Len Deighton

For many of us, Len Deighton goes hand in glove, mentally, with Michael Caine.  The movie adaption of The IPCRESS File put them both on the map.  Don’t think for a minute we weren’t crazy about Bond, but IPCRESS, with its elliptical, deep-focus photography, and the odd, unsettling score (by Bond composer John Barry, no less), signaled something on a different wavelength from the Bond world, with its deep color saturation, exotic locations, and thumping bass line.  Bond signified Empire; IPCRESS was kitchen sink. 

It’s interesting, when you think about it that way, to realize we were introduced to the writer by the movie, and not the reverse.  IPCRESS was a successful book – not the phenomenom of le Carré’s Spy Whom Came in from the Cold, a year later – but the movie was a big return on a small investment; more importantly, from my own point of view, is that I started reading Len Deighton.

Horse Under Water, an underrated and very solid sequel to IPCRESS, was published in 1963; Funeral in Berlin, in 1964; Billion-Dollar Brain, in 1966; and An Expensive Place to Die, in 1967.  Brain is the weakest, An Expensive Place to Die the strongest, the most melancholy, and an evocative valentine to the Paris of the late ‘60’s - so a sentimental favorite of mine, as well. 

Skipping ahead, we get SS-GB, an alternate-history conceit (England loses the Battle of Britain, and the Nazis take over); the outstanding XPD, shorthand for Expedient Demise; and Goodbye, Mickey Mouse, fighter pilots in that same Battle of Britain.  Then the first of the Bernard Samson trilogies, Game, Set, and Match.  He followed up with Hook, Line, and Sinker, a few years later, and Faith, Hope, and Charity.  I’m not that big a fan.  All the naked class hostilities are there, and the icy superciliousness of the upper-class twits running the Service, but in and of itself, it’s not the engine of redemptive fury that it was in the earlier, IPCRESS, sequence of novels.  It seems more like simple exhaustion.

Interspersed, though, are two very good books.  Winter, a story of generational trauma, and the rise and fall of Nazi Germany.  And secondly, City of Gold, the city in question being wartime Cairo, clearly a thematic counterpart to Rick Blaine’s Casablanca, with its shifting loyalties. 

And there’s non-fiction, as well, cookbooks and histories, and miscellany, but the masterpiece among the novels is Bomber, from 1970, which I intentionally slid past, a couple of paragraphs above.  Bomber gets credit for being the first book written on a word processor, an IBM electric typewriter mated to a magnetic tape drive.  This matters mostly because of its dense and detailed storyline, and a draft manuscript of well over 100,000 words.  Using a computer program, you could navigate the material a lot more easily – it’s been almost sixty years, and the rest of us are grateful Len Deighton took the plunge.

Bomber takes place over a single night, as a squadron of Lancasters crosses the English Channel on a raid into the Ruhr industrial zone, and through miscalculation hit the wrong target, a small German market town.  It’s told from multiple POV’s, the RAF bomber crews, the German fighter bases on the coast, and the people on the ground, caught in the storm of incendiaries and high-explosive.  There are successes and humiliations, heroism and futility, politics, opportunism, and naked terror.  The deserving and the undeserving alike will die, or be spared, by no logic but the hand of God, or the rough odds of accident.  It should be said, however, that the novel is in no way indifferent or nihilist.  You simply don’t know who’s going to live through the story, and neither do they.  I think that’s the point.  We’re in the hands of a higher power, and that power doesn’t show sympathy or intelligence or warmth.  You can’t petition it.  It simply is. 

I don’t know that this is a consistent theme in Deighton’s work.  It doesn’t seem to be.  He himself appears genuinely cheerful, surprised at his good fortune, not too terribly reflective, perhaps.  Or not prone to look a gift horse too closely in the mouth. 

He lived in Portugal and Guernsey.  My guess is he was a tax exile.  And he quit writing, thirty years ago.  I think he got bored with it.  By his own admission.  He once said that it’s fun to tell people you’re a writer, but after the party, you have to go home and actually do it.

He’d just turned 97.  God bless.