Len Deighton
Leonard Cyril Deighton (/ˈdeɪtən/; born 18 February 1929) is a British author. His publications have included cookery books and works on history and military history, but he is best known for his spy novels.
Len Deighton | |
---|---|
Born | Leonard Cyril Deighton 18 February 1929 Marylebone, London, England |
Alma mater | Royal College of Art |
Occupation(s) | Writer, illustrator |
Spouse | Ysabele Deighton |
Children | Two |
After completing his national service in the Royal Air Force, Deighton attended art school in London, and graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1955. He had several jobs before becoming a book and magazine illustrator; he designed the cover for first UK edition of Jack Kerouac's 1957 work On the Road. He also worked for a period in an advertising agency. During an extended holiday in France he wrote his first novel, The IPCRESS File, which was published in 1962, and was a critical and commercial success. He wrote several spy novels featuring the same central character, an unnamed working-class intelligence officer, cynical and tough.
Between 1962 and 1966 Deighton was the food correspondent for The Observer and drew cookstrips—black and white graphic recipes with a limited number of words. A selection of these was collected and published in 1965 as Len Deighton's Action Cook Book, the first of five cookery books he wrote. Other topics of non-fiction include history, particularly military history.
Several of Deighton's works have been adapted for film and radio. Films include The Ipcress File (1965), Funeral in Berlin (1966), Billion Dollar Brain (1967) and Spy Story (1976). In 1988 Granada Television produced the miniseries Game, Set and Match based on his trilogy of the same name, and in 1995 BBC Radio 4 broadcast a "real time" dramatisation of his novel Bomber.
Biography
Early life and early career: 1929–1961
Deighton was born in a workhouse in Marylebone, London, on 18 February 1929.[1][2] His father was the chauffeur and mechanic for Campbell Dodgson, the Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum; Deighton's mother was a part-time cook. At the time the family lived in Gloucester Place Mews near Baker Street.[3][4] In 1940, during the Second World War, the eleven-year-old Deighton witnessed the arrest of Anna Wolkoff, a British subject of Russian descent for whom his mother cooked; Wolkoff was detained as a Nazi spy and charged with stealing correspondence between Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt.[5] Deighton said that observing her arrest was "a major factor in my decision to write a spy story at my first attempt at fiction".[6]
Deighton was educated at St Marylebone Grammar School, but was moved to an emergency school for part of the Second World War.[7] After leaving school Deighton worked as a railway clerk[8] before being conscripted for national service at the age of 17, which he completed with the Royal Air Force (RAF). While in the RAF he was trained as a photographer, often recording crime scenes with the Special Investigation Branch (SIB) as part of his duties.[7][8] During his work with the SIB he learned to fly, became an experienced scuba diver and an excellent shot with both rifle and pistol.[9]
After two and a half years with the RAF, Deighton received a demobilisation grant, enabling him to study at the Saint Martin's School of Art where he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art; he graduated from the college in 1955.[2][10] While studying he held a temporary job in 1951 as a pastry chef at the Royal Festival Hall.[9] He worked as a flight attendant for British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) between 1956 and 1957 before becoming a professional illustrator. Much of his work as an illustrator was in advertising—he worked for agencies in New York and London—but he also illustrated magazines and over 200 book covers, including for the first UK edition of Jack Kerouac's 1957 work On the Road.[4][7][11]
Publishing career: 1961–
Following the publication of a cartoon cookery illustration in the Daily Express in 1961, Deighton was commissioned by The Observer to provide a weekly "Cookstrip" for the paper's magazine, which he did between March 1962 and August 1966.[12] Deighton came up with the concept while he was working at the Royal Festival Hall and made sketches to remember some of the steps he undertook preparing dishes.[13][lower-alpha 1] He later explained:
