Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station

by Dorothy Gilman

Paperback, 1985

Status

Available

Call number

Fic Mystery Gilman

Publication

Fawcett (1985), Mass Market Paperback, 224 pages

Description

Fiction. Mystery. Suspense. Thriller. HTML:�Absorbing and worthwhile . . . You won't want to put the book down.��Portland Telegram The cheerful Mrs. Virgil (Emily) Pollifax of New Brunswick, New Jersey, is once again plunged headfirst into a hair-raising CIA mission. Posing as a tourist in China, Mrs. Pollifax meets the sinister challenges of the Orient to safeguard a treasure for the CIA . . . and all but loses her life in the bargain. �Filled with adventures�and misadventures�but through it all Mrs. Pollifax is triumphant.��Booklist.

User reviews

LibraryThing member Jean_Sexton

The sixth book in this cozy mystery series was written while the Cold War was ongoing and China was emerging from isolation. I liked the characters, the mystery behind the operation, and the descriptions. One situation was quite jarring for me, but then the series does have some dependence on Mrs.

Pollifax's good luck.

You'll need to have read the earlier books in the series to fully enjoy this one. I knocked it down a half star for the jarring situation.

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LibraryThing member Othemts

These books continue to get better as the series moves along. Mrs. Pollifax is really given a chance to grow as she's moved from a naïve, inexperienced joke of a CIA agent to someone with quite a bit of experience. Here, she gets to play a motherly part and role of mentor to a young man on his

first CIA mission in China. Altogether fun and entertaining reading.

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LibraryThing member streamsong

The elderly Mrs. Pollifax once more leaves her home on an espionage mission; this time she poses as a tourist on a guided trip in newly opened China. Her mission is to make contact with a dissident and help spirit him out of the country. Along on the tour is an inexperienced second spy, young and

undertaking his first mission, but his identity is not revealed to Mrs. Pollifax.

I remember enjoying these a long time ago (thirty years ago?!) and so had picked this one up at a sale somewhere for a bit of nostalgia. It was still laugh out loud funny and had a variety of great characters, but also struck me as very naïve and highly coincidental spy work.

Great cozy comfort read, though. I wouldn't rule out picking up another if I see it.

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LibraryThing member cbl_tn

Mrs. Pollifax is useful to the CIA precisely because she is not a professional agent. She seems like a harmless, average middle aged woman. However, she is extremely perceptive, she can mask her emotions, and she has a brown belt in karate. She'll use all of these skills on her latest assignment.

The CIA needs to get a man out of a work camp in a remote part of China. Mrs. Pollifax will join a tour group and will make contact with a local who knows the location of the work camp. One of her fellow travelers will not be who he or she seems to be, but will also be working for the CIA.

This book was written less than a decade after Mao's death, and not long after China reopened to Western tourism. The Cold War hadn't yet ended, either. The exotic locations in this series are part of its appeal, and the setting for this book is especially pleasing. The only odd note for me was the composition of the tour group. Although it doesn't seem to have been marketed as a singles tour, all of Mrs. Pollifax's fellow travelers were singles. There wasn't a couple or a family among them.

This isn't a typical cozy mystery series. It's more of a cozy spy thriller. It's a great series for armchair travelers.

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LibraryThing member tjsjohanna

I liked that there is the added element of Mrs. Pollifax's personal life. While the adventure was good, as usual, and Mrs. Pollifax was resourceful and clever as is her wont, the life and death nature of her adventures was underlined by "what she had to lose" now that Cyrus is in her life. Nice way

to change things up a bit.

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LibraryThing member nolak

Mrs. Pollifax is sent to China to safeguard a treasure for the C.I.A. Peter and Jenny are here for this next adventure, which finally ends with Emily's wedding and a surprise. Intense drama in this one to keep you hanging by your nails.

LibraryThing member justchris

Later in the series, the titles begin to reflect geography so that us poor readers don't start confusing the books too much. What's the difference between the Elusive and the Unexpected again? Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station involves much more than a courier job. Mrs. Pollifax and another agent

are undercover on a rare expedition to western China. The other agent is to go AWOL and extract a political prisoner from a remote labor camp and help him escape across the border. The tour is the means to get the agent in the vicinity, and Mrs. Pollifax is to provide additional cover, as well as making sure the actual American tourists manage to leave the country in the wake of possibly dangerous events. In this case, Emily Pollifax is the experienced agent, and the other is on a first mission (talk about jumping in the deep end of the pool). This is the book where Mrs. Pollifax kills someone and is herself injured. Once again Emily takes a chance on someone, and once again, a nice happy ending for a couple who meet during the story, and once again the authorities aren't nearly as harsh as in the real world. The Chinese police let her go, really, after such a story full of holes and at least one body lying around?

