Split Code

Johnson Johnson #5

by Dorothy Dunnett

Also known as "Dolly and the Nanny Bird."

Genres: Mystery, Thriller, Mystery Thriller, Fiction, Espionage, Contemporary

200 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Dorothy Dunnett OBE was a Scottish historical novelist. She is best known for her six-part series about Francis Crawford of Lymond, The Lymond Chronicles, which she followed with the eight-part prequel The House of Niccolò. She also wrote a novel about the real Macbeth called King Hereafter and a series of mystery novels centered on Johnson Johnson, a portrait painter/spy.

Her New York times obituary is here.

Dorothy Dunnett Society: http://dorothydunnett.org
Fansite: http://www.dorothydunnett.co.uk/

Reviews

[Algernon (Darth Anyan) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Everyone knows three boring things about Eskimos. I’ll tell you another. Whenever I think about Eskimos I think about bifocal spectacles.

It’s time to say goodbye to bifocal spectacles for me.
This is the last book written by Dorothy Dunnett about freelance portrait painter, sailor and spymaster Johnson Johnson, about his glasses and his yacht Dolly [technically it’s the penultimate book chronologically, but I already read the one set in Morocco, so it’s the end of the road for me]
I’ll tell you another thing about these books: they were never boring. I don’t believe Dunnett can write a boring book, not even when she writes for holiday fun, in a lighter mood than her heavy hitting historical novels.

As a spectacle in itself, it would hardly have taken the drive-ins by storm. All I or anyone else saw was a shortsighted man in a knitted tie and a nondescript sports jacket and trousers. If you looked a little more closely, you saw he had a lot of black hair and odd cufflinks. His glasses, if you looked more closely still, were bifocals.

Although Johnson Johnson is the one character that appears in every book in the series, he is never the narrator. This role is reserved for the ‘dish of the day’ or the ‘bird’ from the original titles: a young and pretty woman who is independent-minded, strong-willed and professionally accomplished. Pretty soon, this young woman becomes annoyed at bifocal glasses, since Johnson Johnson usually has a secret plan involving her particular skills.

We first meet Joanna Emerson at a sky party in Manitoba, together with a bevy of the young and wild of the jet-set, plus one man wearing bifocals. The party turns a little wilder than planned, with a race through a blizzard in a runaway train and a meeting with local Eskimos. Joanna is being discreet about her own posh family connections and about her qualifications from the most renowned English Nanny school, but events force her to take action to save the baby of the Booker-Redmans family, a pair of mostly clueless parents, badly in need of professional help.
Johnson Johnson hints at darker deeds afoot.

Private nurses and children’s nannies know more about the personal lives of the idle rich than any gossip writer ever born.

Dunnett’s plots have always been rather baroque and wild, so it will be useless to try to write a synopsis without giving away major plot points. Let’s just say that Joanna, the nanny bird, takes up employment among New York’s most elevated mansions, but she cannot escape the specter of the bifocals as she gets involved with liquid bananas incidents, racing wheelchairs and shoot-outs in amusement parks.
Later events take her to what was at the time Yugoslavia and the spectacular Dalmatian coast, among cliff-top castles and the old ramparts of Dubrovnik. Since all Johnson Johnson books usually have some sort of denouement at sea, Joanna must also reveal to the reader another of her secret talents:

The danger of the Bora squalls lay in their suddenness. Next time the wind would be stronger, the wave would be higher. And if I didn’t see it in time we would broach, and fill and roll over. I had a hard weather helm and I held it with both hands, my feet braced on the opposite locker, and kept my raw stinging eyes on the blustering dark to the north.

All in all, this was one of the better adventures in the series, the usual mix of screwball romantic comedy and Cold War espionage. I’m sure there’s something in the plot that justify the alternative title about coding and computers, but I was too captivated by the barely controlled mayhem to pay attention to the actual McGuffin.

Since I finished both the Dorothy Dunnett and the M M Kaye romances, I guess it will be time next year to go back to Elizabeth Peters and her crocodiles and mummies.
But I also have one more book from Dunnett before I start my re-read project of her House of Niccolo series: The King Hereafter.

