Ask No Question

by Mary Hocking

The Alpine tunnel was closed, so the two men ignored their orders and headed for the St. Bernard Pass which took them into Italy...Later, they learned that if they had obeyed orders, they would have been ambushed.

They were Stephen Mitchell and Dan Burke, British Agents assigned to keep an eye on a scientist suspected of intentions to defect.

But in the obscure way of bureaucracy, the men selected for this purpose had little in common with one another. In fact, in the appalling heat encountered along with their unwary quarry at Lake Maggiore, their differences begin to flare into open hostility.

And then Miriam appeared, whether irrelevantly or by design, who could tell? The fact remained that Mitchell had known her in Berlin. She began to dog him, implacably, about a problem of her own: namely, how to get her husband out of prison in East Germany.

Drawn to her in a way inexplicable even to himself, Mitchell becomes ever more deeply involved in Miriam's dilemma until the idea takes root that there is a way to help.

The trouble is, the method entails betraying everything for which he stands....

An engrossing spy novel, Ask No Question is surely one with a difference. For Mary Hocking's essential preoccupation is with character and spiritual dilemma--unusual but plus tributes in the genre of espionage stories and in this case, no obstacle to pace.

253 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1967

About the author

Born in in London in 1921, Mary was educated at Haberdashers’ Aske’s Girls School, Acton. During the Second World War she served in the Women’s Royal Naval Service (Wrens) attached to the Fleet Air Arm Meteorology branch and then briefly with the Signal Section in Plymouth.

Writing was in her blood. Juggling her work as a local government officer in Middlesex Education Department with writing, at first short stories for magazines and pieces for The Times Educational Supplement, she then had her first book, The Winter City, published in 1961.

The book was a success and enabled Mary to relinquish her full time occupation to devote her time to writing. Even so, when she came to her beloved Lewes in 1961, she still took a part-time appointment, as a secretary, with the East Sussex Educational Psychology department.

Long before family sagas had become cult viewing, she had embarked upon the ‘Fairley Family’ trilogy, Good Daughters, Indifferent Heroes, and Welcome Strangers, books which give her readers a faithful, realistic and uncompromising portrayal of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary times, between the years of 1933 and 1946.

For many years she was an active member of the ‘Monday Lit’, a Lewes-based group which brought in current writers and poets to speak about their work. Equally, she was an enthusiastic supporter of Lewes Little Theatre, where she found her role as ‘prompter’ the most satisfying, and worshipped at the town’s St Pancras RC Church.

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