Mrs. Pollifax (franchise)/Trivia

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Trivia about Mrs. Pollifax (franchise) includes:

  • Adaptation Decay: The 1999 TV Movie, particularly where the characterizations of Bishop and Carstairs are concerned.
  • Continuity Nod: Numerous, scattered through the books.
    • Several times it's noted that Mrs. Pollifax regularly receives letters and Christmas cards from the people she's met and helped on earlier missions, and she occasionally reminisces about her earlier travels.
    • In Mrs. Pollifax Pursued, she recounts to Willie (of Willie's Traveling Show) how she traveled with gypsies in Turkey -- and Willie turns out to be related to them.
    • In Mrs. Pollifax, Innocent Tourist, Carstairs mentions the "Bidwell case", which was a key part of Mrs. Pollifax Pursued.
  • Did Not Do the Research:
    • In The Amazing Mrs. Pollifax, the narration refers to Belleaux's helicopter as a "plane" half the time. This is blatantly wrong: a "plane" is always a fixed-wing aircraft, and never a rotary-wing aircraft (i.e., a helicopter). This may possibly have been ignorance on Gilman's part, or it may have been Mrs. Pollifax's in-character ignorance; it's hard to tell. Either way, no one even vaguely familiar with aircraft should have made the error.
    • In Mrs. Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha, Gilman describes the "Stalin's Organ" rocket launcher as small enough to be disguised as luggage on top of a VW microbus, when in fact it was large enough to require a good-sized truck to carry it around.
    • For the same book Gilman invented a miniature radio locator beacon called an "Ackameter" out of wholecloth, a device which is implausibly tiny for the period and verges on James Bond-style spy tech.
  • The Great Politics Mess-Up: The fall of the Iron Curtain required an almost complete rewrite of the plot of The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax when it was filmed in 1999.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: Dragon Alley, a street in Hong Kong that Mrs. Pollifax visits several times during the course of Mrs. Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha, can very easily be misread as "Diagon Alley" by the careless reader.
  • History Marches On:
    • All the changes imposed by The Great Politics Mess-Up, of course. Mrs. Pollifax goes from adventures in Eastern Europe in the 1960s, to Africa in the 1970s and early 80s, to the Middle East in the late 80s and 90s.
    • Gilman bought completely into the "Iraq has Weapons of Mass Destruction" narrative used to justify the second Gulf War, and based the plot of 1997's Mrs. Pollifax, Innocent Tourist around a coded document listing all the depots and factories in Iraq that are now known to have never existed.
  • The Movie: Mrs. Pollifax - Spy, a 1971 comedy-adventure film starring Rosalind Russell in the title role; Russell also wrote the screenplay (adapted from the first novel) under a pseudonym. Also, The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax, a 1999 TV Movie of the first novel, starring Angela Lansbury in the title role.
  • Series Continuity Error: Carstairs' first name is given as "James" (instead of the established "William") twice in Mrs. Pollifax and the Golden Triangle. While it might be an in-character error, given the contexts and that the error is never remarked upon suggests otherwise.
    • Similarly, the one time Bishop's first name is given, several books in, it's also "William", which may be another example of authorial confusion over the first names of characters generally referred to by their last names.
  • Technology Marches On: Mostly invisible since the series is not gadget-heavy, but 1997's Mrs. Pollifax: Innocent Tourist has a moment that can sound absurd to modern readers, when it's speculated that a tour bus might have a car phone on which it can be contacted.
  • Unintentional Period Piece: The earlier books in particular, thanks to The Great Politics Mess-Up as well as simply History and Technology both Marching On. Additionally, individual books frequently affix themselves firmly to specific years with references to "recent" events such as Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda's April 1975 visit to the White House, the Iran-Contra affair (1986-87), or the Siege of Sarajevo in 1992 (during all of which Mrs. Pollifax remains in her 60s).
    • Modern/younger residents of New Brunswick, NJ will be confused by references to locations in and features of the city that disappeared decades ago. (For instance, there hasn't been a department store in the city's "downtown" area since at least the 1970s.)
  • Write What You Know: Author Dorothy Gilman was born and raised in New Brunswick, NJ in the early 20th century, and modeled Mrs. Pollifax after herself, even though she was some twenty years younger than the character. Her personal travels became the settings for the various novels.
    • Although Gilman is deliberately vague on exactly where in New Brunswick Mrs. Pollifax's apartment building is located, enough details accumulate by the fourth book to suggest to those familiar with the city that it is probably located on Livingston Avenue, a few blocks west of Monument Square. There exist in real life a pair of red brick apartment buildings in that vicinity which are of the right vintage and size that either one might have inspired (or actually be the model for) the Hemlock Apartments.


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