[Tanya · Rating 4 out of 5]

You couldn't say of the anthropologists that they were stoned out of their skulls: but neither were they in the way of dealing with what you might call emergencies. The Booker-Readmans had, at public or finishing school, never even met a Boy Scout. But you would expect, alone in the howling wastelands of Canada, in a deserted railway carriage with the temperature at twenty five under, that the men for the job would be Eskimos. [p.22]

Dorothy Dunnett is one of my favourite novelists: her thrillers, while much lighter and less epic than her better-known historical sagas, are written with typical verve, humour and drama.

Dolly and the Nanny Bird -- later republished as Split Code -- was first published in 1976, and is very much of its time. (Tag for period-typical sexism, racism et cetera.) The premise of each novel in the 'Dolly' series is that an independent and capable young woman becomes involved in the swashbuckling spy adventures of Johnson Johnson, the thinking woman's James Bond: an enigmatic aristocrat who paints portraits (as Dunnett did herself), and turns up, with his yacht Dolly, to solve or spark secret-service crises, spouting witty and impenetrable asides.

In this novel, the independent young woman is Joanna Emerson, a trained nanny whose father is a colleague of Johnson's and whose previous employer died under mysterious circumstances. She's manoeuvred into accepting a job as nanny to the Booker-Readmans, who may be involved in perfidious business, and whose offspring Benedict becomes a target for kidnappers.

One thing I love about these novels, and about Dunnett as a writer, is the characterisation. We never really get to know Johnson, but the narrators of the novels are complex, likeable and interesting. Case in point: Joanna, in this book, gave me some idea of how it might feel to form strong bonds with babies and small children. (This is otherwise wholly outside my experience.)

I'd read this novel before, several times, but not in the last twenty years or so: I remembered some details (such as the melancholy last line), but the plot was pretty much opaque to me.

Immense gratitude to Caroline, who gave me the hardcover of this and my next read (Dolly and the Bird of Paradise) last Easter. I don't read many hardcovers these days, because they're unwieldy when one is rushing from place to place: but I spotted these on the shelf just when I craved an easy, pleasant read and was locked in place by the pandemic.

[Andrea]

On the whole, this was probably the best of this series so far. The main character is herself involved in the espionage game, though as a decoder, and thus spends a lot of time being calm and competent. A heck of a lot about child care in the story, along with a great many women who have the care of children and yet care nothing for them.

As usual there's a portion of the ending that steps out of adventure and could be suitably be called "mad cap". Almost all of these books have had a section that is presumably meant to be comedic, but is where credulity is stretched to the limit.

[Nigel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been cataloging my books online for a few years now, but looking back it's odd that some of the writers for whom I have the greatest love barely rate a mention, due to my possibly arbitrary decision to just add books as I read them. I could explain why I do this except I can't remember and I'm sure it was a dreadfully boring reason and why the heck should anyone care? Various editions of the novels of Dorothy Dunnett take up about two whole bookshelves all by themselves, and yet this is the first of her novels to turn up on my Goodreads! This is both uninteresting and insignificant! Yet I'm noting it anyway. Anything to avoid company.

Joanna Emerson is one of Johnson Johnson's dolly birds, young women who, whatever their other qualities, tend to score high on intelligence and resourcefulness, be single and have a well-defined trade which they are rather good at, all in contrast to the casual sexism of the oh-so-seventies titles. This is Dunnett: ironies abound. Back to Joanna, highly trained nanny who, after a difficult adventure on a train in the middle of a freezing Canadian tundra, ends up employed by a rich New York couple to mind their new-born baby. Deeper agendas have conspired to bring this about, aided by the machinations of yachtman and portrait painter and freelance troubleshooter for British Intelligence, Johnson Johnson. Dodging kidnap attempts ostensibly aimed at the bawling heir, negotiating the marital difficulties of her employers and the social climbing of the family next door, Joanna provides an excellent service, provided she can survive.

