Line #7 Literature/CodeNameVerity


1	[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/code_name_verity.jpg]]
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3	->"''It's like being in love, discovering your best friend.''"
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5	''Code Name Verity'' is a 2012 young adult historical novel by Creator/ElizabethWein set in 1943 Occupied France. Queenie, a British secret agent, has been captured and tortured into giving up the code sets to the wireless radios she was supposed to be transporting to the French Resistance when her plane crashed. Now, the commander of the prison where she has been held, SS-Haupsturmfuhrer Amadeus von Linden, wants her to write down every detail she can tell him about the British war effort. But Queenie has a rather different idea: she'll give up the details, but only by telling the story of her best friend, Maddie Brodatt, who was the one who flew her to France. And Queenie may not be telling the truth about everything she writes....
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7	Has a [[SpiritualSuccessor semi-sequel]], ''Literature/RoseUnderFire,'' which ties into the events of the first book. ''The Pearl Thief'' is a prequel starring Queenie. ''The Enigma Game'' is a companion novel that occurs directly prior to ''Code Name Verity'', and features Queenie's older brother, Jamie, along with characters introduced in ''The Pearl Thief''.
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9	Note: This story is full of many sudden plot twists, meaning spoilers may occur below.
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11	----
12	!! ''Code Name Verity'' contains examples of:
13	* AluminumChristmasTrees: [[invoked]] Elizabeth Wein in her afterword is quick to point out that, yes, both the UsefulNotes/{{SOE}} and the ATA were documented to have female agents and pilots in their employ during the Second World War, although very few of them, and she does admit that a female ATA pilot would almost certainly not be allowed to fly to France.
14	* AnachronicOrder: The confession [[spoiler: quite deliberately]] explains its writer's current life in prison among its stories of the past. [[spoiler: Then Maddie's story begins in her crashed plane, just after the end of the story Julie told, but over a month before the 'present day' when Julie finished her confession.]]
15	* ApologizesALot: Maddie, when she's in [[spoiler: France]].
16	* BerserkButton: The very Scottish Queenie is extremely offended whenever one of her captors refers to her as "English".
17	** [[spoiler: Maddie very nearly kills one of the prisoners the Resistance frees when he mocks Julie as being a collaborator.]]
18	* BittersweetEnding: [[spoiler: Maddie makes it out of France alive and manages to complete Julie's mission, but Julie herself is killed.]]
19	* BlitzEvacuees: The Craig Castle Irregulars.
20	* BlueBlood: Queenie is the daughter of an earl.
21	* BraveScot: [[DoubleSubversion Doubly subverted]]. Queenie initially appears to be a cowardly collaborator who cracks under torture. By the end of the book, [[spoiler: she faces death bravely, and TheReveal proves that she gave the Nazis false information]].
22	* CatchPhrase: Queenie declares "I am SCOTTISH!" quite a lot.
23	** And Maddie likes to tell herself "FLY THE PLANE, MADDIE!" whenever she gets too emotional.
24	** "Kiss me, Hardy!" could also qualify.
25	* ChekhovsBoomerang: In a conversation about fears, Queenie says that she is afraid of killing someone. Maddie says she's afraid of letting people down, which could include killing someone. Queenie points out that it could also include ''not'' killing someone, if you'd be [[MercyKill "doing them a favor by killing them"]], and they talk about Queenie's great-aunt and -uncle who were in such a situation. Later Maddie finds herself in a situation where she'd be doing someone a favor by killing them. [[spoiler: It's Julie, and she does go through with it.]]
26	* ChekhovsGun: Queenie's scarf, the number code written at the top of some of her pages, the occasional underlined passages in Queenie's account, Georgia Penn saying she was "looking for verity" in her interview with Queenie, and a few others.
27	* ChekhovsSkill: Maddie's shooting ability.
28	* ClassifiedInformation: Most of the events of the book. After all, careless talk costs lives.
29	* LesCollaborateurs: Queenie is loathed by her fellow prisoners because she's collaborating with von Linden. [[spoiler: It is later revealed that all of the important information she divulged was for nonexistent wireless radios, in order to hide her actual mission in France]].
30	* ComingInHot: Maddie's landing in France.
31	* CoverIdentityAnomaly: Queenie probably could have bluffed her way out of her initial questioning if she had had her identity papers.
