Smiley Was Always Watching - Intertextuality In 'The Honourable Boytoy'

At the risk of making an audacious literary effort somehow even more intertextual than it already is, I need to confess something about The Honourable Boytoy. 

Whenever I'm trying to write something in another register - for example, when I'm creating Ruritanian Femdom as in The Ruritanian Pretender, or when I'm channeling Noir as I did for my Chander piece in Anna Voss Writes the Classics - I spend a fair amount of time trying to immerse my mind in the cadences and texts of the original: I need to get a feel for the way each author holds and deploy language, and the way their characters talk.

Sometimes, that gets away from me, and I end up writing elements I didn't intend to. 

So it was with trying to write femdom espionage in the world of John le Carré. 

It's a sign of how deeply I'd tried to immerse myself in his register that even admitting that I want to confess something already has my brain reaching across my writing desk for the box labelled ‘Observations Control delivers with some asperity’.

Fortunately, Control does not appear in The Honourable Boytoy, other than as an agonisingly oblique reference, so in theory, he cannot sneer at me over his jasmine tea, or criticise my compulsion to unburden myself of an author’s sins. 

In practice, I find myself constructing the sneer anyway (“Sins? Don’t be sentimental. Authors do the job they’re given”). 

He really does have the most compelling register, Control: it creeps up on you when you’re trying to think of something else; it’s quite fascinating.

Nevertheless, Control does not run The Association, the ominous little cold war intelligence agency for whom the Honourable Jimmy Easterly - my titular Boytoy - is an agent. He is, I’m afraid, too masculine for my world, and so The Association is run by a woman - one of a series of women - known as The Secretary. 

Even so, readers may perhaps infer something of her literary antecedents from the fact that The Secretary, poised in her fourth floor office on Store Street, insists on drinking camomile tea: soothing. Calming. Faintly maternal… and inclined to put you to sleep unless your brain was already working ferociously. 

It is also, of course, hard-coded as an inherently female drink; folklore suggesting it’s an abortifacient, as well as a drink midwives might use for uterine stimulation, sometimes used as a purgative… it is Association, through and through.

Just as something of Control’s attitude slipped into The Secretary’s habits without my really noticing it, so too other elements of The Circus found ways to insinuate themselves into the narrative.

I’ve written about the way my characters have circumvented my intentions before - I have still not completely got over the way Nicolette Vernier outright took over a scene in Sense of Submission - and so it was something of a surprise to me to discover, midway through the first draft of Boytoy, that I was no longer writing in a vacuum. 


Obviously, the whole book is Cold War Espionage in the le Carré/Voss style; but I had assumed that I was at least setting things in a parallel universe, one in which either there was no Circus, or in which the Circus was completely oblivious to what The Association was doing. 

…That, of course, is impossible. It makes no sense; at the very least Smiley would have found out somehow. 

The trouble is, he had to find out, because in order to write something that inhabits the same kind of literary space as Smiley, one has to admit the same ethos, the same sense of intelligence agencies fighting on despite (moral?) decay. If The Association exists, so must The Circus. 

If the Circus exists, it is - almost canonically - impossible for The Association to mount Operation Bonbon without The Circus knowing. So Smiley must know. And do nothing? Know what Bonbon was about to ask of Jimmy and... feel no qualms? Not even privately?

No.

And so Smiley… well, hm. This is where it becomes perhaps a little complicated. I would not venture to say that Smiley appears in The Honourable Boytoy (although, as I have said before, I do think le Carré uses the tradecraft and tools of D/s fiction more than the average vanilla reader might realise; it is perhaps not that far from his turf). 

But, while Smiley doesn’t appear as a named character in The Honourable Boytoy, I did feel the need to include… well. I called him Mr Barraclough. 

He appears just as Jimmy - dutiful, locked, desperate already after weeks of training and submission - is trying to make contact with a woman who may have the key to the chastity cage he's been locked in, one woman in a city full of millions... Just as he might finally have made contact with her, as part of a clandestine meeting:

He still remembered the burst of hope he’d felt when a shadow had fallen across the table and a mild, tubby, man had slipped into the chair opposite him with a demure murmur of apology.

“Forgive me,” he’d mumbled, gesturing vaguely to the back of the coffee shop, “they said we could share a table.”
 

It had all the hallmarks of a meet, of a hook by one agent and a contact by another, an escalation of authority that must lead him – must lead him – to Liese, to his key. 

 

So Jimmy had waited, smiling blandly at the man, sipping his coffee with a neutral, open gesture that invited civilities without appearing to either want or repudiate social contact.
 

“You’re an Englishman,” the man offered after a moment’s consideration of Jimmy’s coat “So am I. But you’re not a tourist, and not sheltering from the weather, I think. Your name being…?”
 

“Jimmy. James. James Elwood,” Jimmy beamed “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
 

The man had nodded, as if he hadn’t noticed the tremor of excitement as Jimmy stilled his hands against the table, and presently he ventured, “I’m over here on business. Not my favourite time of year for Vienna, and my principal really thinks I should be focusing my efforts elsewhere, but still. It gets me out of the house. I wonder, though – why are you here? I rather thought you were looking to meet someone?”
 