These are rather light, fast, fun books, though not without their darker, sharper, sadder moments. The hero - enigmatic, surpassingly clever, deeply manipulative but hiding nasty emotional and physical scars - is cast from the same mould as Lymond, Niccolo and Thorfinn, as are the supporting characters who provide us with our not entirely reliable view of them. The Dolly books, nevertheless, can be a bit of a mixed bag, and though not the best, this is certainly one of the better ones.

[Diana Sandberg · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ugh. Hard to believe this is the same author who wrote very absorbing medieval historicals with such grace and intelligence. This is cheap James Bond and deadly tedious. There were 8 of these, of which this is the 7th. All are apparently now out of print and good riddance. Besides being ankle-deep in 70s Brit slang – I’d forgotten how fond of brand names they were – and the unexplained references to previously met characters and events, the story itself is stupid and overly convoluted. I resented having to wade through tons of nautical jargon in an attempt to follow the oooh-exciting yacht adventure.

Other references were just obscure. Describing a ritzy enclave, she says, “the beachside properties are expensive and large: anyone from the Third Crusade would have felt instantly at home.” Eh? Ok, that was the Kings’ Crusade, meaning there were, um, 3 or 4 major kings and probably a few other leaders involved, and (duh) a vast preponderance of knights, fighters and hangers-on, just like any other war machine. What the heck is she trying to say? It doesn’t make any sense.

Even more mysterious: a street scene in Yugoslavia – “…in front of each arch of the knee shops…”. Knee shops?? I looked this one up and got nowhere that didn’t point at places to buy knee braces. She also uses words like “joppling” and “whimming”, which she perhaps made up. I only found “jopple” on a website of made-up words with humorous definitions, and “whimming” in a nonsense poem by John Lennon and in a blog, as a humorous extension of the noun. I’ll add that the usage was quite clear in the blog, but not at all in the book. No idea what it was meant to convey.

Probably the most interesting facet of the book is the fact that the series’ continuing character appears pretty much in the background and the narrative is from the pov of what is apparently a one-shot. It seems that each book has a different “bird” (there’s that slang again) and I gather that each is the narrator, although I’d have to actually look at another to find out and I really don’t care to bother.

[Brittany · Rating 4 out of 5]

Joanna Emerson, the heroine of this book, is the closest of any of the Johnson heroines to Philippa. This is, of course, a very good and fun thing. She's a nanny, and her character takes a nice, slow time making itself apparent. She's also the only one of the Johnson heroines to already be working in the world of espionage (on the side of good) when Johnson encounters her. Joanna gets wrapped up in a kidnapping plot that's not really, and the resulting adventure is the grittiest so far. (Dunnett sure has a thing about fathers who are horrible to their children.) The action includes the most emphasis on actual sailing ability, some interesting bits about disease, and a truly creepy puzzle/torture/prison scene.

It may have been the circumstances of my life at the time (I had just been called to jury duty for a grim homicide trial) but this is the first Johnson book I was happy to be done with.

This book was originally published as Dolly and the Nanny Bird.

[Paula Learmouth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is Book 6 in 'A Dolly Mystery'. I've had the pleasure of reading and reviewing all 5 other books. In this book we meet Joanna Emerson who has trained as a nursery nurse and now works as a nanny for the Booker-Readmans, looking after their son baby Benedict. The family are very wealthy. In this book we have a train that becomes unhooked from the main train and ends up stranded and left in the freezing temperatures of Canada. Johnson Johnson know Joanna's father as he is a colleague of his. Johnson and his beloved yacht Dolly is never to far away from the action and always there to help with the trouble that is out there. Who and why did someone want Joanna to get this job? There are plenty of red herrings and twists throughout the book which I love. Now we are coming nearer to the end of 'A Dolly Mystery' I would love to see a bit more about Johnson Johnson and what's behind his bi-focals he wears

[Joy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Joanna is a highly trained nanny and nurse, but she has a father in the British Secret Service, and he finds it handy to involve her work with his. During what is supposed to be a cooling-off period in North America, Johnson Johnson pitchforks her into a job in New York with lots of money in the family. Kidnapping is only to be expected, but it's actually quite a bit more complicated than that.