32	* CunningLinguist: Queenie uses her knowledge of German to talk down and interrogate the German bomber, and she later uses her fluency in French and German to become a spy.
33	* DefiantCaptive: Queenie struggles against her captors, tries to escape, and [[spoiler: feeds the Nazis false information]].
34	* DelayedNarratorIntroduction: Queenie, as narrator, introduces Maddie to her narrative before introducing herself. When she does introduce the character of Queenie, she initially does not reveal that she is Queenie.
35	* DoubleTap: The UsefulNotes/{{SOE}} can't take prisoners, so they use this to make sure their targets are killed. [[spoiler: Maddie uses it to kill Julie]].
36	* DrivenToSuicide: [[spoiler: Von Linden.]]
37	* EvenEvilHasLovedOnes: Von Linden, Queenie's interrogator, has a daughter named Isolde. Queenie brings her up several times to unbalance him.
38	* EverybodySmokes: Not surprising considering that the novel is set during UsefulNotes/WorldWarII.
39	* FakeDefector: More like [[spoiler: Fake Collaborator]], as it's revealed that [[spoiler: the information painfully tortured out of Julie is in fact worthless--the codes she gives correspond to radios that don't exist, and this covers up what she was actually transporting--explosives]].
40	** [[spoiler: Georgia Penn, a Nazi radio announcer]], fits the trope as well. She is American but works for the Nazis while also spying for the Allies.
41	* FakeOutMakeOut: Maddie and Jamie, to cover up Jamie starting to say Maddie's real name.
42	* FamousAncestor: Queenie is proud of her descent from [[Film/{{Braveheart}} William Wallace]], Theatre/{{Macbeth}}, and [[UsefulNotes/MaryOfScotland Mary, Queen of Scots]].
43	* FireForgedFriends: Maddie and Queenie become friends during the Battle of Britain.
44	* GivenNameReveal: Queenie does not mention her real name until the end of her section of the novel. [[spoiler: Her name is Julie (or more properly Lady Julia Lindsay [=MacKenzie=] Wallace Beaufort-Stuart)]].
45	* HandsOnApproach: Paul to Maddie when he's teaching her how to shoot a gun.
46	* HeelFaceTurn: [[spoiler: Anna Engel is revealed to have been suffering pangs of conscience even before she meets Julie, and eventually fully assists the Resistance and Maddie in destroying the Chateau de Bordeaux]].
47	* HeroicBSOD: Queenie suffers from it [[spoiler: after seeing the photo that supposedly shows Maddie's corpse]]. [[spoiler: Maddie suffers a rather severe version of this after having to shoot Julie in order to keep her from being tortured to death]].
48	* HowWeGotHere: The novel begins with Queenie already in a Gestapo prison. Much of Queenie's narrative involves her explanation of why Maddie flew her to France and how she was captured by the Nazis.
49	* InelegantBlubbering: Maddie does a lot of this.
50	* LastSecondWordSwap: Jamie nearly gives away Maddie's real name, but quickly changes it to "Ma chérie!" and kisses her to make it credible.
51	* ManipulativeBastard: Von Linden edges toward this thanks to his ability to get whatever he wants to know from his prisoners, through a combination of torture and subtle manipulation. The only thing that stops him from fully being one is that he [[spoiler: is implied to actually dislike his job, and thus is more of an unusually interesting PunchClockVillain than anything else.]]
52	** [[spoiler: Queenie]] might actually fit the description of a ManipulativeBastard better; [[spoiler: she weaves an elaborate lie throughout the narrative while fooling Von Linden into keeping her alive to finish said lie (which he thinks is the truth), manipulates von Linden masterfully several times using anything from his daughter to subtle body language, and carefully orchestrates the destruction of the Chateau de Bordeaux ''from inside a cell''.]]
53	** [[spoiler: Her plans continue even beyond the grave thanks to Maddie.]]
54	* MeaningfulEcho: Intentionally by von Linden: "''Je vous souhaite une bonne nuit.''"
55	* MercyKill: [[spoiler: Maddie kills Julie to save her from further torture]].
56	* NomDeGuerre: While in France, Maddie exclusively goes by her aerial callsign "Kittyhawk". This is to hide her last name; she's in so much danger already without anyone knowing she's Jewish.
