The Deighton Dossier

A cover story - tracking down Deighton's designs: can you help?

2012-01-19T13:52:00.000-08:00

'The cover should bring a subtle and intimate promise of what the writer has contrived:
not a display of incoherent pyrotechnics' - Len Deighton

Len's cover for Free Love and Heavenly Sinners, 1956

As readers of this blog will know, before he became an internationally-renowned thriller writer and historian Len Deighton was a designer and illustrator during one of the purple patches of 20th Century British design during the fifties and early sixties.

Many of his designs are well known, but even Len himself isn't sure exactly how many book cover designs he produced. I've been in communication with Edward Milward-Oliver - author of The Len Deighton Companion - on the subject of Len's cover designs, which he's currently researching. While we think we have the definitive list of cover illustrations, there just might be more out there that neither of us is aware of. Indeed, I've received emails from blog readers on this very subject, so the definitive answer is, perhaps, still to be had.

Therefore, I thought I'd use the Deighton Dossier to both share a great collection of the known covers Len has produced, and crowd source the question:

Do you know of any 'missing' Len Deighton covers out there?

Find out more below...

Much of the work Len undertook at the time after leaving St Martin's School of Art and the Royal Academy was in book cover design. As a freelance designer working for publishing houses and magazines, Len must have produced hundreds of design commissions, from the large to the small. But most will have had the distinctive trademark of Len's design work during this period - the black outlining, the minimal use of conventional shading, strong matte colouring and lettering that made use of all sorts of new and modern fonts, all of which made Len's covers stand out as exciting and eye-catching. He certainly took advantage - as other illustrators did during this period - of the possibilities from new printing and production techniques, and the freer expression being developed in London's art schools, that allowed book covers to tell stories in themselves.

Len's most famous commission is the cover for the UK first edition of Jack Kerouac's beat generation novel On the road, which as well as being one of the most sought-after of Len's cover designs (good copies go for £800+) is now available in poster, t-shirt, greeting card, postcard and tea towel, such is the popularity of the design and its compelling pen portrait of the story of Sal Paradise and his travel's across 'fifties American heartlands.

Equally as important at this time are the numerous penguin covers Len produced, recognisable by the iconic orange and white covers and the strong black line designs. In the book Penguin by Illustrators from 2009, Len gave some insight to the life of a freelancer in the fifties, working to deadlines and always needing to be creative:

Long, long ago I lived in Central London. I was easy to reach. I delivered on time, and have never been known to turn away a paid job. I became an artist of last resort and often faced ferocious deadlines: 'I know it's Friday afternoon, Len, but we need it Monday morning, so I'll get the proof round to you tonight ... or maybe first thing in the morning.' At Penguin, my drawings were seldom modified by orders from above - maybe they should have been. Not enough time I suppose.

The result was a mixed bunch of covers; from them I recall John Wain's Hurry on Down, my Budd Schulberg cover for The Disenchanted and Iris Murdoch's Under the Net as being reasonably successful. The colour bands went from horizontal to vertical to make more room for cover drawings, many of which were hurriedly produced and not good enough. While money and time were lavished upon typographic perfection the artist was the last in line when it came to fees.

Len believes he did around 22 book covers during his time as an illustrator, but he - and we - think there may be other examples of his cover or endpaper illustrations out there in the world of books which might have been overlooked with the passage of time. My personal favourite - as a baseball fan - is the cover for George Plimpton's Out of My League, the story of a journalist who convinces himself he's got what it takes to step up to the plate of his local baseball team and face an innings from the star pitcher. Len's illustration perfectly captures the fear and anticipation of the baseball hitter as he waits in the dugout to face the curve ball and the sinker.

Below are the details for the covers which are known about by collectors and which are illustrated in the image below. If any readers, design and illustration historians or collectors know of any other Deighton covers that should be added to this list, do please get in touch!

Deighton's cover illustrations

1955
Fred Bason’s Third Diary

Fred Bason - Andre Deutsch - London 1955 - Jacket

1956
Sales on a Shoe String

Sydney Hyde - Andre Deutsch - London 1956 - Jacket

My Husband Cartwright

Olivia Manning - Heinemann - London 1956 - Jacket and illustrations

House of Secrets

Sterling Noel - Andre Deutsch - London 1956 - Jacket

Free Love and Heavenly Sinners

Robert Shaplen - Andre Deutsch - London 1956 - Jacket

1957

The Revelations of Dr Modesto

Alan Harrington - Andre Deutsch - London 1957 - Jacket

The Other Paris

Mavis Gallant - Andre Deutsch - London 1957 - Jacket

1958

On the Road

Jack Kerouac - Andrew Deutsch - London 1958 - Jacket

Advocate for the Dead

Alex Weissberg - Andre Deutsch - London1958 - Jacket

Onionhead

Weldon Hill - Andre Deutsch - London 1958 - Jacket

The Idle Demon: a Collection of Verses

R. P. Lister - Andre Deutsch - London 1958 - Jacket

The Key Above the Door

Maurice Walsh - Penguin (1282) - London 1958 - Cover illustration

The Small Dark Man

Maurice Walsh - Penguin (1283) - London 1958 - Cover illustration

The Southerner

Douglas Kiker - Andre Deutsch - London 1958 - Jacket

Tender is the Night

Scott Fitzgerald - Penguin reprint (906) - London 1958 - Cover illustration

1960

Under the Net

Iris Murdoch - Penguin (1445) - London 1960 - Cover illustration

The Disenchanted

Budd Schulberg - Penguin (1498) - London 1960 - Cover illustration

1961

The Little Perisher

Dighton Morel - Secker & Warburg - London 1961 - Jacket
1962

Anatomy of Britain

Anthony Sampson - Hodder & Stoughton - London 1962 - Endpapers

Out of My League

George Plimpton - Andre Deutsch - London 1962 - Jacket

1963

The Incomparable Atuk

Mordecai Richler - Andre Deutsch - London 1963 - Jacket

Hurry on Down

John Wain - Penguin (1442) - London 1963 - Cover illustration

The full collection of Len Deighton covers is below, kindly provided by Edward Milward-Oliver.

Board already? The curious case of The Ipcress File game

2012-01-02T02:40:00.000-08:00

About now in households across the UK and beyond, a multiplicity of board games like Monopoly or Cluedo - purchased as Christmas gifts and played, sometimes reluctantly, on Boxing Day - are being put back on the top of the cupboard, to be played again only occasionally on future Boxing Days if the TV is no good.

In this electronic age, board games have become something of an anachronism. When a world of immersive 3D fun is available on the PlayStation or Wii, why resort to pushing a plastic character around a board?

The answer was always using your imagination and interacting and having fun with others in a way you cannot with electronic gaming. Until perhaps the 'nineties or thereabouts, when a character in a book, TV series or film, or the film/book itself was a hit, it was often made into a board game. In the marketing parlance, such a 'tie-in' was produced to maximise revenue for the rights holder and create a lucrative commercial bond with fans of a particular character or series.

I was prompted to blog about board games having come across recently - via eBay - a copy of The IPCRESS File board game, made by Milton Bradley.