We make an interesting visit to Yugoslavia, during the time Tito was still controlling the feuding tribes. I felt that Dunnett went rather overboard in the amount of description in this book, but the plotting is clever with surprising twists.

[Margaret · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh, c'mon this is not self-loathing anti-feminism - the Johnson Johnson books are not deep but they are funny. Consider their competition of the time - Bond films with Sean Connery. Really, funny, no?

[Anne · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not the same as Niccolo! Very different, be warned. But still fun, even if it was difficult to understand the 1980s British references.

[Helen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Later I realised the character in this was an interesting forshadow of Simon in Niccolo

[Brackman1066 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easily my favorite heroine of the series. Joanna Emerson is actually a good partner for Johnson, and this was a fun read.

[Catherine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic! Loved it. So glad I'm not a nanny. But I LOVED the whole story.

[Paterson Loarn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here’s another humdinger of a funny crime novel by Dorothy Dunnett! I have enjoyed every book in the Dolly series so far. Split Code, the sixth in a series of seven, may be my favourite.
Each of Dunnett’s Dolly novels is narrated by a different strong, talented young woman who has to fight a crime. Dolly is a luxurious yacht owned by Johnson Johnson, a world-renowned portrait painter and yachtsman who doubles as a British secret agent. The most remarkable feature about JJ is the bifocal glasses which emphasise his enigmatic appearance. Although he is very wealthy, JJ wears jumpers and ties knitted by an uncle.
In Split Code the narrator is Joanna Emerson, a graduate of the world’s finest college of Nursery Nurses. No sooner is she engaged as a nanny to Benedict, newly born heir to a vast cosmetic fortune, than she is caught up in a complex kidnap plot. But JJ is close at hand, and he understands the dangerous game Joanna is playing. Before long, bullets are flying.
What I like most about Split Code is the account of Joanna’s career as a top-flight professional nanny. She describes play dates with other nannies, the uniform she is proud to wear and the day-to-day lives of her wealthy employers. This novel was first published in 1976, so it is a window into the past. However, I suspect the basics of life as a nanny have not changed in fifty years.
Joanna’s affection for her charge shines through the dramatic accounts of attempted abductions. She is completely focused on the needs of vulnerable three-month-old Benedict. This makes the tension and excitement of Dunnett’s plot very powerful.
Thank you, Farrago Books and Random Things Tours, for giving me a copy of this book in return for an honest review.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well this is book seven in the new running order of the Dolly Mysteries and I still feel no closer to knowing our enigmatic hero Johnson Johnson, famous portrait artist, secret British agent and notorious bi-focal wearer. Once again he appears, with the help of his trusty yacht Dolly, to solve the mystery and save the day, but so much of his character is hidden in mystery.

However, once again we also have a smart, bold and daring heroine to work alongside Johnson and narrate the story for us.

This time it is Joanna Emerson, a nanny with a secret, that tells the tale. It all begins when a party train is unhooked and left stranded in the freezing temperatures of Canada. Quick thinking and practical Joanna is easily able to take care of baby Benedict, whose parents are both clueless and extremely wealthy.

Following her success, she’s quickly hired to be Benedict’s nanny. But who wants her in that job enough to set up the stranding of a train?

Dunnett’s writing is as taut and witty as ever, and she weaves mad cap comedic scenes into the tense mystery with ease. She also describes locations do vividly you could imagine you’re there!

[Sonja Charters · Rating 4 out of 5]

NB - new order in the reprints...



I'm back again....this time with book 6 in the Dolly Mysteries series.
I've been reviewing Dorothy's books over the last few months and have read all 5 of the previous books in this series - Tropical Issue, Rum Affair, Ibiza Surprise, Operation Nassau and Roman Nights.

It's been great to be able to read this series in order and I'll be reading and reviewing book 7 in November too!

