Deighton at Eighty
This article is part of the free ebook Need to Know, which can be read on this website or downloaded here.
‘It was the morning of my hundredth birthday.’
So begins Len Deighton’s Billion Dollar Brain, published in 1966. Yesterday, Deighton himself turned 80. Last year, the centenary of Ian Fleming saw a resurgence of interest in James Bond’s creator—could it be Deighton’s turn? HarperCollins has announced it will reprint eight of his novels this year, including The IPCRESS File, Funeral in Berlin and Billion Dollar Brain, all with new introductions by the author. Quentin Tarantino has also said he is contemplating filming the Game, Set and Match trilogy, featuring Deighton’s embattled British agent Bernard Samson.
Now is the perfect moment for a Deighton revival. In the current political climate, his novels—particularly his Cold War spy stories—act as a refresher course in what happened last time round. Unlike John le Carré’s work, they don’t make for bleak or melancholic reading, and are often rather jaunty in tone. But running through them is a deep mistrust and cynicism of the powers that be. His protagonists are anti-authoritarian, laconic, past their best, bitter and seething at the absurdity of their business.
The books have one foot in the realist camp of the espionage genre, in the tradition of Eric Ambler and Graham Greene, depicting the spy game as a bureaucratic muddle. But Deighton was often very funny, and he had a way of nailing the atmosphere concisely. In An Expensive Place to Die (1967), a courier from the British embassy passes the narrator a dossier and asks him to read it and hand it back while he waits. ‘It’s secret?’ asks our hero. No, the courier tells him—the photocopier’s bust and this is his only copy.
Deighton reinvented the spy thriller, bringing in a new air of authenticity and playing with its form. He added footnotes and addenda on arcane (but always interesting) aspects of espionage, and mocked the genre’s conventions. His first novel, The IPCRESS File, was framed as a story told by the narrator to the Minister of Defence, who is cut off sharply when he tries to elicit an elaboration of a point:
‘‘It’s going to be very difficult for me if I have to answer questions as I go along,’ I said. ‘If it’s all the same to you, Minister, I’d prefer you to make a note of the questions, and ask me afterwards.’
‘My dear chap, not another word, I promise.’
And throughout the entire explanation he never again interrupted.’
In an excoriating essay written in 1964, Kingsley Amis suggested that the reason for this was that the minister had fallen asleep. But he later he changed his mind somewhat: in a letter to Philip Larkin in 1985, he wrote that Deighton’s work was ‘actually quite good if you stop worrying about what’s going on’.
Deighton’s complex plots might be a reason why he is not more widely read today, in a world where we are impatient to cut to the chase, unmask the villain and move on to the explosive finale. Even at the time, Amis wasn’t alone in being befuddled: Deighton initially submitted The IPCRESS File to Jonathan Cape, Ian Fleming’s publisher, but after they asked him to simplify the plot he took the manuscript to Hodder & Stoughton. Their edition became a huge bestseller, bigger than Hodder had prepared for, and Deighton went back to Cape, who published his second novel, Horse Under Water. It sold 80,000 copies in two days. Deighton was feted as ‘the poet of the spy story’, the new Fleming, the anti-Fleming, and much more besides. Soon, the film world came knocking. James Bond producer Harry Saltzman produced three films from Deighton’s work, and Michael Caine rocketed to world fame as the bespectacled, gourmet-food-loving cockney spy Harry Palmer.
Deighton’s output has been enormously varied, from novels about the film industry (Close Up) to cookbooks to military history. But, for me, it has always been his spy novels that have held the most attraction. When I decided to write a spy novel of my own, I avoided rereading Deighton for fear his influence would be too strong. But as my book was taking place in the late 1960s, and partly in London, I did use one of his books for research purposes: London Dossier, a guidebook he compiled and co-wrote in 1967. In it, I found everything from what was on the menu at Ronnie Scott’s to the history of Chinatown—but most of all I found the atmosphere of the era, captured in a beautifully written snapshot.
They don’t, as they say, write them like this anymore. Deighton’s novels usually contain enough elements for several books. Horse Under Water, for instance, featured a wrecked submarine, forged currency, heroin, ice-melting technology and British Nazis. But it was often what Deighton omitted from his books that made them so appealing. It is typical that the protagonist of his first novels wasn’t even named—‘Harry Palmer’ had to be thought up for the films. Deighton’s complexity can initially be off-putting, but persist and you will be entertained, informed, thrilled and dazzled. Long may he, and his creations, live on.