I was buying expensive cookbooks. I'm very messy, and didn't want to take them into the kitchen. So I wrote out the recipes on paper, and it was easier for me to draw three eggs than write 'three eggs'. So I drew three eggs, then put in an arrow. For me it was a natural way to work.[14]
In 1962 Deighton's first novel, The IPCRESS File, was published; it had been written in 1960 while he was staying in the Dordogne;[8] the book was soon a commercial success.[15][16] The story introduced an unnamed working-class protagonist, cynical and tough, who was called by the name "Harry" once, although the character says he does not remember whether he had used that name; he was given the name Harry Palmer in the 1965 film adaptation.[1][lower-alpha 2]
Deighton considers the character not as an anti-hero, but "a romantic, incorruptible figure in the mould of Philip Marlowe".[15] Deighton described the inspiration of using a working-class spy among the Oxbridge-educated members of the Establishment as coming from his time at the advertising agency, when he was the only member of the company's board not to have been educated at Eton. He said "The IPCRESS File is about spies on the surface, but it's also really about a grammar school boy among public school boys and the difficulties he faces."[17]
After two further novels with his unnamed protagonist—Horse Under Water (1963) and Funeral in Berlin (1964)—Deighton published two cookbooks in 1965, Len Deighton's Action Cook Book (a collection of his cookstrips from The Observer) and Où est le garlic, a collection of French recipes.[11][18][lower-alpha 3] Two further novels in the spy series followed—Billion-Dollar Brain (1966) and An Expensive Place to Die (1967)— after which he published his first historical non-fiction work, The Assassination of President Kennedy (1967), co-written with M. Rand and H. Lockston.[18] During 1967 he also edited and contributed to Len Deighton's London Dossier, a work that described itself as "a real London guidebook".[19] The book suggested the hostels owned by Lord Rowton were doss-houses for down-and-outs. He and the publishers Jonathan Cape were sued for libel; they apologised, withdrew with suggestions made in the book by amending the claim in unsold editions, and paid substantial damages.[19] In September that year he wrote an article in The Sunday Times Magazine about Operation Snowdrop, an SAS attack on Benghazi during the Second World War. The following year David Stirling, the leader of the raid, was awarded substantial damages in libel from the article.[20] During the mid-1960s Deighton wrote for Playboy as a travel correspondent, and he provided a piece on the boom in spy fiction; An Expensive Place to Die was serialised in the magazine in 1967.[21]
In 1968 Deighton was the producer of the film Only When I Larf, which was based on his novel of the same name.[22] He was the writer and co-producer of Oh! What a Lovely War in 1969, but did not enjoy the process of making films, and had his name removed from the film's credits.[4][23]
In 1970 Deighton wrote Bomber, a fictional account of an RAF Bomber Command raid that goes wrong.[11] To produce the novel he used an IBM MT/ST, and it is likely that this was the first novel to be written using a word processor.[24][25] After being advised to by the historian A. J. P. Taylor, Deighton wrote Fighter: The True Story of the Battle of Britain, published in 1977.[15][26] The book was well received by readers and critics, although it was "censured by some for including interviews with German participants", according to the journalist Jake Kerridge.[15] Taylor wrote the introduction for the book, describing it as a "brilliant analysis";[27] Albert Speer, once the Minister of Armaments for Adolf Hitler, thought it "an excellent, most thorough examination".[28]
This was followed in 1978 by another novel, SS-GB, the idea for which came from Ray Hawkey, Deighton's friend from art school and the designer of the covers of several of his books. While the two were discussing what would have happened if the Germans had won the Second World War, Hawkey asked Deighton if he thought there could be an alternative history novel.[12][29] Blitzkrieg, his history of the rise of the Nazis and the fall of France, has a foreword written by General Walther Nehring, Chief of Staff to General Heinz Guderian.[30] His final history book is Blood, Tears and Folly: An Objective Look at World War II, which examined the events of the war up until 1942.[31] Reviewing for The Times, Henry Stanhope considers the work "extremely readable", although he questions the division of the book into different theatres of war, rather than a purely chronological history. This approach, Stanhope considers, "presents a less complete picture to the reader".[32] The historian Allan R. Millett considers the book would have improved by wider research into the Russian, Japanese and American aspects of the war.[33]