The Harry Palmer character is not the only espionage fiction character to have his own board game. A little research shows that in the past, the board game's proved a popular route to market for some major characters in spy fiction, and indeed about the Cold War and spying in general.

And one can see why: the best board games encourage players to be tactical, to keep secrets, to bluff their opponents, to take on missions, to make (metaphorical) threats and, ultimately, to come out on top. The Cold War in cardboard.

In 1965 Milton Bradley (MB) Games in the US bought out a board game based on The IPCRESS File, clearly hoping to ride on the coattails of the commercial success of the movie in the cinemas in the US. Images from the film's marketing materials are used - presumably under license - and on the box is the legend: 'Harry Palmer, the cool British agent'.

It is difficult to determine their target audience. The movie was aimed at an adult audience, yet the game is marked as 'from 10 to adult'. It is a bit of a stretch to imagine many adults playing the game as it is incredibly simple and lacking in sustained interest. In form it is a simple chasing game, with players picking up orders and enacting them through dice rolling and movement. Up to four players move around a board which features representative scenes from the film complete with recognisable characters of Harry Palmer and Dalby and Ross. Players are gven spy assignments, but one player secretly becomes a double agent. Those around the table are required to solve their assignments so that they can identify the double agent. Any player who knows who the double agent is then 'licensed to kill' the double agent and thereby win the game. Simple as.

Of course, to a collector one of the attractions of a game like this is not the game itself but, given the fate of most board game is to end up in charity shops or on the sum, their rarity. That in itself is of value to a collector, along with the sheer curiosity factor. The design of The IPCRESS File box and game is of interest as it clearly by the same artist who produced the cinema poster and bill campaigns for the film in the US market. This is evidence the the board game rights were clearly an integral part of the studio's overall marketing campaign for the film in the 'States.

However, no such games were produced for Funeral in Berlin or Billion-Dollar Brain, which suggests either the game was a complete failure, or the marketing people at the studio were looking to target a more mature audience through more traditional marketing means.

Beyond collecting books and films, for a fan of any particular genre or character, the ephemera - the items which float around in the outer rims of the character galaxy, so to speak - offers then new sources of interest, particularly as favourite characters and themes are played out in new forms of media.

The IPCRESS File board game follows in path of a number of games which have a clear espionage link; indeed, some of the most famous spy fiction characters have appeared in cardboard and plastic form.

James Bond, for example, appeared on a famous board game published by MB games during the sixties which came out alongside some of the early films: the James Bond Secret Agent 007 game of 1964 was the first of many tie-ins around the film series, and was produced when only three Bond films had been released. Clearly there was enough popularity surrounding those early films to justify the move into gaming marketing. It has been re-released and updated at certain points, and now demands serious money from collectors for a good copy.

MB also produced games tied to specific movies : Thunderball from 1965 follows on from the release of the generic Bond game, and is the first specific film-based game; Goldfinger appeared in 1966 and the action follows themes in the film, your objective being to capture Goldfinger, who's hiding out in Fort Knox. These games are simple roll and move games, where the players' pieces capture other gamers' and have to undertake missions managed through simple card instructions. The main link to the film - as is the case with The IPCRESS File game - is in the attractive box packaging, which contains scenes recognisable from the films which were intended to attract adults and children who had seen the film, and wanted to enact the scenes themselves. Whether the reality of the game play matched their expectations is another matter! More contemporary is Scene It?, a film trivia game which is linked to a DVD of clips from the films. 007 has also appeared on playing cards.

Bond, of course, has also made the obvious leap from screen to computer game console over the last twenty years, the most recent example being the re-imagining of James Bond Goldeneye, which was a hit on the PS2 when it first came out in the 1990s. But that's probably something for another blog post; the closest Len Deighton's writing reached in the digital age is the Commodore 64 game Blitzkrieg!

The sixties were a golden period for TV and film-based spy characters and series, and this is reflected in the sixties being a boom period for board game. So the characters from the original Mission: Impossible TV series made it to cardboard. The New Avengers, not strictly spies I guess, also made it onto the toy shelves in the same decade with an eponymous game. The Man from U.N.C.L.E. was a major sixties hit and not surprisingly, it was also produced as a board game tie-in to tap into the demand from fans to re-enact the missions outside of the broadcast schedule. This blog post carries some more detail about what the game involved.

More broadly, a little Internet-based research has thrown up a number of generic spy-related board games, few of which I've heard of but which sound intriguing: Vienna (naturally, a centre of the spy world in the fifties and sixties in Europe), Conspiracy (what else!) and Inkognito, which draws on the historical world of the spy in the heart of the Venetian Republic.

In 1973, Espionage is one of the more successful games which play on the general interest in popular culture in all things spying, which was a feature of the Cold War period right up until the late eighties. Spy Ring is a contemporary spy game to The IPCRESS File, requiring players to visit embassies placed across the international city of Espiona, the one who collects the most valuable set of secrets being the winner. Thriller writer Robert Ludlum put his name to a Game of Counter-Espionage in 1988, which again plays on the obvious gaming factors of deception and secrecy from your other gamers around the table. Spy Ring was the entry into this increasingly burgeoning market from Waddingtons, the UK game maker which was in a perpetual game of catch up with its much larger US competitor, MB.

The attractions of the spy-related board game to makers are clear. It introduces elements of mystery, detective work, outwitting your friends around the table and keeping secrets. Most involve the elements of chance (dice), movement around the board, and missions and objectives for each player, all of which encourage repeat play and repeat association with the theme and brand and, presumably, repeat custom at the box office or on the TV screen.

This webpage, and the website Board Game Geek, both have more information on each and links on these and other games. If you've played any of the games mentioned, or can recommend to readers any other games of interest, do put up some posts below.

The reissues - the job is done .....

2011-12-23T10:35:00.001-08:00

Arnold Schwartzman, Len Deighton's friend and collaborator on a number of books, emailed me recently to say he's now completed the full set of covers for the Harper Collins reissues of all of Len Deighton's fiction works.

Having seen them all, I can say they're on a par with the original set of Ray Hawkey covers, in the sense in which they innovate and provide a consistency of design across all the books, and give the book buyer a clear sense of what themes the book is exploring.

Make up your own mind by checking out the covers in this online gallery.

Reproduced below are the covers for the final four books in the reissue series, coming out in 2012. Noticeably, Arnold's chosen to adopt a common theme running across the books, of a pair of spectacles, worn by the hero. The 'spy with no name', a certain Harry Palmer? Given that Palmer (unnamed spy) isn't in Spy Story, for example - based on my understanding of the story and a reference by Len in a previous edition - might this cause confusion? To the book-buying public, probably not. The covers are on a par with all the others produced so far, and Arnold's to be congratulated on revitalising Len's existing collection of stories.

Bored already? ....

2011-12-16T07:59:00.000-08:00

Nick Jones, chronicler of all things books in Lewes and writer of the Existential Ennui blog, has put up an interesting post about The Ipcress File, in which he references well known comments by author Kinglsey Amis in an article called 'A New James Bond', in a published collection of essays, Kingsley expresses frustration with the complex plot:

"tough sledding with The Ipcress File... The endless twists and turns of the plot, the systematic withholding of clues and even of settings in time and place..."

