Mademoiselle Bambù

Mademoiselle Bambù is Pierre Mac Orlan’s take on the spy novel, written and expanded between 1932 and 1966.

Set in Hamburg, London, Palermo, Brest and other ports of call in the anxious Europe of the 1920s and 1930s, Mademoiselle Bambù tells the tales of three secret agents: the melancholic adventurer and accidental spy, Captain Hartmann; his enigmatic mistress from Naples (and a double agent for the Germans), Signorina Bambù; and the sinister Père Barbançon, who retires from his life of espionage and murder to eke out his troubled days in an aptly named “Boarding House of Usher,” where shadows are as likely to strangle a man as they are to haunt him.

Like all of Mac Orlan’s novels, Mademoiselle Bambù is less a novel than a barometer of societal unease, crippling melancholy and dark humor.