57	* NotSoDifferentRemark: Queenie invokes this towards von Linden as she too was an interrogator.
58	* OddCouple: Maddie is a middle-class Jew from Stockport, and Queenie is a Scottish aristocrat.
59	* OhCrap: Queenie when she tells the French resistance girl being tortured in the room next to her to "just lie!" about the information the Gestapo are looking for, [[spoiler: as it reveals that she herself lied about the wireless codes, and her actual mission in France]].
60	* OnlyKnownByTheirNickname: Queenie only ever refers to herself by her nickname throughout her story, until the very end. [[spoiler: However, subverted in Maddie's part of the story, where she refers to her friend exclusively by her actual name, Julie]].
61	** Queenie claims she never knew the real name of the agent she worked for, and only ever refers to him as the Machiavellian Intelligence Officer. [[spoiler: Maddie reveals Julie actually did know his name, as did Maddie herself, although Maddie doesn't reveal his name either, referring to him as John Balliol, the Scottish king who William Wallace died defending]].
62	* OvertRendezvous: Maddie and Anna Engel walk around Ormaie speaking English and discussing their plans to [[spoiler: blow up the Ormaie Gestapo headquarters]].
63	* UsefulNotes/PlaneSpotting: There are descriptions of military aircraft throughout the book.
64	* RaisedByGrandparents: Maddie.
65	* RedOniBlueOni: Queenie is the Red to Maddie's Blue.
66	* LaResistance: The [[TropeNamer Trope Namers]] are mentioned throughout the book, and Maddie and Queenie's mission was to deliver [[spoiler: explosives]] to them. [[spoiler: In Maddie's part of the story, she is taken in by a Resistance family, and essentially becomes a Resistance agent in her efforts to complete Julie's mission.]]
67	* TheReveal: [[spoiler: Maddie and Julie's mission wasn't to deliver wireless radios to the Resistance, it was to deliver explosives in order to destroy the Chateau De Bordeaux, and the occasionally underlined parts of Queenie's account are actually instructions for how to break inside long enough to set the charges]].
68	* ScheherezadeGambit: Queenie relies on this, knowing that she'll be kept alive to finish her report as long as von Linden continues to find it satisfactory.
69	* ScrapbookStory: The novel is composed of Queenie's confession, [[spoiler: Maddie]]'s writing, and a few other letters and notes.
70	* ShamefulStrip: Part of Queenie's torture at the hands of von Linden.
71	* SpottingTheThread: Queenie looked the wrong way when crossing the street, which made a German official suspect that she was British.
72	* SpySpeak: Happens most notably when Queenie talks to [[spoiler: Georgia Penn]].
73	* SurvivalMantra: "FLY THE PLANE, MADDIE!"
74	* TakeItToTheBridge: The book's climax takes place at a bridge.
75	* ThatsAnOrder: Queenie to Maddie when they're firing an antiaircraft gun during an air raid.
76	* ThoseWackyNazis: Von Linden, a member of the SS, is a combination of the first type and the ninth type.
77	* UnreliableNarrator: [[spoiler: Maddie reveals in her section that a lot of what Julie wrote in hers was inaccurate, to say nothing of the fact that she lied about what her mission was in France]].
78	* ViolentGlaswegian: Queenie isn't from Glasgow, and she can be quite refined, but when thrown into a corner she can and does fight in a rather undignified fashion.
79	** Queenie makes an offhanded comment about a previous British POW who was the epitome of the StiffUpperLip trope, and how because of him her captors were legitimately shocked by how uncooperative she was.
80	* VulnerableConvoy: The Resistance attacks a bus transporting prisoners, including [[spoiler: Julie]].
81	* WhamLine: So many. The one that supplies the final [[TheReveal reveal]]: [[spoiler: "Eleven code sets--eleven dummy code sets, ONE FOR EACH OF OUR DUMMY WIRELESSES..."]]
82	* WickedCultured: Von Linden quotes (and possibly took his daughter's name from) an opera, appreciates the narrator writing her story in literary style, and takes the narrator's reference to a certain work as a recommendation to read it himself.
83	* UsefulNotes/WorldWarII: Set largely in Occupied France, with flashbacks to wartime England and Scotland.
84	* WrenchWench: Maddie.

Context Literature / CodeNameVerity