Great article that's worth checking out.

Shelf Life redux...

2011-12-10T03:54:00.001-08:00

Blog reader Richard Corles has shared a picture of his bookshelf, showing his collection of Len Deighton first editions, including it looks like a mix of US and UK first editions:

So I thought, what about asking other blog readers to send in photos of their own bookshelves and collection of Len Deighton books (or, indeed, any other relevant author). To kick things off, here's part of my collection of Deighton's books, including the reissued Game Set and Match series with the spine design spelling out 'Bernard Samson':

If you want to post up a picture of your bookshelf, send me a photo (max 2MB).

Dutch blog follower Arthur Nutbey has sent in a photo of his shelf; he tells me he takes off all the dust covers to make it more 'library-like':

Sci-Fi? Ah, no, San Francisco

2011-12-08T11:13:00.001-08:00

A number of readers - including author Jeremy Duns, who dragged himself away from his plagiarism research to Tweet me - have alerted me to an excellent overview of Len Deighton's work in the SF Daily. That's SF for San Francisco, not Science Fiction as I first thought, confused.

The article - here - by Casey Burchby, makes the case that Deighton's works have stood the test of time, as we near the fiftieth anniversary of The Ipcress File next year in 2002. I think Casey's opening analysis of Len's position in the literary world is pretty accurate:

"For many of us, Len Deighton may be a shadowy name at best. His best-sellerdom, though it lasted decades, is now a memory. (His most recent novel was published in 1996.) Yet Deighton is one of the best writers of the second half of the 20th century, being a master of spy fiction as well as a major contributor to the literature of World War II in fictional and nonfictional forms."

Well worth a read.

Competition - win a Top Notch thriller

2011-11-30T11:43:00.001-08:00

Author Mike Ripley - who's a keen reader of this blog - has made it his own one-man mission to resuscitate, rescue and re-purpose British thriller books that have gone out of print but which deserve their day in the sun again. His Top Notch Thriller imprint has over the last couple of years republished over fifteen books by British thriller writers.

I've just finished a great little story: Cold War, by David Brierley.

It's set in Paris in 1979 and follows the trail of a young, CIA-trained agent Cody, who's now left the CIA and is living in Paris with her lover. She gets caught up in the fever pitch of the election in France when it appears sinister forces are set up to bring down the Government. Though she is trying to escape the spying game, after a former colleague reveals to her secret information before he is killed, she is forced to track down the real story behind a scientist, Jean-Louis Ladouceur.

From being a by-stander at a shooting, Cody becomes the central player in a spy drama that moves from Paris to Berlin and tests her agents skills to the limits.

It's a good read, which I polished off commenting on the train over one week. Always good too to read stories with female espionage heroines, which in 1979 were still a relatively new phenomenon. Author David Brierley was described then as a new name joining the range of the world's great spy fiction writers.

To celebrate Mike's efforts in promoting British thriller writers, I've agreed to run a little competition for Deighton Dossier readers. The prize: a copy of another Top Notch Thriller - Undertow, by Desmond Cory, the story of Johnny Fedora, a half-Spanish, half-Irish assassin contracted to British Intelligence, who's charged with getting to grips with a KGB plot to uncover secrets from a sunk U-Boat in the Mediterranean (shades of Horse Under Water!). This character made his debut in 1951, two years before the arrival of James Bond.

To win this book, please answer this question (and send your answers to me at deightondossier [AT] me [DOT] com):

What is the name of the film about German U-Boats by Wolfgang Petersen from 1981, which starred Jurgen Prochnow?

Competition closes 12 December. No correspondence will be entered into. Judge's decision is final. One winner from the winning answers will be picked at random. Winner will be notified through email.

Good luck, readers!
________

We have a winner: Matthew Comstock!

Ken Russell, RIP

2011-11-28T12:07:00.001-08:00

British film director Ken Russell died over the weekend, after a long illness. He was 84 years old.

Famous for films like Women in Love and the Who's Tommy, he was also the director of the third Harry Palmer movie - Billion-Dollar Brain. Filmed in 1968, the film is not as fondly remembered as The Ipcress File or Funeral In Berlin, but it arguably had much going for it and was certainly visually very appealing.

After two 'conventional' directors in Guy Hamilton and Sidney Furie for the first two movies, producer Harry Saltzmann plumped for someone a little more unconventional for the third movie; but this only his second major feature and one year before Women In Love, which attracted attention for its male nude wrestling scene (one suspects Saltzmann might have thought twice had Russell already made this film and thought: 'Is this my guy?').

The location shooting in Finland is spectacular and arguably it must be difficult to make a duff film in such a beautiful location. It works along at quite a pace and the battle on the ice, as Midwinter's troops race to Latvia, is pretty spectacular and demonstrated the financial oomph the studio was putting behind the Palmer character after the successes of the first two films. Obviously a scholar of film history, the scene on the ice, between the two onrushing armies, is an homage to Sergei Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky film of 1938.

The music is excellent, too: the score offers a relentless, harsh mood (like the Baltic weather), with a focus on brass and percussion including three pianos; the score constantly varies the main theme. What it lacks, maybe, is the cockney charm of London or the Cold War vitality of Berlin from the earlier two films.

The reissues (15) - Charity

2011-11-25T14:07:00.001-08:00

After nine books (if you exclude Winter), with Charity Len Deighton brought the curtain down on - according to The Times - "one of the great literary achievements of British fiction." Having dealt in the first trilogy with the knowledge that his wife is a defector, only to discover in the second trilogy that Fiona's defection was in fact the greatest infiltration success of London Central and he was the crucial - unwitting - pawn in this most elaborate of espionage chess games, Charity rounds of the Samson story.

Bernard is still working for Frank Harrington in Berlin but increasingly caught up in the machinations of his brother-in-law George Kosinzki who is supporting the growing Catholic church movement in Communist Poland. Samson is increasingly anxious to find the truth about the defection of his wife and the death of her sister during the mission to exfiltrate her. A meeting with a former colleague, Jim Prettyman, reveals that he was responsible for hiring the hit man who killed Tessa, Fiona's sister. What is worse, Bernard realises there is no future for him and girlfriend Gloria, who is now carving a career for herself in London Central and sharing a bed with Bret Rensellaer.

Bret holds an inquiry in to Tessa's murder which uncovers that Silas was solely responsible for Tessa's death, and had gone to great, murderous lengths to keep the operation secret by trying to murder various of Bernard's contacts and friends who'd been forced to become involved. Betrayed by the department that now seeks to repay his loyalty, Bernard asks Fiona and their children to join him in Berlin, his true home.

The new introduction

What's most interesting in this new introduction is that Len explains his "obsession" with Berlin, which I've always maintained is one of the central 'characters' in the books, because the city and its inhabitants is so wonderfully described that the reader totally understand the mixed feelings Bernard has about the city and its people. That sentiment too is understood by Deighton:

"Berlin is like an ever-present character in my Bernard Samson books. It hovers over the action like a storm cloud even when the action moves to a different locale. But Berlin has no speaking part. It is the action and the inter-action that must always dominate stories of the type that I write. Berlin is the backdrop but the people who strut and posture on the stage together create a mood of drama, farce, horror or knockabout horror that must be maintained through all the stories. When I wrote Winter, a story of Berlin the first half of the twentieth century, and the prelude to the Bernard Samson stories, the ghosts danced in my head.