I think by now, we've come to expect our amazing female lead in Dunnet's books and Joanna Emerson is just that!
As a top graduate at the college of nursery nurses, it's no surprise that she lands herself a top job, looking after Benedict, the heir to a vast fortune.
What we didn't expect (or maybe we secretly did) was that there have been many attempted kidnappings on Benedict and it's part of Joanna's job to prevent them!

Once again, Dunnett writes such a strong female lead. Joanna has other skills it seems and she's not afraid of sharing those with everyone, whilst the men cower away.
Of course, Johnson appears to help out too.

I loved the intrigue in this book as we try and work out who is doing the kidnapping and why?

As ever, the descriptive writing transports us to some amazing settings and pulls us along on this exciting adventure.

I find this series very reminiscent of James Bond adventures - but with a slight touch of Johnny English too!

Can't wait for book 7.....

[Lilykitten · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loves this story - it's one I can read over and over again. The heroine plays as much a part in solving the mystery as does Johnson, and this was the first mystery book I read where the writer expected you to pay attention and remember what was said before, as she refers back to it without spelling it out all over again.
I found comparing the details on how babies were looked after with those of today just as enjoyable as the mystery, and I cared much more about the minor characters and their lives here than in any of the other books. The end with the realisation that Joanna had once fallen in love with Johnson, but now 'had other girls' children' was quite sad; the whole character of Joanna seemed to have more depth than many of Dunnett's other 'Dolly' heroines.
The puzzles and plot twists were great to follow, the villains suitably eccentric and clever, and the sailing/scenery descriptions very effective.

[Mint · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's already the fifth book in the series, and there's nothing new for me to say that I haven't already said in the previous four. Dorothy Dunnett is an amazing author, and her mystery is full of twists and turns and way too much chaos as always. Even though I manage to guess something for once, there are still so many more twists that I didn't have to worry about the story being flat or anticlimactic at all. Also, I feel like we don't get as much of Johnson in this book as in some other books, but Joanna, the narrator of this book, is a powerhouse of a girl, one of the most fun female protagonists I've ever read about. She carries the story on her own very well, and in a way that I totally wasn't expecting when I first saw that the narrator of this book would be a nanny. So, that's another kudo to Lady Dunnett's masterful craft of characters.

[Seriesbooklover · Rating 4 out of 5]

Split code is definitely more a spy thriller than the other books and we learn in the book that Johnson is MI5, this has been hinted at before but this book makes this overt and also who he works for.
The plot and action is a complex and zany as you would expect for Dorothy Dunnett, involved yachts, smallpox outbreaks, castles and talking toy teddy bears. Ad with all the other Dolly books the action takes place all over the world including Dubrovnik, New York and Winnipeg.

This book was written in 1974 and is a book of its time- some of the descriptions of how the babies and children are treated would raise a few eyebrows today and given Joanna’s considerable skills in all areas, she would be a spy in her own right.

[MB (What she read) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been lucky enough to get my hands on print or e-copies of the this series--unfortunately, all except this one which seems to be out of print and no longer available as an e-book. I'd love to re-read it--hopefully it will be made available again sometime.

[LeahBethany · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dolly and the Nanny Bird is the fifth book in the Johnson Johnson series and as I have said in other reviews the titles in this series are horrible but the novels themselves are so much fun. I very much enjoy the humor and wit of the characters and the mystery always keeps me guessing.

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Plot had some silly bits but fun characters and an imagined peek at the jet set from a generation ago. Action moves from Canada to nyc to cape cod to Dubrovnik.

[Leslie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good espionage thriller though there are some dated attitudes - I was a bit surprised that the 1970s still had a good bit of 1950s Cold War feel to it.

[Helen Geng · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read May 2022

What a unbelievable mish mosh!

Straight to bookmooch.com

[Amanda Santos · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favourite dolly book. Just read it a 3rd time. Still a great read

[Katherine Hinkle · Rating 4 out of 5]

I came across this author several years ago with her Dolly series. They are now very hard to find. Other writings are easier to find.