Beginning in 1983 Deighton wrote three connected trilogies: Berlin Game (1983), Mexico Set (1984) and London Match (1985); Spy Hook (1988), Spy Line (1989) and Spy Sinker (1990); and Faith (1994), Hope (1995) and Charity (1996). Winter, a companion novel dealing with the lives of a German family from 1899 to 1945, which also provides an historical background to several of the characters from the trilogies, was published in 1987. The trilogies are centred on Bernard Samson, a tough, cynical and disrespectful MI6 intelligence officer.[1][34]
Personal life
Deighton married the illustrator Shirley Thompson in 1960;[1] the couple were divorced in 1976, having not lived together for over five years.[35] He left Britain in 1969, and has lived abroad since, including in Ireland, Austria, France, the US and Portugal.[2][36] He lived for a while in Blackrock, County Louth,[37] where he married Ysabele, the daughter of a Dutch diplomat.[36] The couple have two sons.[14]
Deighton does not like giving interviews, and these have been rare throughout his life; he also avoids appearing at literary festivals.[38][39] He says that he does not enjoy being a writer and that "The best thing about writing books is being at a party and telling some pretty girl you write books, the worst thing is sitting at a typewriter and actually writing the book."[17] After completing Faith, Hope and Charity in 1996, he decided to take a year off writing; at the end of the period, he decided that writing was "a mug's game" that he did not miss and did not have to do.[40] By 2016 Deighton had retired from writing.[41][42]
Works
Novels
According to the film and media historian Alan Burton, The IPCRESS File along with John le Carré's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, "changed the nature of British spy fiction" as it brought in "a more insolent, disillusioned and cynical style to the espionage story".[43] The novel used appendices and footnotes which, according to the film academic Alan Burton, gave a sense of authenticity to the work.[44] The academic George Grella considers Deighton's novels to be "stylish, witty [and] well-crafted",[45] and provides "a convincingly detailed picture of the world of espionage while carefully examining the ethics and morality of that world".[46] Burton considers The IPCRESS File is "a marker of a new trend in mature, realistic espionage fiction".[44]
The academic Clive Bloom considers that after Funeral in Berlin was published in 1964, Deighton "established a place for himself ... in the front rank of the spy genre, along with Graham Greene, Ian Fleming and John le Carré".[47] Deighton's later works were less oblique than the earlier ones, and had, according to Bloom, "more subtlety and deeper characterization".[47] Oliver Buckton, the professor of literature, also considers Deighton to be in the forefront of post-war spy writers.[48] The crime writer and poet Julian Symons writes that "[t]he constant crackle of his dialogue makes Deighton a kind of poet of the spy story".[49]
Grella considers Deighton to be "the angry young man of the espionage novel", with the central characters of his main novels—the unnamed protagonist from the IPCRESS series and Bernard Samson from the nine novels in which he appears—both working class, cynical and streetwise, in contrast to the upper class and ineffective seniors in their respective novels.[46][43]
Adaptations
Several of Deighton's novels have been adapted as films, which include The Ipcress File, Funeral in Berlin, Billion Dollar Brain and Spy Story. All feature the Deighton character who was unnamed in the books but was given the full name "Harry Palmer" for the films; the producer for two of the three films, Harry Saltzman, came up with the name.[50] Two television films also featured Palmer: Bullet to Beijing (1995) and Midnight in Saint Petersburg (1996); they were not based on Deighton's stories. All the films except Spy Story feature Michael Caine as Palmer.[51] Deighton's hands were used in The Ipcress File in place of Caine's for a scene in which Palmer is breaking eggs into a bowl and whisking them.[52]