As a historian, Deighton tells the reader that he has had a fascination for all things German for many decades, and displays his grasp of the strategic imperatives which drove the development of Berlin - and Germany - from peasant economy to economic powerhouse in just over a century and a half. Across three pages, Deighton displays his knowledge of Berlin's history to explain its role in the ups - and many downs - of German culture from the Kaiser time right up to the fall of the Wall. Berlin is a city of contradictions - cultural centre drawing in people from all across central Europe, yet one which is dominated by the German army, to the extent that in the nineteenth century revenues from one particular toll gate went straight to the German army. Makes for fascinating reading for anyone interested in understanding the dynamics that have created this most tumultuous of cultures.

There is an interesting part of the introduction in which Deighton seeks to respond to critics' descriptions of the novels and their classification as spy thriller. Despite his apparent Prophet status in understanding the structure forces that eventually brought down the wall - the Catholic and Lutheran churches - and reflecting them in the heart of his novel, Deighton insists the stories are not political thrillers. They are, Len insists, comedy dramas about love and marriage, of a man with two women in his life.

The new cover
The spine motif - torn up plane tickets spelling out BERNARD SAMSON - is complete with this book, and the total effect when all nine books are place side to side is very pleasing. Arnold Schwartzman explains the front cover image - of Samson's image behind a push-bell directory - is to suggest Samson as the 'third man' of the story, an unreliable narrator; it also suggests the third book, of the third charity. The best image is on the back: a Russian ashtray on which lies a lit cigarette with lipstick, hinting at Fiona's central role in this whole drama.

The quality of thinking that has gone into all nine of the covers of this triple trilogy is immense, and I think that Schwartzman's design deserve consideration alongside Ray Hawkey's original covers for the trilogy.

Well, that's annoying ...

2011-11-21T14:44:00.001-08:00

Where are all our postings?

I've just discovered that the Deighton Dossier online forum - established for over two years and with 250 members - has been, well, wiped. Like some secret Stasi file, the contents have gone. It's empty. Barren. Void of opinion.

~~I had had an email from Forumer, the hosts, saying it was being updated. Some update!~~

It's damned annoying, that's what it is. The forum had been a great place for readers of the blog and the website to post up their comments on Deighton's books and more widely the Cold War and spy fiction in general. All gone. Not a hint of why. Oof, I'm angry!

But in the spirit of the residents of America's hurricane alley, when you lose something important in a storm, well you just start rebuilding straightaway. And that's what I'll do with the forum. I've reconstituted it on Proboards and you can now access it by clicking on this link.

~~So, if you've visited it before and made comments, please go back to it and sign up again and start adding new themes, ideas and reactions to the blog and the website.~~

Update

All back to normal, after Forumer's hiccup losing our forum during their server exchange. Original forum - with original postings - now back up and live online, at the usual address.

The reissues (14) - Hope

2011-11-20T09:41:00.001-08:00

After a gap of a few months (and a delivery of another pack of four review copies) I want to pick up on the coverage and review of the reissues of Len's works by Harper Collins. I'm now at reissue no 14 - Hope - book three of the Faith, Hope and Charity trilogy, the last of the three trilogies charting the betrayal - domestic and political - experienced by world-weary middle-aged spy Bernard Samson.

This story charts Bernard moving closer to solving the mysteries of his wife Fiona's defection - and subsequent triumphant return after being unmasked as London Central's most successful mole in the KGB in Berlin - and the tragic death of her sister in Fiona's exfiltration in the mud of a building site by the side of an autobahn outside East Berlin.

At the start of this novel, the reader finds Bernard and Fiona struggling to get back to how things were pre-defection. This story - less action packed than earlier episodes - is more reflective, and places much of the dialogue and plot around new evidence of the ties that bind the main characters. Deighton in this novel in effect asks the reader: can treachery in a marriage, let alone the spying game, ever be reconciled?

It starts in London. Bernard is confronted with an injured man on his doorstep one evening; the prelude to a series of events that starts to uncover the facts behind Tessa Kosinski’s murder in Berlin and paints the department in an unfavourable light, by revealing, piece by piece, the machinations of old hands Silas Gaunt and Bret Rensselaer - Bernard's boss - so bringing Bernard into conflict with his superiors once again. The injured visitor on his doorstep points to Poland, home of his brother-in-law George Kosinski, so Bernard travels there with his immediate superior Dicky Cruyer to find out exactly what keeps his brother law travelling regularly to Poland. What he finds prompts further soul-searching, as he edges nearer the truth.

The new introduction
When one places the Samson series of within the historical context, they seem particularly prescient, foreshadowing as they did the inner contradictions that led to the eventual fall of the Berlin Wall (the series starts in 1984 and continues up to early 1988, just a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall). Deighton confirms that in setting out the story - to be written, remember, over nine books over a series of seven years in the end - he was taking a risk:

"My whole Bernard Samson story was based on the belief that the Berlin Wall would fall before the end of the century. There were many times I went to bend convinced that this assumption had been a reckless gamble, and there were many people asking me where the plot was going. Sometimes I thought I heard a measure of Schadenfreude. More than one expert advised me to forget the Wall, tear my plan down and radically change its direction. I didn't yield to my fears. I stuck to my lonely task and to the original scenario and was eventually vindicated."

Some readers do sometimes point out that the last three novels of the series are the three least strongest, perhaps because the story was in the end overtaken by events; Hope appeared in 1995, six years after the Wall fell. With the main character (arguably) in the Samson series now gone - the Wall itself - the tension built into the story was, perhaps, lost through the march of history itself.

Nevertheless, Deighton was correct to alight on Poland as the likely wick which, once lit, would explode and undermine the Soviet rule of Eastern Europe from within. The election of a Pole Karol Wojtyla as Pope John Paul II was, Deighton writes, one of the first sustained challenges to Communist rule and an opposition supported by the US with additional funding from the thousands of Polish emigres with family behind the iron curtain. In giving primary to George Kosinski in the novel, Deighton wanted to highlight the tension under which the Poles lived: should they simply put up with their Eastern neighbour, whose tanks were parked just across the border in Belarus, ready to invade, or look west and seek the support of the western nations (to whom Poland was heavily indebted).

Of course, as the reader has encountered over the last few books, Fiona Samson's undercover work in Eastern Germany was also aimed at providing financial and practical support to religious groups as the source of internal pressure in that country which would finally crack the fragile constructed edifice that was the 'second' Germany. Only in this case, it was the Lutheran church rather than the Catholic.

The year of the story (1987) is one in which tumultuous background events - close to home and on the world stage - suggested a coming storm (literally, in the case of the great hurricane in the UK) and a shifting of the foundations on which Cold War uncertainties were faced. Behind the Iron Curtain, pressure was building as the economy stagnated and the communist regimes could offer their people little respite.

