Dorothy Gilman

Dorothy Gilman (1923-2012) was an author of mystery and espionage novels.

She is best remembered as the author of a series of novels about Mrs. Emily Pollifax, an elderly widow who, feeling useless and terminally bored, decides to pursue her childhood ambition and become a spy. Her application to the CIA happens to coincide with an urgent situation requiring somebody who is not known to the opposition and who can convincingly play the role of an innocent tourist, two qualifications for which she is aptly suited, so instead of immediately telling her to get lost, she's offered what's expected to be a straightforward courier run. Of course, things don't go as smoothly as expected... For more information about the adventures of Mrs. Pollifax, see our page for the series.

Other novels by Dorothy Gilman include The Clairvoyant Countess and sequel Kaleidoscope, about a psychic descended from the Russian nobility who befriends a policeman and helps him in his investigations; and The Tightrope Walker, about an emotionally-scarred antique dealer who gains self-confidence and a variety of new friends while investigating a cry for help hidden inside one of her antiques.

Tropes for the Mrs. Pollifax books can be found on the page for that franchise and/or its related work pages.


 * Bad Dreams: In The Tightrope Walker, Amelia is plagued with nightmares related to her traumatic childhood.
 * Bad Humor Truck: In The Clairvoyant Countess there is a significant ice cream truck company run by a very scary bad guy.
 * Creator Thumbprint: The vast majority of her books feature strong women having adventures around the globe.
 * Defictionalization: In The Tightrope Walker, the protagonist's favorite novel as a child turns out to be unexpectedly relevant to the plot. The Maze in the Heart of the Castle was fictional, but few years later, Gilman actually wrote it.
 * Impoverished Patrician: The countess's background in The Clairvoyant Countess; she has settled down to working for her living.
 * Pater Familicide: One of the other psychics in The Clairvoyant Countess is rescued from one of these.
 * Psychic Powers: The Clairvoyant Countess, not surprisingly.
 * Write Who You Know: Seen in-Universe in The Tightrope Walker: the manuscript of an author's last novel, lost at her death and subsequently rediscovered, turns out to contain characters based on her relatives, and so keenly observed that their fates in the novel foreshadow events that occurred after the novel was completed.