for sexual conquests might put her and her team in danger. In the first
installment, it is said that “friend or enemy, she and Nigel Pickering were going
to share a bed together” {Ecstasy 111-2). The second novel tells us that “she’d
done it before - killed a lover who was an enemy” {Diamonds 70). She may be
capable, but readers may not be able to forgive her recklessness. In Operation
Doomsday, she suspects a “handsome” man of being a Russian agent. She sees
that “she might have to kill him tomorrow, but tonight they were going to enjoy
one another” (120). Her seduction immediately takes precedence over the
mission: “To hell with it, she thought. She didn’t care if he was a Russian
agent!” (120). Her hormones lead readers to wonder how seriously she takes her
position with NSA. As she tells Farnsworth when late to a spy rendezvous due
to a sexual rendezvous, “There are just some things that are more important
than saving the world’” {Ecstasy 35).
The Baroness series offers a telling glimpse into the social ideology of the
American masses in the mid-‘70s although they are clearly not high literature.
The books are poorly edited, often including spelling mistakes and punctuation
errors as egregious as missing quotation marks. The continuity of the plot is also
haphazard. Sometimes her parents are alive, sometimes they’re both dead. While
Penny always has a cover for being in whatever locale the books are set in, her
team is often called upon to go undercover. Despite the fact that they are the
world’s top models and therefore highly visible global citizens, they are never
recognized while on a mission. And even for readers willing to suspend belief,
too many blunders appear in the plots. For example, in Flicker o f Doom, she
winds up being imprisoned, and her Bemadelli falls into the hands of her
opposition. She retrieves the gun after a madcap escape. Even non-spies know to
check for ammo in such a situation. Penny doesn’t and is forced to compensate
for being unarmed later in the text.
The texts are not legitimate literature, but they make many references to
texts that are. In detailing her path toward espionage via flashback. The Ecstasy
Connection mentions “the novels she liked to read... her favorite. Baroness
Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel. She never dreamed she’d be a spy herself Or a
Baroness” (96). Later in the novel, she witnesses obese arch-villain Mr. Sim eat
a lunch that could only be rivaled in description by the feasts of Anthony
Burgess’ Tremor o f Intent (135). Not all of the literary allusions are to espionage
fiction, however. She mentions a “womb with a view” in a pun that would likely
shock E.M. Forster {Ecstasy 143). In Flicker o f Doom, she is invited to sample
some of her nemesis’ sherry, “‘a fine Amontillado - [his] last cask of it’” (53).
Such phrasing immediately brings Edgar Allen Poe’s famous short story to
mind. While in Tangier, she is told that Anais Nin has recently moved out of the
city (87). The series is not canonical, but it shows a wide knowledge of texts and
authors that are.
Yet, an engagement with pulp fiction is just as telling about a society as its
high literature. Regardless, the books of the series offer a compelling character
study of what a rich, beautiful, famous, titled, white female spy would look and