As Deighton writes, with a devastating collapse of the world's financial markets and President Gorbachev meeting Pope John Paul in the same year, the tides of history were pointing to something. For Bernard Samson, it also suggests that his quest for the truth is coming to a conclusion and that he is edging closer to the dark secrets on which the UK's efforts to undermine the communist regimes of Berlin and Warsaw were based. Hope sees a tougher, more hard-bitten Samson than the desk-bound agent first met in Berlin Game, Deighton comments, but he is still a character which the reader trusts and wills redemption for.

The new cover design

Arnold Schwartzman here chooses to portray Bernard Samson looking through a pub window, emphasising - with the window from a pub - that Bernard is in the 'last chance saloon'. It's a lovely idea, although I'm not sure if the cover image is just a little too busy and evidently a PhotoShop amalgam that, for me, doesn't quite work. On the back cover he places a model of Tower Bridge across an old map of Berlin, drawing an analogy between the Thames and the Wall, both in some senses dividing two great cities. It is also a metaphor for the placing of something quintessentially English behind the Wall - Fiona.

Shelf life ....

2011-11-18T13:48:00.001-08:00

On the shelf

A visit to my local Waterstones recently: Harper Collins' reissues of Len's books. All good.

In the trenches of public opinion ...

2011-11-14T12:56:00.001-08:00

Very interesting article on the BBC website today concerning Oh! What a Lovely War, the Joan Littlewood stage show about the First World War which, according to the article led to a major change in the public's attitude towards the great war. Former BBC radio producer Charles Chilton wrote the original treatment which, when picked up by theatre producer Joan Littlewood and put on at the Theatre Royal, Stratford, it was a major cultural event:

"Littlewood gave the show a new political bite, as befitted a nation growing tired of deference. The family of Field Marshal Douglas Haig wanted to stop the show reaching the West End, claiming the portrayal of him was a crude caricature."

Of course, Oh! What a Lovely War was subsequently produced by Len Deighton in 1969 (he also wrote the script). Richard Attenborough starred in the movie which - with its cast comprising the creme de la creme - presented a coruscating view of the "donkeys" who led the British "lions" in such catastrophes as Verdun and Paschendaele.

Interestingly, however, the article fails to reference Deighton's connection to this movie.

War in real time ....

2011-11-11T01:07:00.001-08:00

Len Deighton's Bomber is being broadcast this afternoon on BBC Radio 4 Extra, in real time, according to the BBC's Blog, to mark Armistice Day, today.

For those of you not familiar with this work, it's significant because Bomber covers 24 hours in the life of a crew of a Lancaster bomber involved in a failed raid over Germany. The key to the original radio version by the BBC is that when broadcast, in the 1990s, it was done so in real time - i.e. in sections across 24 hours - so that when time references were made in the play by the characters, they corresponded to real life!

The tension, according to the writer of the Radio 4 Extra blog, is real!

Check out the link here for more information.

Tracking down Bernard Samson ....

2011-11-10T13:49:00.001-08:00

On my last trip to Berlin one of the things I did was to spend a little time tracking down and photographing the locations of some of the key places which feature in the Bernard Samson series of ten books. Any fans of the series who are going to Berlin at any time can use this map as a reference.

However, it's not complete. There's an open invitation to blog readers to add to this map any key locations that I might have missed (particularly from the last two trilogies).

View Bernard Samson's Berlin - Len Deighton's Berlin in a larger map

Of spies and science fiction ...

2011-11-07T11:43:00.000-08:00

A Neuromancer, hard at work

William Gibson, creator of some of the greatest modern science fiction stories and characters, is something of a spy fiction fan, according to a recent interview in the Paris Review magazine reveals which I've been made aware of through links elsewhere.

The critically acclaimed writer of such books as Neuromancer and The Difference Engine has apparently taken inspiration from Len Deighton and John Le Carré in his works, taken by their creation of different versions of the "anti-Bond". I'm sure the Paris Review won't mind me quoting a snippet from the interview to illustrate:

"When science fiction finally got literary naturalism, it got it via the noir detective novel, which is an often decadent offspring of nineteenth-century naturalism. Noir is one of the places that the investigative, analytic, literary impulse went in America. The Goncourt brothers set out to investigate sex and money and power, and many years later, in America, you wind up with Chandler doing something very similar, though highly stylized and with a very different agenda. I always had a feeling that Chandler’s puritanism got in the way, and I was never quite as taken with the language as true Chandler fans seem to be. I distrusted Marlow as a narrator. He wasn’t someone I wanted to meet, and I didn’t find him sympathetic—in large part because Chandler, whom I didn’t trust either, evidently did find him sympathetic.

But I trusted Dashiell Hammett. It felt to me that Hammett was Chandler’s ancestor, even though they were really contemporaries. Chandler civilized it, but Hammett invented it. With Hammett I felt that the author was open to the world in a way Chandler never seems to me to be.

But I don’t think that writers are very reliable witnesses when it comes to influences, because if one of your sources seems woefully unhip you are not going to cite it. When I was just starting out people would say, Well, who are your influences? And I would say, William Burroughs, J. G. Ballard, Thomas Pynchon. Those are true, to some extent, but I would never have said Len Deighton, and I suspect I actually learned more for my basic craft reading Deighton’s early spy novels than I did from Burroughs or Ballard or Pynchon.

I don’t know if it was Deighton or John le Carré who, when someone asked them about Ian Fleming, said, I love him, I have been living on his reverse market for years. I was really interested in that idea. Here’s Fleming, with this classist, late–British Empire pulp fantasy about a guy who wears fancy clothes and beats the shit out of bad guys who generally aren’t white, while driving expensive, fast cars, and he’s a spy, supposedly, and this is selling like hotcakes. Deighton and Le Carré come along and completely reverse it, in their different ways, and get a really powerful charge out of not offering James Bond. You’ve got Harry Palmer and George Smiley, neither of whom are James Bond, and people are willing to pay good money for them not to be James Bond."

Relax in your favourite armchair and read a Romantic story ...

2011-10-16T05:08:00.000-07:00

Is Harry Palmer a Romantic hero? A Romantic with a capital 'R', a part of the literary tradition of Rousseau and Wordsworth?

Well, that wasn't my first reaction when reading the novels, but it was what Fred Erisman read into his reading of Deighton's first six novels. And he shared this idea with other fans in the April 1977 edition of Armchair Detective.

Life before the Internet was an innocent age

I'd never seen a copy of this American magazine, but I made a serendipitous find on, where else, eBay! The Armchair Detective was a quarterly journal devoted to the appreciation of mystery, detective and suspense fiction. I write 'was', as it's now longer a going concern, having grown from simple fanzine produced on a mimeograph (Ed - there's one for the teenagers!) to a quarterly journal matching in quality the output of many of the more established literary papers. And then, sadly, gone. The reviews are scholarly, intensely researched and backed up by references (as this article is) and often - as in the case of the front cover - innovative in design.

Now, of course, fans of any genre of fiction or the arts are connected by the Internet, and everyone's a critic and a reviewer - we're spoilt for choice. This blog for example is a true antecedent of the cut-and-paste efforts of yesteryear and supports the tradition in the digital age.

