Taking pains not to sound self-important, Shauna Singh Baldwin describes her new novel, The Tiger Claw, as the book only she could have written. While the Montreal-born author is not the first to tell the story of French Resistance spy Noor Inayat Khan, Singh Baldwin, perhaps more than other authors, shares a fortuitous list of commonalities with this particular subject.

Khan, the daughter of an Indian Sufi composer father and an American mother, was raised in France, India, and England. Physically and psychologically chameleon-like, she was the perfect candidate for espionage. Similar to Singh Baldwin, an Indo-Canadian Sikh with a Green Card, Khan’s life was marred by a series of culture shifts and a persistent sense of displacement.

"Her story is fascinating. She has been orientalized, eroticized, glorified, blamed. It’s kind of like Joan of Arc: 450 books written about her and then someone writes the 451st because the facts are so interesting," says Singh Baldwin who, after years spent writing about and researching the character, is still completely taken with her.

The story behind the new and personal chronology of Khan’s activities during the Second World War is a tale unto itself. Singh Baldwin and her husband run a popular spy-themed restaurant in Milwaukee called The Safe House. For its 25th anniversary, the couple invited Gaston Vandermeersche to join the festivities. The former leader of the Dutch Underground discovered the story of Noor Khan while researching his memoirs. They never met, but he learned they had been held by the Gestapo at the same time in the same jail.

While Singh Baldwin is a little critical of Vandermeersche’s description of an imprisoned Indian princess ("Sure, sure, they were all Indian princesses in the 1940s. Then they became wizard programmers and now they’re all writers"), she decided to do some research.

After the publication of her first novel, What the Body Remembers, in 2000, Singh Baldwin read Madeleine, Jean Overton Fuller’s 1952 biography of Khan, but the book raised more questions than it answered. It seemed the Muslim Khan had been engaged for five years to a Jewish musician. In the late 30s, she received a mysterious "stomach operation." While in prison for treason, Khan was given special treatment, including the use of pen and paper to pursue her writing. Why?

Singh Baldwin began an extensive investigation that took her to Khan’s jail cell, her London address, and along the route Khan travelled into Paris during the Occupation. In France, the author interviewed former Resistance fighters and, in India, participated in a Sufi ceremony honouring Khan’s nephew.

However, the real immersion was yet to come. Just a month after beginning to write The Tiger Claw, the World Trade Centre fell and all hell broke loose in the US. Singh Baldwin took a six-week hiatus to distribute information pamphlets on behalf of Sikh cab drivers whose turbans were being confused with Osama bin Laden’s desert garb.

"It had to be spelled out. People suddenly became so willing to suspend the rule of law, 1100 people disappeared overnight, the Geneva Convention was suspended. It was a parallel of–guess what?–the 1940s," Singh Baldwin notes. "I would write a scene in my novel and the next day it would be enacted in real life."

Canada is one of the few places to make Singh Baldwin’s latest work readily accessible. Publishers in the US and UK won’t touch it. She says she knows the reason why. Though it’s a true story with a WWII setting, The Tiger Claw is a criticism of imperial powers through the eyes of a Muslim heroine. Without intending to do so, she has written a commentary on our times; Singh Baldwin is candid when she laments that the issues most deserving of discussion at this time are those least likely to receive it.

"Islam, Judaism, and Christianity have formed a triangle that has plagued the world. We might not be members of any of them, but we are all caught between their fights," Singh Baldwin says. "This story brought me hope, though. I wrote my way to hope eventually. The motivation came from a lot of people–today’s members of the Resistance."