The first trilogy of his Bernard Samson novel series was made into a thirteen-part television series by Granada Television in 1988.[34][53] Although Quentin Tarantino expressed interest in filming the trilogy,[54] the project was not forthcoming.[55] The nine Samson novels were in pre-production with Clerkenwell Films in 2013, with a script by Simon Beaufoy.[56]
In 2017 the BBC adapted Deighton's novel SS-GB for a five-part TV miniseries, broadcast in one-hour episodes; Sam Riley played the lead role of Detective Superintendent Douglas Archer.[57] In 1995 BBC Radio 4 broadcast a "real time" dramatisation of Bomber. The drama threaded through the station's unchangeable schedule of news and current affairs from early morning to midnight.[58]
Legacy and influence
Deighton's work has been acknowledged by the thriller writer Jeremy Duns as being an influence on his own work.[59] In Letters from Burma, the politician Aung San Suu Kyi mentions reading Deighton's books, while under house arrest. Suu Kyi wrote that she was passionate about Arthur Conan Doyle's tales of Sherlock Holmes and the spy novels of le Carré and Deighton.[60] When asked by Christie's about his love for Indian art and how he started his collection, the writer V. S. Naipaul credited Deighton. "I met Len Deighton, the thriller writer, at dinner many years ago. He demonstrated to me that Indian art could really be approachable. I bought from ... Maggs because of Len Deighton pushing me onto [them] as being a very fair dealer, saying that they do not charge you much more than they should. That's a marvellous thing to be told".[61]
Deighton's 1970 novel Bomber was listed in Anthony Burgess's work Ninety-nine Novels, as one of the 99 best novels in English since 1939.[62] Bomber, the third album of the rock group Motörhead, was named after the novel, as the band's singer, Lemmy, was reading it at the time.[63]
Notes and references
Notes
- Several of the strips are pinned up in the background of the film set of Harry Palmer's kitchen in The Ipcress File.[14]
- The character appears in several of Deighton's works:
- The IPCRESS File (1962)
- Horse Under Water (1963)
- Funeral in Berlin (1964)
- Billion-Dollar Brain (1966)
- An Expensive Place to Die (1967)
- Spy Story (1972)
- Yesterday's Spy (1975)
- Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy (1976)[1]
- Deighton wrote five cookery books in total:[12]
- Len Deighton's Action Cook Book (1965) OCLC 30271545
- Où est le garlic (1965) OCLC 1112522953
- Basic French Cooking (1979) OCLC 473056466
- ABC of French Food (1989) OCLC 1145799233
- Basic French Cookery Course (1990) OCLC 803775071
References
- "Len Deighton". Contemporary Authors.
- Dawson Scott 2006b.
- "The Deighton File". 26 May 2009, Event occurs at 4:20–4:50.
- Dawson Scott 2006a, p. 43.
- Masters 1987, p. 257.
- Campbell 1992, p. 101.
- Buckton 2012, p. 55.
- Masters 1987, p. 258.
- Macdonald 1992.
- Milward-Oliver 1987, p. 11.
- Brown 1987, p. 12.
- Milward-Oliver 1987, p. 98.
- Walsh 2009.
- Stummer 2014.
- Kerridge 2017, p. 55.
- Krueger 2014, p. 102.
- Kerridge 2019, p. 44.
- Jackson & Gwilliam 1999, pp. 16–17.
- "Libel Damages For 'Doss-House'". The Times.
- "Libel Damages For 'Operation Snowdrop' Leader". The Times.
- Hines 2018, pp. 160–161.
- "Only When I Larf (1968)". British Film Institute.
- Kerridge 2009, p. 10.
- The Daily News of Los Angeles. 17 January 2020.
- Kirschenbaum 2013, p. 1.
- Buckton 2012, p. 67.
- Taylor 1994, p. xxvi.
- "Books". The Bookseller.
- Deighton 2017.
- Deighton 1982, Title page.
- Jackson & Gwilliam 1999, p. 15.
- Stanhope 1993, p. 39.
- Millett 1995, p. 1807.
- Woods 2008, p. 118.
- Bird 1976, p. 39.
- Bateman 1997.
- Egan 2018.
- Didcock 2009, p. 17.
- "The Deighton File". 26 May 2009, Event occurs at 1:15–2:05.
- "The Deighton File". 26 May 2009, Event occurs at 3:45–4:05.
- Kerridge 2016, p. 29.
- Landin 2022.
- Burton 2016, p. 119.
- Burton 2013, p. 37.
- Grella 1988, p. 449.
- Grella 1988, p. 450.
- Bloom 1995, p. 46.
- Buckton 2012, p. 57.
- Symons 1985, p. 229.
- Burton 2018, p. 99.
- Barrett, Herrera & Baumann 2011, p. 27.
- Baker 2012, p. 41.
- "Game, Set and Match (1988)". British Film Institute.
- Child 2009.
- Sharf 2019.
- Kemp 2013.
- Whitworth 2017.
- "Bean There, Done That!". Northwest Vision and Media.
- Duns 2009.
- "Back to prayer for Suu Kyi". Capital News.
- "Collectors & their collections: V.S. Naipaul". Christie's.
