And so I was hooked. The books were out of print, and – this being the early 1990s, before the days of Amazon and EBay – hard to find in second-hand book shops; so my library came to the rescue and ordered all five titles for me, which I read on holiday one week. I quickly forgot the original reason for wanting to read them, and was carried along instead by Deighton’s sharp, witty dialogue and byzantine plots, lost in the puzzle of trying to work out just what was going on. All five books - The Ipcress File, Horse Under Water, Funeral In Berlin, Billion-Dollar Brain and An Expensive Place to Die - were unconventional spy adventure stories, in which the motives of all the protagonists are not clear or explained until the end (and sometimes not at all – you’re on your own!). The unnamed hero is always in the middle of the plot, trying to work out what was going on around him, keeping his suspicions from his colleagues – and from you, the reader, too. The Ipcress File, Deighton’s first book, is quite rough around the edges – it was written over two summers, and the join between the two is quite noticeable; the story is not as tightly told as the film, but the writing in other books is much more polished.
The best of the first five is Funeral in Berlin, in which the Berlin representative of the British Secret Service Johnny Vulkan claims to be in contact with a Russian scientist who wants to defect. The plan is to smuggle the scientist across the Berlin wall, in a coffin as part of a fake funeral, using a local organisation which has arranged the escape of many people across the wall to make the necessary arrangements, with the help of a Colonel Stok, a Russian security officer on the take. Our unnamed hero is sent to check that the operation is viable, and meets Stok, who confirms his support, but only if a successful organisation looks after the plan, as he doesn’t want to be implicated in the escape. Vulkan sends our hero back to London with a request for a passport and matching papers in a specific name, which he duly organises, but the plan quickly unravels once he returns to Berlin with the papers, which are sought not only by Vulkan but also by agents of Israeli intelligence. Funeral in Berlin was made into a successful film also starring Michael Caine (while a third story in the series – the excellent Billion-Dollar Brain – was turned into a travesty of a film by eccentric director Ken Russell, and is best avoided).
After the first five “unnamed” spy books, Deighton took a break from writing spy fiction to look at two other types of deception. In Only When I Larf, he tells the tale of three confidence tricksters as they develop a scam to sell non-existent tanks to a corrupt African general; each chapter of the story is told from the perspective of a different member of the gang, as they try to deceive each other as well as their victims. This was followed by Close-Up, a dark story of self-deception involving an actor with a dodgy past, who is trying to keep the truth away from a biographer who has been assigned to tell his story. Again, Deighton develops the story using the perspective of different characters to both illuminate and disguise the reality that the main character is trying to conceal.
In between these two books came Deighton’s masterpiece – Bomber, a historical novel describing an RAF bombing raid during World War 2. The novel brilliantly captures the savage impersonal nature of the bombing campaign by looking at the issues confronting characters on both sides – the bomber crews charged with executing the mission, the officers who planned it, the Luftwaffe crews defending their homeland, and the civilians and fire crews in a small town that ends up being bombed in error during the raid. It is heartbreakingly realistic and captures the pressures the bomber crews were under to fly on raids against civilians, without shirking from describing the horrors the raids caused. There is a scene which still causes me nightmares, as an inexperienced pilot on his first mission is getting to grips with flying his Lancaster, analysing his body’s reaction to the stresses and discomforts of a combat mission (he was a medical student before being called up for service, and he is thinking how to describe his experiences to his father, a respected doctor). While we see him thinking about this, Deighton intersperses dialogue between the pilot and radar operator of a night fighter that is flying beneath his bomber, unseen by the crew of the Lancaster, and describes the unfortunate young pilot’s final moments as the fighter opens fire. Terrifying. A sobering but utterly compelling read that I go back to at least once a year.
Deighton returned to spy writing with a trio of so-so stories which may or may not have featured the “unnamed spy” of the first five – the character is still unnamed, but seems to be a different person to the first set. These three books – Spy Story, Yesterday’s Spy and Twinkle, Twinkle Little Spy are perfectly adequate stories but pale by comparison to his next project – the Bernard Sampson cycle. This series of ten books – the three trilogies Berlin Game, Mexico Set, London Match; Hook, Line, Sinker; and Faith, Hope, Charity; plus the self-contained back-story saga Winter – build a compelling and elaborate tale of deception in which Sampson – a bitter, sarcastic spy overlooked for promotion and now too old for field work – finds himself the victim of the ultimate betrayal when his wife, herself a highly-placed official in the secret services, defects to East Germany, leaving him the subject of doubt and suspicion by his bosses and colleagues. He has to demonstrate his loyalty while overcoming his reservations about the effectiveness of the people he works for; and at the same time he also has to deal with his devious friends and the machinations of his wife’s family, who want to take custody of his children. The series is just superb from start to finish. The standalone novel Winter tells the story of the Berlin-based Winter family from 1900 to 1945; the characters in this story also feature throughout the Sampson saga. 
Alongside the Sampson novels, Deighton wrote a clutch of other excellent novels, each distinctive in its own right. XPD is a stand-alone spy adventure following the consequences of the publication of the memoirs of an American soldier who was part of an army gang which stole gold and documents from a Nazi hoard at the end of WW2; Goodbye Mickey Mouse is a romance between an English journalist and an American pilot during WW2; Mamista is a tale of cynical manipulation by the CIA in a South American country wracked by Civil War; City of Gold is a whodunit-style story set in Cairo in the days leading up to the Battle of El Alamein; and SS-GB is a complex whodunit set in an alternative history in which Germany successfully invaded Britain during WW2. All of these are top reads. My favourite is Mamista, a bleak tragedy in which an Australian doctor is commissioned to conduct a health check amongst revolutionary forces hiding in the jungles of a South American country; the check has been clandestinely ordered by the CIA in order to establish the strength of the forces aligned against the country’s government, which it would like to have overthrown in order to get a more malleable administration with which to negotiate access to oil rights. As the story develops, it becomes apparent that the US involvement with both the government and the revolutionaries is thoroughly Machiavellian, with the unfortunate doctor caught in the middle.
So why do I like Len Deighton’s books so much? Well, first of all they are exquisitely written, full of sharp observations, sparkling dialogue and well-observed characters. Second, I love the slightly oblique way in which he tells his stories; nothing is quite what it seems, often he doesn’t spell out all the subtleties of the plot, it’s usually up to you to work out what’s going on – that makes them not only a joy to read once, but a pleasure to read over and over, as each time I read them I notice some detail I’d previously missed. Third, I respect him for trying to find different “hooks” into his stories – the characters with no names, the multiple narrative viewpoints, the opinionated nature of his first-person characters and their skewed perspectives. Fourth, there is a slightly subversive anti-establishment tone to his writing, which I quite enjoy. And finally they’re just darned good reads; give one a try!
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