I Spy

Espionage thrillers set in wartime Washington were still a novelty when Natalie Sumner Lincoln (1881-1935), a Washington-born journalist who built her career on mysteries about the capital’s political society, published I Spy in 1916. Written while the United States was still neutral in the First World War, the novel follows a German plot to steal two American inventions with military value, a camera designed to map terrain from an airship and a process for making glass armor. Lincoln filled her books with senators, socialites, and embassy figures drawn from her newspaper work, and her series detective, Inspector Mitchell of the Washington police, appeared in roughly ten novels between 1916 and 1927. I Spy preserves the invasion anxieties of America on the eve of entering the war. Free PDF download available on BDeBooks.