There have been a slew of mashups of Victorian history and literature over the years, none better than 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen', the comic book series, not the movie. They tend to be Victorian, though, perhaps due to steampunk being such a prolific literary genre, and Cynthia Ward's 'Blood-Thirsty Agent' series would appear to be another one. After all, the core characters stem from Bram Stoker, Sheridan Le Fanu and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, all Victorians writing in the Victorian era. However, nothing here actually takes place back then, with the first book set on the Titanic in 1912 and the rest succeeding it in time, and that's never felt so apparent as here, in the decadent Berlin of 1931.

This is the fourth and last book in the series and, while there are certainly ways back should Ward ever wish to take them, she's firmly drawn a line under the whole thing here. It's an emphatic end and I wonder why. Maybe Ward didn't want to keep moving forward in time and that wouldn't be an easy task, given that she has Austrian agent Dolf Hiedler decapitated by the golden woman of the title. Maybe someone could steal his brain and keep it on a tropical island until an opportune moment to resurrect him. However, why would they do that when there was never a Third Reich, the British Empire dominant in this alternate history?

And the Empire is the point this time out, as we expected from the way that the third book ended. Lucy Harker, dhampir daughter of Dracula, has been a loyal spy for British Intelligence, even with the occasional disagreement. After all, M isn't just her boss, he's her stepfather, Mycroft Holmes. However, his actions in Pellucidar at the end of 'The Adventure of the Naked Guide' were the final straw for her and she's now a double agent, working not just for but also against the Empire. She's a human being, even if she's technically a dhampir, and she's finally witnessed the dark side of the colonial machine.

With the first two books set in 1912 and 1915 and the third following immediately after it, this one makes quite the jump forward to 1931. Presumably Lucy and her lover, Clarimel Stein, or Countess Karnstein from 'Carmilla', have been working as double agents for fifteen years by this point and I wonder what they managed to achieve in that time, presumably to the benefit of the Americans, beyond Lucy writing a series of pulp stories. However, it's here that their work is exposed, as one of those stories, handed to Dolf Hiedler, contains coded messages and, when he's killed, it's taken by the golden woman. Things are about to get serious.

Of course, Dolf Hiedler is Adolf Hitler. If you hadn't guessed that already, while Lucy's message to him was coded in a pulp story, his to her was coded into a rant about the Jews. I guess the enemy of our enemy is our friend. He's far from the only character here we should recognise. The head of Station G in Berlin is an openly gay writer called Christopher, clearly Christopher Isherwood, who wrote the novels that would become 'Cabaret'. The bad cabaret singer who joins him and Lucy at the Lady Windermere underground club is Sally Bolle, just as clearly Sally Bowles from 'Cabaret'.

The golden woman is a gilded mechanical woman, or Maschinenmädchen, whose name is Maria, a giveaway that ought to help you place her even before we meet her creator, Herr Rotwang. As a science fiction fan, I adored how Ward connected eras here, a story that already included Martian tech from 'The War of the Worlds'—Lucy kills and feeds on a rapist soldier in a Tripod—and a slew of references to Edgar Rice Burroughs now ties to 'Metropolis' and 'R.U.R.', the Czech work which introduced the word 'robot'. Suddenly, sci-fi isn't just English language any more.

Then again, this isn't a series stuck on the surface of our planet. We've already visited the Hollow Earth in its form of Pellucidar and there are other connections here to Mars, Venus and the Moon through John Carter, Ulysses Paxton, Carson Napier and the Selenites from Wells' 'The First Men in the Moon'. No wonder we end up in a spaceship, the Orion, whose plans Lucy and Clarimel would love to steal and turn over to the Americans. And I'll shut up, because there's so much to discover here and I don't want to spoil it all. I caught plenty more references, both to historical people and fictional ones, a whole slew of them working for the French Resistance, but I'm sure I missed a lot more. I'm not as well-versed in this era. I wonder if my efforts to catch up will net me more later. I feel like this is a very re-readable series.

And, of course, it's not just a game of spot the reference. There's a real story here and it's back to the unpredictable action packed mindset of 'The Adventure of the Dux Bellorum', after a slower, more straightforward third entry in the series. It's odd that Ward's approach alternated across a four-book series, the first and third primarily set in single locations and unfolding in straight lines but the second and fourth bouncing around all over the place, the events in one chapter defining where we'll be in the next. Then again, the western front during World War I and Weimar Berlin are large canvases but the Titanic and the plains of Pellucidar more simple ones.

What's more, Weimar Berlin gives Ward even more opportunity not just to expand the mindset of her series but play into the needs of its publisher. These are 'Conversation Pieces' books, after all, and the whole point of this Aqueduct Press series is feminist science fiction. Maybe simply having a lesbian couple in the lead is enough to qualify but Ward explores many topics in these books, none more so than this fourth entry. There's much about feminism here, whether in humans or robots. Including real people like Josephine Baker adds to that. There's also plenty about colonialism and LGTBQ+ concerns and simply what it means to be human. This series is a gift that keeps on giving and, at this point, I'm sad that it's over and I can't roll into book five next month. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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