Happy 80th Birthday, Len Deighton

And in honor of the occasion, as well as HarperCollins UK's plans to reissue several books starting this summer, the "famously publicity-shy" spy novelist sat down with the Telegraph's Jake Kerridge for a wide-ranging interview on his career, which began with the 1962 publication of THE IPCRESS FILE right around the time a little film named DR. NO put spy fiction on the map in a big, big way. Kerridge writes:

[Deighton's] first four novels are a wonderful mixture of the exciting and the amusingly humdrum, narrated by an unnamed working-class intelligence officer from Burnley who spends as much time trying to reclaim his expenses as he does searching for kidnapped scientists. His Eton- and Oxbridge-educated superiors are usually incompetent – “what chance did I stand between the communists on the one side and the establishment on the other” – or treacherous. Much is made of the fact that he is overweight: in Billion Dollar Brain (1966) he is told he has been chosen to go on a mission to Helsinki because he is “the one best protected against cold”. Well, James Bond may be thinner, but so is his dialogue.

Deighton doesn’t see the character as an anti-hero, and stresses that he is a romantic, incorruptible figure in the mould of Philip Marlowe. "This is not the way it is now. Modern fiction is not so keen to guard the integrity of our heroes … When I started writing I had rules. One was that violence must not solve the problem, and I cannot have the hero overcome violence with a counterweight of violence."

Indeed, Deighton hopes his readers will "get a laugh" out of his work (an antidote to the often gloomy and taciturn tone of much spy fiction, necessary as it might be) but is also somewhat disdainful about prizes: "To allow someone to give you a knighthood is to admit that there is someone who is allowed to appraise you on a scale which you are going to agree with. The audacity of it!"

I'm glad to see renewed interest in Deighton because it always seemed something of a shame his work became neglected over the years. And if Deighton can be revived, why not, say, Helen MacInnes?

UPDATE: Jeremy Duns, whose first novel FREE AGENT comes out this July over here, writes a Deighton appreciation for the Guardian Books Blog:

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.

Comments

[Graham]

The four "Harry Palmer" novels are absolute classics. The only thing I've ever read that was even remotely like them was Deighton's later "Game/Set/Match" series. Just fabulous stuff.

[Sarah]

Thanks, Graham!

[Keith Raffel]

I think Berlin Game, the first of the 10 books in the Bernard Samson series, is my favorite spy novel ever. 'Nuff said.

[Mike Berry]

I always had a sense that the end of the Cold War derailed Deighton in a way that it didn't Le Carre. Maybe by the mid-Nineties Deighton simply wanted to retire. But I would love to see what he would make of post-9/11 espionage.

[David J. Montgomery]

GAME/SET/MATCH are my favorites of Deighton's work, more so than the earlier stuff. (And more so than the later Samson books, which weren't as good.) He also wrote a terrific satire set in L.A. (not a spy novel) called VIOLENT WARD.

[Ralph H.]

Deighton's fiction goes way beyond the thriller genre, and maintains high standards indeed. _Bomber_ and _Goodbye Mickey Mouse_ are fine novels about the air war in Europe during World War II.

[michael]

Good stuff,as a teenager in London I loved Ipcress, and I shoved my New Statesman into my pocket as his hero did,,still as much as I dislike the le carre later books and public school chat Le Carre did reach heights that Deighton never did.