Dame Stella Rimington, former director general of the UK’s domestic counter-intelligence and security agency, MI5, and author of several spy thrillers, has died this week, aged 90.
A decade ago, Rimington came to Melbourne to promote her latest spy thriller, featuring her alter ego Liz Carlyle, also an MI5 agent. I was invited, as convenor of Sisters in Crime Australia, to interview her before an appreciative audience at Readings bookshop in Hawthorn. They were clearly delighted to be hearing from a real-life spy – especially one widely credited as the blueprint for Judi Dench’s version of M in the Bond movies.
Tall, elegant, impeccably dressed and sharp as a stiletto, Dame Stella was everything we wanted her to be: a woman who had made it to the top in the macho world of espionage.
