Len Deighton

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]

Cookstrip for boeuf bourguignon

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]