- Burgess 1984, p. 1.
- Grow 2015.
Sources
Books
- Barrett, Oliver Boyd; Herrera, David; Baumann, James A. (2011). Hollywood and the CIA: Cinema, Defense and Subversion. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-136-80676-6.
- Bloom, Clive, ed. (1995). Modern Crime and Suspense Writers. New York: Chelsea House. ISBN 978-0-5852-2979-9.
- Buckton, Oliver (2012). "Len Deighton". In Parini, Jay (ed.). British Writers. Supplement XVIII. Detroit, MI: Gale. pp. 55–72. ISBN 978-1-4144-8026-8.
- Burton, Alan (2016). Historical Dictionary of British Spy Fiction. London: Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 978-1-4422-5587-6.
- Burton, Alan (2018). Looking-Glass Wars: Spies on British Screens since 1960. Wilmington, DE: Vernon Press. ISBN 978-1-62273-290-6.
- Deighton, Len (1982). Blitzkrieg: From the Rise of Hitler to the Fall of Dunkirk. New York: Ballantine Books. ISBN 978-0-7126-7428-7.
- Grella, George (1988). "Len Deighton". In Reilly, John M. (ed.). Twentieth Century Crime & Mystery Writers. London: Macmillan. ISBN 978-1-349-81366-7.
- Hines, Claire (2018). The Playboy and James Bond: 007, Ian Fleming and Playboy magazine. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ISBN 978-1-5261-1616-1.
- Krueger, Christine L. (2014). Encyclopedia of British Writers: 19th and 20th Centuries. New York: Infobase Publishing. ISBN 978-1-4381-0870-4.
- Masters, Anthony (1987). Literary Agents: The Novelist as Spy. London: Basil Blackwell. ISBN 978-0-6311-4979-8.
- Macdonald, Gina (1992). "Len Deighton". Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography. Detroit, MI: Gale Research. pp. 35–55. ISBN 978-0-8103-7988-6.
- Milward-Oliver, Edward (1987). The Len Deighton Companion. London: Grafton. ISBN 978-0-586-07000-0.
- Symons, Julian (1985). Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel. New York: Viking. ISBN 978-0-6708-0096-4.
- Taylor, A. J. P. (1994). Introduction. Fighter: The True Story of the Battle of Britain. By Deighton, Len. New York: Harper Paperbacks. ISBN 978-0-0610-0802-3.
- Woods, Brett F. (2008). Neutral Ground: A Political History of Espionage Fiction. New York: Algora Publishing. ISBN 978-0-87586-533-1.
Broadcast media
- "The Deighton File". The Author Archive Collection. 26 May 2009.
Journals and magazines
- Baker, Brian (2012). "'You're Quite a Gourmet, Aren't You, Palmer?' Masculinity and Food in the Spy Fiction of Len Deighton". The Yearbook of English Studies. 42: 30–48. doi:10.5699/yearenglstud.42.2012.0030. ISSN 0306-2473.
- "Books". The Bookseller (3838): 80. 1979.
- Brown, Geoffrey (February 1987). "The Thrillers and Spy Novels of Len Deighton". The Book and Magazine Collector. Diamond Publishing Group (35).
- Burton, Alan (January 2013). "Mind Bending, Mental Seduction and Menticide: Brainwashing in British Spy Dramas of the 1960s". Journal of British Cinema and Television. 10 (1): 27–48. doi:10.3366/jbctv.2013.0120.
- Jackson, Crispin; Gwilliam, Graham (March 1999). "Len Deighton: The Master Thriller Writer Turns Seventy". The Book and Magazine Collector. Diamond Publishing Group (180).
- Millett, Allan R. (March 1995). "Blood, Tears and Folly: An Objective Look at World War II". The Journal of American History. 81 (4): 1807–1808. doi:10.2307/2081821.
News media
- "Back to prayer for Suu Kyi". Capital News. 12 August 2009.
- Bateman, Michael (6 April 1997). "A kitchen thriller". The Independent.
- Bird, David (26 November 1976). "Notes on People". The New York Times. p. 39.
- Burgess, Anthony (5 February 1984). "Modern Novels; The 99 Best". The New York Times. Section 7; Page 1.