Back to the article. Erisman's initial thesis approaching Deighton's novels is interesting: the spy as 'romantic', linked to the ideal of Romantic thought derived from Rousseau and Wordsworth. His thoughts are personal, intellectual, and he displays emotional individualism. He acts from personal principle rather than from expediency.

The first six novels, Erisman writes: "convey a sense of the aimless intricacy of an intrigue-ridden society, pervaded by obscurity and betryal." Within this world, the unnamed spy (Palmer) is, he says, "Deighton's answer to the problems posed to the individual by contemporary life." This is a spy seeking personal satisfaction and freedom, while doing his job; he is dissatisfied with the world. Palmer, Erisman guesses, is "a Thoureauvian questing after inward reality in a twentieth-century setting." That's a deep analysis one rarely sees in connection with Deighton's novels. The writer goes on to critically deconstruct Deighton's texts, looking at notions of friendship, love and deception within the novels and for the most part, what he presents are ways of viewing the characters that I for one hadn't considered before.

He quotes a lovely perspective by another critic, James D'Anna on how the character epitomised the moral duplicity and uncertainty at the heart of the Cold War:

"the dominant colour of the Cold War is neither black nor white, but grey ... the issues in the East-West conflict are as blurred as a defective television tube."

Overall, this review provides something new by placing Deighton's hero within the pantheon of Romantic heros. One wonder if that was what Len had at the back of his mind when he developed the character?

Update

The cover design was at first a puzzle for me as I wrote on this blog. As eagle-eyed readers have commented - and thanks for their input - the car is a Jensen, and therefore it's clearly a reference to a line by Harvey Newbegin, 'Harry Palmer's' old spy pal in Billion-Dollar Brain, on the day the former met the latter:

'The first time I ever saw him was in Frankfurt. He was sitting in a new white Jensen sports car covered in mud, with a sensational blond, sensational. He was wearing very old clothes, smoking a Gauloises cigarette and listening to Beethoven on the car radio and I thought, "Oh boy, just how many ways can you be a snob simultaneously".'

I didn't spot it, as it's been a while since I've read Billion-Dollar Brain all the way through, and the image didn't look much like Frankfurt, but that clearly seems to be the reference and I should have spotted it. My bad! Well done to the blog readers who pointed out my error

The full article is available as a .pdf on the main Deighton Dossier website. Click the link on the front page.

Old-school cuisine ... at a pinch!

2011-10-08T08:07:00.000-07:00

Instant whip was always a handful to whisk and you never got it completely smooth, a residue of sickly powder laying at the bottom of the dish. Such was the state of cooking in the sixties.

The Independent's Gerard Gilbert cites this out-of-a-packet pudding as one of the great milestones of cooking in the sixties. Is Instant Whip the nadir of home-spun cooking or the start of the foodie revolution which transformed Britons' eating habits and led us directly to Jamie Oliver and Ready Steady Cook? Gilbert talks to Valentine Warner, the star of a new TV series Eat the Sixties, to answer that very question.

Warner turns to one of the great cookbooks of the sixties to argue that Britain's palate was changing for the better, and Chicken Kievs and Smash instant potato were merely the culinary foothills of a long slog up Mount Cuisine:

'Valentine Warner is knocking on my front door with the ingredients for chicken kiev and prawn and avocado cocktail, as well as a copy of Len Deighton's Action Cook Book. The spy novelist who gave us Harry Palmer was also an enthusiastic chef who wrote a newspaper recipe column throughout the Sixties. "This is actually a really good little cookbook," says Warner, showing me the cover of a man ladling spaghetti from a saucepan as a girlfriend encouragingly tousles his hair from behind (this is the 2008 reprint – knowingly sexist). "There were more men left to their own devices to get on with it... the bachelor in the kitchen."'

Great nostalgic stirrings reading this article. As a child, Instant Whip was a super treat, for which a whisk a procured and much furious beating and stirring later I was eating the sickliest, treacliest .... tastiest pudding around.

In the lair of the Wolf - understanding the Stasi's top spymaster

2011-10-02T05:29:00.000-07:00

When you're a spy, how do you measure success? In the case of Markus Wolf, the chief of the East German foreign intelligence service the HVA - Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung - he can look back during a 40-year career with the Stasi at the successful deep penetration of West Germany's intelligence and political structures, and the creation of an overseas agent network that was highly regarded/feared by both sides of the Cold War, and think: job well done.

And yet, like a uniformed King Cnut, ultimately his professionalism and skill was unable as part of the East German political and security leadership to hold back the tide of contradictions in a system that - ultimately - failed economically, politically and morally. How he addresses these twin tracks of professional pride and political failure make the autobiography I've just completed a fascinating read. That, following retirement, he became a Gorbachev follower and in 1989 ended up speaking - now as a writer - to one of the dissident protest forum's that sprang up in that year, is just one of many surprising facts in this book.

Man without a face provides a useful counterpoint to any conventional western understanding of the thrust and parry of Cold War espionage. Wolf comes across as immensely proud of what he achieved, the professional standards he introduced, the innovations his team developed - in particular, the use of Romeo agents to hook unsuspecting West German women into sharing intelligence - and the society which he was defending.

And yet, throughout the book, he expresses significant doubts: about the realities of the comradely relationship with the KGB, about the lives of agents sacrificed to achieve the bigger goal of defending the GDR, and the realities of defending the indefensible when, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the opening of the Stasi files, the reality of East German was exposed for all Germans to see. It is, in its way, a wonderfully expressive defence of the personal over the political.

Wolf's story is both compelling and entertaining. A son of a German communist playwright, his teenage years were spent in Russia, where he took up the struggle against Nazi Germany and became part of the early growth of East German communism under Walter Ulbricht.Wolff - who died in 2006 - is fascinating because he was, after Erich Mielke, one of the top Stasi leaders and spies, although he was rather more 'Control' than 'Bond', spymaster more than spy.

Wolf's life and career are inextricably linked to the fall of Nazi Germany and the communist seizure of Eastern Europe right up to just before the fall of the Wall. That history shapes Wolf's moral framework and his assessment of his role in the Cold War. Acknowledged as "communism's greatest spymaster" in the blurb for this autobiography, what he achieved - in pure espionage terms - is significant:

He placed an agent at the heart of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt's private office - Günter Guillaume - who brought about the former's resignation
The HVA's tentacles reached into the heart of West Germany's counterintelligence through the activities of agent Klaus Kuron
The Stasi exposed numerous ex-Nazis at the heart of West Germany's government in the sixties and seventies
The HVA funded the 'Generals for Peace' campaign in the seventies which did much too boost the anti-nuclear groups in West Germany which sought to undermine the placement of American Pershing nuclear missiles on German soil by showing leadership to the anti-nuclear protest movement
His office trained many of the ANC guerilla's who subsequently played a significant part in defeating the Apartheid regime in South Africa

His morally ambiguous defence of his role at the top of an oppressive, dictatorial and morally dubious political and intelligence system reads at times a little like Albert Speer's defence of his role in the Nazi regime: yes, there were things that in hindsight were wrong, but I was performing a role in the defence of my country and.... well, you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.