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LibraryThing member dallenbaugh

A fun, cozy mystery taking us to China where Mrs. Pollifax must help extricate an important person from a prison camp later to be sneaked out of the country under the very noses of both the Chinese and the Russians. And why does Mrs. Pollifax put herself through these wild adventures at the age

when most of us can not even get off the couch? She says "it was this experience of altered selfness that was the meaning behind all of her own adventures: a sense of bringing to each moment every strength and resource hidden inside of herself as well as the discovery of new ones: a sense of life being so stripped to its essence that trivia and inconsequentials fell away."

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LibraryThing member FKarr

entertaining story of Mrs Pollifax, CIA senior, on her first trip to China

LibraryThing member kaulsu

Better than most in the series, Mrs. Polifax seems to come into her own on this trip. In this one, she still stretches the reader's imagination a bit, but in a more plausible way. Hard to quite believe the Chinese interrogators, but by the end of the book the reader can't possibly expect anything

more.

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LibraryThing member Olivermagnus

Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station is the sixth in the Mrs. Pollifax series, which centers on a grandmother in New Jersey who joins the CIA. In this adventure, Mrs. Pollifax must go to China and help rescue Mr. X from a forced labor camp. The CIA signs her on with an American tour group where

eventually she will meet another CIA operative. He or she will only reveal himself to Mrs. Pollifax after she’s made contact with an intermediary who can locate the camp. In the meantime, Mrs. Pollifax and the reader try to guess which of the six other Americans on tour is the secret operative.

The plot thickens when Mrs. Pollifax suspects that her bags have been searched and that she’s been followed on a secret nightly reconnaissance outing. This being a Cold War-era book, the Soviets are trying to get to Mr. X before the Americans do and it's up to Mrs. Pollifax to navigate this dangerous terrain with decorum, dignity and charm. If that doesn't work, she's also a brown belt in karate!

This series is always filled with adventure, suspense and remain a fun, light mystery sure to entertain just about everyone who likes the “cozy” genre. The reader will be swept away by the adventure, humor and intrigue, all the while learning about the customs and history of foreign lands.

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LibraryThing member tkcs

I love Mrs. Pollifax! I thought I'd read all the books in the series but discovered one I missed. Yay!

LibraryThing member thornton37814

The CIA needs the help of Mrs. Pollifax to get a man out of Chinese work camp. She's sent on a tour group to the country, knowing that one of her fellow tourists is the agent who needs her help but unsure which is. Her job sends her to a Chinese barber shop near a tourist attraction to gather

information on the work camp's precise location. The book's setting in the years following Mao's death prompting a re-opening to Western tourism probably appealed to those curious about China when the book appeared in print during that time. While I think there are too many coincidences regarding the composition of the tour group, it still provides an intriguing plot which should appeal to most cozy readers. The espionage element is probably a bit tame for those who prefer thrillers.

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LibraryThing member AbigailAdams26

Mrs. Pollifax is off to China in her sixth assignment for the CIA, operating as cover for another agent, unknown to her, that is also in her tour group, and whose mission is to rescue a dissident engineer from a labor camp and smuggle him out of the country. As our gradmotherly heroine gets to know

her fellow travelers, she remains watchful, curious as to who this other agent might be. Little does she imagine however, that more than one of the group is hiding a dangerous secret...

I greatly enjoyed Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station when I first read it years ago, as an adolescent, and I greatly enjoyed it upon this recent reread. I seem to be revisiting the entire series, perhaps as a comfort read during this unexpected worldwide crisis and quarantine. What better time to become an armchair traveler? And what better and more entertaining way to do it, than to follow along on Mrs. Pollifax's exciting, humorous and heartwarming trips to various countries, at the behest of Mr. Carstairs of the CIA? Here we have the usual coterie of interesting secondary characters - top marks here to Iris and Peter! - as well as the fascinating geographic locales. Since I was a young girl, I've wanted to visit the tomb of the First Emperor, so that aspect of the story is always quite interesting for me. I was struck, on this reread, by the fact that the trip is to Xinjiang, and features the Uygher people. Published in 1983, it describes a China that is far less developed than it is today, a China that had not yet begun persecuting its Uygher minority with the zeal that it does today. It's rather sad to think that, rather than progressing on issues of human rights and environmental protection, China has actually gotten quite worse in some respects. Leaving these rather melancholy musings aside, this is one I would wholeheartedly recommend to all readers who have enjoyed previous installments of the series.

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LibraryThing member jetangen4571

1980s, historical-places-events, China, spies, history-and-culture, suspense*****

Two things to remember: this is a work of fiction, and it was first published in 1985. Now then. Mrs Pollifax, a widow who always appears to be an innocent tourist of a certain age, has occasionally done courier work

for the CIA, but this is her first time in China. The tour is fascinating, the fellow tourists are interesting, and some people are very different than they seem. A VERY enjoyable read!
Voice actor Barbara Rosenblatt always does a wonderful job with all the voices and really acts out the story and not just read it. Her voice brings the characters to life with her inflections entirely suited the situations and characters.

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