Welcome to Litsy!

BANG. Jonty spins round, holding on to the church gate, trying to stay upright. He looks across at me, startled. BANG. BANG. Jonty crumples to the ground. I jump out of the Bentley and run over to him as fast as I can manage in my wedding dress. Jonty is bleeding from the head, the chest and the tummy. The last words he says to me before he dies are 'Code 17.'Code 17 was originally a musical idea. Ten years ago I made an album that paid homage to the theme music of 1960s British TV spy series like The Man from UNCLE, The Baron and Department S, and to films like Modesty Blaise and The Ipcress File. The music on the album was from an imaginary TV series called Code 17, featuring the glamorous art dealer/spy Lady Laura Summers. She was imagined as a cross between Sharron Macready of The Champions, Emma Peel of The Avengers and Lady Penelope Creighton-Ward of Thunderbirds, though none of these women was the lead character. Ten years later I thought I could make a novel out of Code 17 and Lady Laura, set in the Swinging London of 1967. I kept to the format of a twelve-episode TV series and tried to imagine each chapter as a fast-moving thirty minute episode, split into short scenes.I hope you can imagine it that way too. You can hear the music at mixcloud.com/planckmusic/code-17