I paraphrase, but there is at the heart of this autobiography a tremendously compelling moral opacity which means one is never sure exactly what Wolf's true feelings are, and whether his defence has any basis in truth. Does helping to liberate Germany from Nazi oppression justify the replacement of Nazi terror with a Communist facsimile? Hannah Arendt's phrase "the banality of evil" feels, at times, appropriate when judging Wolf's role. Does he really feel remorse, or was he satisfied with having done his job to the best of his abilities?

He is candid and ready to acknowledge some of the internal contradictions within Marxism-Leninism and within the GDR itself. Failures of communism are written about at length - the hypocrisy of state officials having access to Western goods denied the majority of the population; the existence of Soviet tanks, missiles and KGB offices across GDR questioning East Germany evident desire to develop its own foreign and intelligence strategy through its support of Arab regimes in the Sudan and the Yemen; the loss of personal liberty by the GDR's citizens.

But I can't help thinking that, rather like the scene in Berlin Game where Bernard Samson first meets Erich Stinnes, the German-speaking KGB major who openly criticises his superiors and the failings of communism, Wolf's openness and candour are those of a committed communist who still believes in the rightness of the cause despite the evidence laid before him after the fall of the Wall. Yet, he also writes with the disappointment of someone who realises that much of what he fought for was false, base, a lie. Is his remorse genuine? Like the espionage world itself, this text is riven with moral ambiguity.

There is, however, genuine, moving pathos in his recognition, after the Wall came down, that he had been fighting a doomed battle, that the system which he defended through an extensive overseas agent network bore within it the seeds of its own destruction. The Berlin Wall becomes the ultimate expression of failure, but it was also a victory of sorts for the GDR:

'Looking back, I often ask myself whether things could have been different. My judgement is that East Germany could not have survived as a state socialist system long after 1961 without a closed border. The economic pressures, coupled with the inherent instability of being half a country (and traditionally the poorer half at that) were simply too strong. But the seeds of the divided Germany's demise began to sprout as soon as the border was fortified and the first concrete slabs put in place along the demarcation line. Cutting off the access of our people to the more attractive part of Germany was a brutal and effective solution but it was only a short-term one. In the long run, it was a disaster. I now see in the moral campaign against the East, which gained strength and conviction by the brooding symbolism of the Wall, was one of the decisive reasons for the eventual outcome of the Cold War. No amount of expertise on our part in planning, diplomacy, or the darker arts of espionage could have prevented that.'

And yet, he writes with great pride about his life and career as a spymaster. Despite his awareness of everything around him and the brutalities of the state he served, he continued to serve it assiduously - being a spymaster was a seven-day a week, twelve-hours a day job. Wolf's rationalising of his role in a brutal regime at time bears parallels with the justifications offered by generals and senior officials in the Nazi regime - they were simply working for their country.

The activities of his office and its agents is placed within the special context of East Germany's position as the unloved, sicklier younger brother of the other Germany, split politically but ultimately still sharing a common history and language. And that contributes to the contradiction at the heart of everything Wolf did. He was defending Germany - the true, socialist, Nazi-defeating Germany. He was - as many Nazi's subsequently described themselves - a patriot, a German. Yet he was putting his agents lives at risks to defend a regime he knew was based upon a total mistrust of its own population.

After the Wall's fall led to the eventual demise of the GDR and the incorporation of the East into the new, united Germany, the Germany that Wolf knew and had defended for over forty years was gone. West Germany had been a separate entity and - as he said at his eventual trial for treason - he had been fighting against what was in effect a foreign country:

'The German word for treason is Landesverrat, which quite literally means "betrayal of country". Common sense would dictate that the accusation against me was absurd: Which country was I supposed to have betrayed? I certainly did not betray my own country, nor the people who worked for me, and I saw no earthly reason why I should be in the dock for betraying someone else's.'

Like many in the East, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disappearance of any trace of Communism in the East has not shake Wolf's core belief in the rightness of Marxism-Leninism. In his eyes, from the perspective of a true Marxist, he was fighting for what's right. All that went before had a clear moral purpose. But does that make it right?

Wolf writes at the end of his autobiography:

"The Cold War is over, and my work may be done, but I have not lost my faith."

Like any believer, faith has the power ultimately to overcome doubt.

A film, you say? Heralding a return to the public consciousness of the spy novel? That's popular? Creating myriad articles in international media? One of Le Carré's novels? No, sorry, haven't heard anything

2011-09-17T08:29:00.000-07:00

With Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy now out in the cinema - and I look forward to seeing it very soon - the slew of positive media coverage of the film, and more broadly the spy novel genre continues apace.

UK media reviews so far have been generous to a fault: The Guardian (five stars), The Daily Telegraph, (five stars), The Times (also five stars), the Daily Mail (a-ha, only four stars!), the Daily Express (ooh, only 3 out of a possible 5), The Sun (back to 4 out of 5) .... they all pretty much love it. And journalists are loving the chance to explore a genre that one might had thought had, Bond apart, slipped from the media's and indeed the popular consciousness. Cue some cliché heavy, but entertaining writing about "the spying game".

William Boyd in The Guardian gives us an A-Z of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; his colleague Agnes Poirier meanwhile looks at the film from the point of view of the UK's national psyche. In The Telegraph, meanwhile, Marie-Claire Chappet gives us her 'inside guide' to the skills and codes of 'spy craft'; in the same paper, Josie Ensor goes for a baser approach to the film, asking if Oldman is sexier than Guinness. One suspects this matters little to about ninety percent of the people going to this film!

In The Times, Ed Potton describes this film as "the ultimate British espionage thriller" (subscription website). Now, that's some boast up against adaptations of Greene, Deighton, Fleming and others. But, he writes, "everyone's talking about this film". Mary Bowers in the same paper reports on John Le Carré's public endorsement of the film through his appearance at the BFI at the premiere earlier this week.

Blog reader Morgan Davies spotted a great article in the Irish Independent which gives a pretty thorough run-down of the great British spy thrillers, right from Greta Garbo in Mata Hari to the present day. Deighton's Harry Palmer was, the writer says, "clever, but he never really had a handle on what was going on in the unending chess match between east and west." And that's the same for many thrilling cold war literary heroes.

All good stuff, and great to see British writers, and British film-making (with a clear Swedish tinge!) grabbing the headlines. Oscar a-hoy, no doubt!

Readers of this blog are welcome to add links to any other interesting reviews and particularly features in the UK and international media, and share their thoughts about the movie.

The Top 5 Cold War-era spy thrillers...

2011-09-15T10:42:00.000-07:00

...according to the Digital Spy website.

Do you agree?

Not bad, as a starter for ten. But are they in the right order?

More Le Carré carry-on in the Telegraph

2011-09-10T04:04:00.000-07:00

A very interesting article in today's Daily Telegraph by Toby Clements, who seeks the source of the current upsurge in interest in John Le Carré.

Entitled 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: A love letter to John Le Carré', Clements aims to establish what it is that makes John Le Carré's stories fresh and accessible to a modern audience, through the new film starring Gary Oldman as George Smiley.

