Spy fiction was massive in the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties — those big paperbacks for Dad to consume on the plane or by the pool. I can still recall the striking original covers for Len Deighton’s Game, Set and Match trilogy, with apples pierced by flick knives.

As a boy, I assumed they’d be non-stop action, like the work of Robert Ludlum or Jack Higgins, but when I finally got round to reading Berlin Game, Mexico Set and London Match in my twenties, I found something rather different. The books are funny, and the pace is often slow. The protagonist, Bernard Samson, is a sardonic, self-aware figure a long way from the classic spy novel hero. Following the news of Deighton’s death at the age of 97, it’s worth considering why his books should be as appreciated as those of John le Carré, who gets all the literary kudos when it comes to practitioners of the genre.

That’s because Deighton’s novels are every bit as morally complex and intricately plotted as his rival’s. They’re much funnier and Deighton has a higher hit rate, mainly because he was sensible enough to retire in the Nineties. There are no late-period stinkers.

The early books tell us a great deal about Britain in the second half of the 20th century. The working class was on the rise, but the country was still largely governed by a public school-educated clique. London is a down-at-heel city of bedsits and bombsites. The intelligence services are housed in crumbling buildings where nothing works properly.

So far, so le Carré. But the crucial difference is that while le Carré was an insider’s outsider, educated at Sherborne, Deighton was solidly working-class. In his first novel, The Ipcress File, one character is described as having “the advantage of both a good brain and a family rich enough to save him using it”. The book was an instant hit, and spawned a film and several sequels starring Michael Caine as Harry Palmer — though the hero is unnamed in the novels. Palmer is the quintessential Deighton creation: amusing, sexually successful without tipping into parody, and perpetually at war with the toffs.

Deighton’s 1970 masterwork, Bomber, examines how incompetence at the top of the RAF — presented here as snobbish and hidebound by rules — leads to the destruction of an ancient German town. Told from the perspectives of British pilots, German aircrew and the people on the ground, it stands for me as one of the great Second World War novels. It even manages to be funny in a bleakly comic way. A German tailor named Voss reflects that “the Nazis had done wonders for the uniform business, whatever their other faults might have been.” Tellingly, the least pleasant person isn’t a Nazi but a scheming ex-public schoolboy on the make, Captain Sweet.

The Samson novels, beginning with Berlin Game (1983), take the reader up to the end of the Cold War, charting a changed world from the overt snobbery from the Sixties. Britain is less decrepit, and the stuffy posh boys of the Palmer era have been replaced as antagonists by more slippery figures such as fellow intelligence officer Dicky Cruyer and — spoiler alert — Samson’s wife Fiona, who turns out to be a KGB agent.

While his novels were hugely popular, Deighton avoided the limelight. He took his writing seriously without taking himself too seriously, unlike le Carré. Yet his influence endures. Television has mined him steadily: adaptations of both SS-GB, his counterfactual about a German-occupied Britain, and The Ipcress File have appeared in the last decade. His fingerprints are visible on a generation of spy writers — most obviously Mick Herron, who brings humor, class conflict and a distinctly Deighton-esque seediness to the genre. If you like the Slow Horses books, it’s worth going back to the original. Even after the end of the Cold War, stories of international espionage and institutional incompetence never go out of date — as contemporary British politics can confirm.

The accents and attitudes might not be the same as in the Palmer novels, but the theme of the maverick taking on a complacent, self-serving establishment is a perennial one. The wrong people are still in charge, which is why Deighton’s work will always be worth reading.

---

Henry Jeffreys worked in the wine trade and publishing before becoming a freelance writer and broadcaster, specialising in drink. He now works as features editor on the Master of Malt blog. His book Empire of Booze: British History through the Bottom of a Glass won Fortnum & Mason debut drink book 2017.  His second, The Home Bar, was published in October 2018.

 

HenryGJeffreys

---