The Spy

Author’s Note and Acknowledgments

Although I tried to base my novel on the actual facts of Mata Hari’s life, I had to create some dialogue, merge certain scenes, change the order of a few events, and eliminate anything I thought was not relevant to the narrative.

For those who wish to know more about the story of Mata Hari, I recommend Pat Shipman’s excellent book Femme Fatale: Love, Lies and the Unknown Life of Mata Hari (Harper Collins, 2007); Philippe Collas’s Mata Hari, Sa véritable histoire (Plon: Paris, 2003)—Collas is the great-grandson of Pierre Bouchardon, one of the characters of this book, and had access to completely new, unpublished material; Frédéric Guelton’s “Le dossier Mata Hari,” in the Revue historique des armées, 247 (2007); and Russell Warren Howe’s “Mournful Fate of Mata Hari, the spy who wasn’t guilty” in Smithsonian Institution, ref. 4224553—among many other articles I used for research. My opening pages are based on the news report filed by Henry G. Wales for the International News Service in October of 1917, and borrow some verbatim language from that report and its retellings.

The Mata Hari file, written up by the British intelligence service, was made public in 1999, and can be accessed on my website in its entirety, or purchased directly in the United Kingdom from the National Archives, reference KV-2-1.

I want to thank my lawyer, Shelby du Pasquier, and his associates for important clarification about the trial; Anna von Planta, my Swiss-German editor, for her rigorous historical review—though we must take into account the main character’s tendency to fantasize the facts; and Annie Kougioum, a friend and Greek writer, for her help with the dialogues and weaving the story.

This book is dedicated to J.