Jimmy had frowned. The approach was all wrong. It… felt right, or at least it felt close to right, but the pace of conversation wasn’t Association. The man’s tone was too gentle; the direction of the questions wrong if he was opposition.
 

“I’m… looking for a friend,” he explained, a shade warily “I hoped… I was hoping to make contact with her. She’s got something of mine but I’m not sure of her current address.”
 

The man nodded solemnly, and removed his spectacles, fumbling briefly at his buttoned coat before he began to patiently wipe them with a napkin.
 

“It can be so hard to be sure of one’s friends,” he said thoughtfully, almost prompting as he looked at Jimmy with a faintly apologetic sympathy. Somewhere behind him, Jimmy swore he saw the silhouette of a young woman who might – was she? – be the girl that had darted from the tram… 

-- The Honourable Boytoy, © Anna Voss, Mafeking Press, 2025

…Clearly this is not Smiley; shortly after this, as I say, he states his name is “Mr Barraclough” which… well. That tells you something.

But I am inclined to think that it is not pure chance that he interrupts “exactly the one moment when he might inadvertently wreck the whole operation”; I think that if anybody was willing to give Jimmy an out from his role as a dutiful agent of The Association, it could well be George Smiley.

And, in the same way, as Evelyn Brandt is working from the Soviet side to ensure there is no mole in their Vienna networks, she sometimes reports to… someone in Moscow. This is obvious - one can hardly write Cold War espionage fiction without writing the implication that the other side are watching and exerting their influence; there has to be an opposite number... But not, I suspect, an opposite to The Association. Whatever is happening on the Moscow end of things, Evelyn Brandt is ultimately reporting to someone... central. 

(And, unlike Mr Barraclough, nobody ever says his name either; he merely lurks in the background, occasionally whispering orders over the phone like some kind of malevolently efficient spider…)


That, then, was my nice, intertextual link; my hint that perhaps Smiley - more or less on his way to Germany to do a spot of tidying-up for Control at this point in the Circus’s chronology, late in 1964 - would already know what The Association was doing, and might manage to make an attempt in Vienna simply to assuage his own conscience. (“Absurdly wasteful, George. We are not in the business of compassion.”)

That Jimmy spurns him, of course - well, that’s inevitable. But it pleased me (and, if I am honest, gave me sleepless nights drafting and re-drafting, and re-re-drafting to try and pin down his tone and mannerisms correctly) to at least show that whatever The Association is doing, and however deft The Secretary may be - someone is a step or two ahead of them. 

…And that was where I left it, as I finished the draft, and then began the (frankly much harder) business of going through the novel again and reworking and editing and, I am sure, missing typos that I have read now a million times and will never spot, however glaring they are to the reader.

I was quite happy. I had Boytoy plotted and written - and it really worked, which was frankly delightful, I had included a few beautiful intertextual references - not just Mr Barraclough and… the unseen authority… in Moscow, but the way Jimmy had - after Cyprus, been put out to grass as a schoolmaster (which The Association says is “the usual protocol”...). And of course I picked the location of The Association’s training school quite carefully - it’s Abridge, at about 2 o’clock to Central London, whereas Sarratt is at about 10; not to mention I had tremendous fun with The Third Man’s cuckoo clock speech…). 

And I felt, frankly, quite clever about myself, but especially I felt clever for thinking to write Smi- Mr Barraclough in: all the effort to get that coffee shop scene right had been worth it, I thought.

And then I began working through the manuscript for the second draft, and found myself re-reading the moment when Jimmy is first summoned to Store Street and is making a show of his tradecraft, checking that the coast is clear before he approaches The Association: it’s meant to show that he’s actually a pretty alert intelligence agent, regardless of the humiliations in store for him. 

Except what I had written turned out to be this (emphasis mine):

                   

It took two days for James Easterly to make it to Store Street, pacing up from the Tottenham Court Road end in a dull brown coat, his brown eyes watchful with the kind of disinterested watchfulness that he'd patiently learned, long ago, and which years of disuse had failed to blunt.

He was nearing 30, although he looked somewhat younger, slim - wiry, perhaps - and his face was shining with a almost boyish excitement as he paced along beneath the bare branches of the overhanging trees.

They had called him back!

He paused on the pavement opposite the building site, pretending to re-tie his shoe, satisfying himself that neither the builders arguing over a cement beam nor the stout little man turning blank glasses vaguely in his direction as he waited for his car to be fuelled up were anything but what they appeared.

Straightening, he smoothed down his tousled brown curls, strode eagerly up the steps to The Association, and knocked twice.

-- The Honourable Boytoy, © Anna Voss, Mafeking Press, 2025

…And I realised that the stout little man behind the wheel was… worryingly familiar.  Right there, in chapter 1, in the root of my very first draft, was this... stout little man, a little man who as Jimmy turns, while he waits for the door to open, is 'still sat behind the wheel, blinking owlishly at his own windscreen as he cleaned his glasses'.

 

As I said - it’s an incredibly compelling register. You start writing things without ever noticing quite how significant they are until far, far later.

Which - I’m pleased to say - you can discover for yourselves: The Honourable Boytoy is available now.