Strange similarities between 2 narrators in Mureil Spark and Charles Portis

I'm not sure how or even whether Muriel Spark will tie up the loose ends of the plot of A Far Cry from Kensington (1988), and at the half-way point it's beginning to look like there's some clunky and improbable explanation for who's sending the threatening messages to the narrator's neighbor, Wanda. It's too bad the plot's probably going nowhere, but the strength of the novel overall is the acerbic voice of the narrator, Mrs Hawkins (we don't even know here first name; she does appear to be a war widow - she's recounting events from 1954 - but she tells us literally nothing about her late husband; odd). She takes gruff from nobody, and is confident in her abilities and her poise. Strange how these things happen as these 2 books have little else in common and appeared on my to-be-read list for completely different reasons but Mrs Hawkins reminds me of the narrator of the book I previously read, Mattie Ross, in True Grit: both women in their 50s/60s looking back on events of their youth, giving little or no info about current life, and both establishing a tough persona and a subtle narrative wit, as they recount completely different worlds: bounty hunting in the Choctaw Nation ca 1880 and the publishing world in London in the 1950s. It would be tempting to say these worlds are also surprisingly similar, but they're not. The stakes are not life-and-death in publishing; in fact everyone seems to have a blase and casual attitude about their work, spending endless time reading mss and communicating with authors - how things have changed! The heads of the 2 publishing houses Mrs Hawkins works for (in first half of novel) strange and eccentric (though in different ways), and the whole world of publishing seems insular and clubby and upper caste. In fact, part of the fun of this novel, at least when it was published, was to figure out who if any of the characters was based on real people. I'm pretty sure the writer Emma Loy  (?) - whom Spark describes as a successful writer who insists that her publisher take on the dreadful work of her insufferable male companion, Hector, must be based on someone (as must Hector). The dish-aspect of the novel, though, is so far back in time now that few readers will really care. Still makes for a good read, though.