Code Name Hélène

by Ariel Lawhon

ARIEL LAWHON

In October 2015, I was sitting in a hotel room in Buffalo, New York, waiting for an event, when I got an email from an old friend. In it was the link to an obituary for a woman named Nancy Wake. I’d never heard of her, but my friend assured me that Nancy was a legend in her native Australia and that her story would make an excellent novel. She ended her short missive by saying, in no uncertain terms, that if I didn’t write about Nancy next, we could no longer be friends. When I read the obituary I knew, the way I always know, that I had found my next novel: all of the little hairs stood up on the back of my neck. I’d never read any story like it—much less a true one!—in which it was a woman who went off to war while her husband stayed behind to hold down the fort. A woman who stepped onto a battlefield and was not only treated as an equal but was revered and respected as a fearless leader. A woman who killed a Nazi with her bare hands. In all my years researching and writing historical fiction, I had never come across such a bold, bawdy, brazen woman. The fact that she really lived, and I had the honor of telling her story, is something for which I will always be grateful.