Clements alights on ambiguity as the secret to this sustained time on the literary stage, with no signs yet as the author approaches eighties of slipping off into the wings. The ambiguity is in the characters - Smiley is anything but the obvious spy, for example: cuckolded, respectful to some extent of his opposite number, his morality is not clear cut, nor are his relationships with the people and the operation of the Circus.

The ambiguity is also in Le Carré as an author, and in his writing, where Clements writes that he challenges the reader to treat the prose rather like a case officer: what's important, what's between the lines, what is noteworthy? The author's own background, and the blurring of his career as a spook with his life writing about them, also adds to this feeling of the "morally ambigious" in all his works.

His last comment is noteworthy: "Len Deighton and Alistair MacLean can only be read ironically". Hidebound by history, he suggests, these authors are no longer 'relevant' in a way that Le Carré is, and offer the reader only curiosity. The modern audience cannot effectively tune in, and reads them only to remember nostalgically how things were. His suggestion that modern audiences are drawn to the drab greys and shabbiness of seventies London in the film is telling.

But then, applying this criteria to other historical and spy fiction novelists - Fleming, Ambler, Greene - that gap between the then and the now is always going to be widened year on year as the world moves on. But if the story, the characters and the plots have real value and sustainability, they can survive the march of history.

And of course, this upsurge in discussion about Le Carré is driven by the inexorable push of the media marketing machine that is Hollywood. Were Tarantino to make good on his promise to film Game, Set and Match; or Ridley Scott, perhaps, to update the Thirty-Nine Steps, then we might see similar media debate about Deighton and Buchan.

Smiley culture

2011-09-07T12:41:00.000-07:00

It's official. The world has had enough of the war on terror and the war in Libya: everyone's nostalgic for the Cold War. Well, judging by the ubiquity of George Smiley and the new film version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in the media and online, the Cold War is back, back, back. It's like it's never gone. This most famous of Cold War spy thrillers is even being referred to on the comment pages of our national newspapers, a sure sign that a cultural phenomenon is emerging.

Gary Oldman's portrayal of the taciturn and morally ambiguous spy-hunter is everywhere this week as reviewers return from the screening sessions for the new movie and file their copy. And they're in universal agreement: the film's a cracker. Numerous reviews all point to Oldman's George Smiley as worthy of an Oscar. Derek Malcolm in the Evening Standard highlights Oldman's portrayal as more "introspective and less knowable" than Guinness' version; Time Out's Dave Calhoun's picks out the film's seventies verisimilitude; The Guardian's Xan Brooks talks of a director - Tomas Alfredson - who's more fascinated with the detail than the denouement, the journey rather than the destination; the Daily Telegraph's David Gritten writes that the film is simply a "triumph".

Consequently, lips are being licked by every spy fiction fan across the globe. Pub bores will also soon start regaling those who'll listen with their opinion that "it won't be as good as Alec Guiness's version". Judging from the new trailers, pub bores up and down the land will have to be buying a few pints by way of apology It looks very, very good.

What comes across from the trailers and the reviews is the pace. Or lack thereof. This is a slow - apparently, at times, slightly ponderous movie. It is the antithesis of the fast-paced, whizz bang crash of the 007 and Bourne spy movies which, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, have largely been Hollywood's staple of this genre. Here is a film which, in the way it apparently winds up the tension and the uncertainty, successfully mirrors the book it portrays.

All the reviews refer to Guinness and the seminal BBC TV series; I've yet to find a review that doesn't. This begs the question can a film maker really ever escape the artistic visions of those who've trodden a familiar path before, particularly when many feel the mould should have been broken after the first pot? The verdict seems to be yes.

That's perhaps surprising because the movie industry - particularly Hollywood - has a long-track record in getting re-makes of much-loved British film and TV spectacularly wrong: Sylvester Stallone in Get Carter. No further questions, m'lud! Having a Swedish director, perhaps, seems to be the key; Tomas Alfredson is schooled in the European school of pathos, character, drama and subtlety.

So. A much-loved British spy novel from a generation ago, with an instantly identifiable central character, previously filmed, and seared into our collective cultural memory, emerges onto the global stage in a remake.

I've no doubt that given the expected success of TTSP - with Oscar's already being polished, judging by all the online and offline comment - in some Hollywood office a producer is already asking the question: "what about The Ipcress File, huh?"

What about it, indeed. One word: unthinkable.

However, might that same cigar-smoking producer (one always assumes producers smoke, somehow) not also conceivably ask the question ..... "what about Game, Set and Match?"

Now that's a different question!

Desert island discovery

2011-08-28T02:29:00.000-07:00

Through regular blog correspondent Bryan Graham, I've uncovered the list of tunes chosen by Len Deighton for his appearance on Desert Island Discs in 1976.

For anyone who doesn't know, this is a BBC Radio 4 series which has been running since the war, in which famous individuals are invited to select eight records which they would like to have with them, were they stranded on this mythical desert island, along with a luxury item and a book.

Len appeared on 19 June 1976. His choices were these:

Ludwig van Beethoven, Für Elise, Soloist: John Ogdon
Louis Armstrong & His All-Stars, Stars Fell On Alabama
Johnny Cash, There ain't no easy run
Gwendoline Brogden, I'll make a man out of you
Maurice Ravel, La Valse, Orchestra: Swiss Romande Orchestra
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Piano Concerto No 11 in F, London Symphony Orchestra
Neil Diamond, Crackling Rosie
Gustav Mahler, Ich hab' ein glühender Messe (from Lieber eines fahrenden Gesellen), Halle Orchestra.

The latter piece Len picked as his favourite tune. His favourite book was The Art of Modern French Cooking - perhaps not surprising, as in his early twenties in Paris Len spent time in some of the great Parisian kitchens learning from top chefs. And his luxury was a photo darkroom, reflecting his early career as an RAF photographer and his long-standing interest in photography.

Apparently, at some point this interview from the show will be up on the Desert Island Discs online archive!

Just Len...

2011-08-19T13:05:00.000-07:00

Bang! Bang!

I have eagle-eyed reader of this blog Bryan Graham to thank for spotting this article on The Guardian's website. Len Deighton is one of 16 thriller and crime writers asked by the paper to pick their own favourite writers. The article appeared last month as crime writers gathered in Harrogate for the annual Crime Writing Festival.

Len's pick is Richmal Crompton, author of the Just William books. He cites young William Brown's undaunted opposition to authority - be it the school teacher or the village policeman - is one of the characteristics of Richmal Crompton's schoolboy character that entranced him and other readers. He sees the evidence of Crompton's writing in other characters:

"It is William's spirit of upbeat anarchy that distinguishes so many British crime stories from their tough-guy American counterparts. His pronouncements are social, political and philosophical but his adventures are catastrophic. William does not recognise catastrophe. Britain's wartime slogan "Keep calm and carry on" might have been his motto. Is William English, rather than British? I think so. Is he a male chauvinist pig? Undoubtedly. Did Richmal Crompton know what she was doing? Perhaps not: but what writer does?"

Also asked to pick their favourite writers as such crime and thriller writing luminaries as Lee Child, Frederick Forsyth, Nicci French and PD James.