{{cite news}}
: CS1 maint: location (link) - Campbell, Christy (21 June 1992). "Spies With Class". The Sunday Telegraph. p. 101.
- Child, Ben (14 August 2009). "Tarantino mulls Deighton spy film to rival Bond". The Guardian.
- Dawson Scott, Robert (4 January 2006a). "Len Deighton: The spy and I". The Independent. p. 43.
- Dawson Scott, Robert (7 January 2006b). "A class act, not a class warrior". The Times. (subscription required)
- Didcock, Barry (31 May 2009). "Tributes to the lives and times of two great talents". Sunday Herald. p. 17.
- Duns, Jeremy (19 February 2009). "Jeremy Duns pays tribute to novelist Len Deighton". The Guardian.
- Egan, Barry (17 September 2018). "Declan Lynch on his childhood and why 'alcoholic' is more of a stigma than words like 'depression'". Irish Independent.
- Grow, Kory (28 August 2015). "Motorhead's Lemmy: My Life in 15 Snarls". Rolling Stone.
- Kemp, Stuart (4 November 2013). "Simon Beaufoy to Adapt Len Deighton's Spy Novels for TV". The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved 29 March 2020.
- Kerridge, Jake (20 February 2016). "In a hurry to use his organ donor card". The Daily Telegraph. p. 29.
- Kerridge, Jake (14 February 2009). "The Deighton file: a life of reluctance and intrigue". The Daily Telegraph. p. 10.
- Kerridge, Jake (19 February 2017). "Len Deighton interview: 'Nobody could have had a happier life than I've had'". The Sunday Telegraph. p. 55.
- Kerridge, Jake (18 February 2019). "From Ian Fleming to Ann Cleeves: Desert Island Discs' best crime writer castaways". The Daily Telegraph. p. 44.
- Kirschenbaum, Matthew (1 March 2013). "The Book-Writing Machine: What was the first novel ever written on a word processor?". Slate.
- Landin, Conrad (24 February 2022). "Time to reopen the Deighton file". Camden New Journal.
- "Libel Damages For 'Doss-House'". The Times. 13 July 1967. p. 15.
- "Libel Damages For 'Operation Snowdrop' Leader". The Times. 24 May 1968. p. 15.
- Stanhope, Henry (18 November 1993). "Panzers and warhorses". The Times. p. 39.
- Stummer, Robin (14 December 2014). "Len Deighton's Observer cookstrips, Michael Caine and the 1960s". The Observer. Archived from the original on 14 June 2016.
- "Through the lens of half a century, we look back on the moments that shaped entertainment and pop culture". The Daily News of Los Angeles. 17 January 2020. p. 1.
- Walsh, John (17 June 2009). "A taste of the action: Len Deighton's cult Sixties' cookbook is back". The Independent. Archived from the original on 5 March 2016.
- Whitworth, Damian (11 February 2017). "There's a Nazi in No 10 and the SS in Scotland Yard". The Times.
Websites
- "Bean There, Done That!". Northwest Vision and Media. Archived from the original on 6 October 2008. Retrieved 26 March 2020.
- "Collectors & their collections: V.S. Naipaul". Christie's. 1 June 2015. Retrieved 31 March 2020.
- Deighton, Len (9 July 2017). "Len Deighton reveals how he wrote SS-GB, the bestseller that imagines Hitler had won the war". Radio Times. Retrieved 26 March 2020.
- "Game, Set and Match (1988)". British Film Institute. Archived from the original on 27 April 2016. Retrieved 30 March 2020.
- "Len Deighton". Contemporary Authors. Gale. Archived from the original on 15 April 2016. Retrieved 25 March 2016. (subscription required)
- Sharf, Zack (3 October 2019). "Quentin Tarantino's Last Movie: 17 Unmade Projects That Could Be His Final Film". IndieWire. Retrieved 29 March 2020.
- "Only When I Larf (1968)". British Film Institute. Archived from the original on 10 March 2016. Retrieved 28 March 2020.
External links
![](../I/Wikiquote-logo.svg.png.webp)
- The Deighton Dossier – website about Len Deighton
- Len Deighton at IMDb
- Petri Liukkonen. "Len Deighton". Books and Writers.