When I was a teenager back in
the 1960s I was a huge fan of American crime thrillers and British spy
thrillers. I was weaned on Ian Fleming and I later read Graham Greene and John
le Carre.
I also read another British spy
thriller writer named Len Deighton. Today is his birthday. He is 89.
Unlike the other British spy writers,
Deighton’s unnamed spy hero in his first series of thrillers was an overweight,
working-class smart aleck. When Michal Caine starred as the spy in the film
versions of The Ipcress File, Funeral in Berlin and Billion Dollar Brain,
the producers called him Harry Palmer.
Over the years I’ve read
nearly all of Deighton’s novels, including his WWII military novels and his clever alternative history novel, SS-GB, which takes place in a post-WWI Briton that
the Nazis have defeated and now occupy.
Last February, when the BBC
offered a TV series based on SS-GB, the Telegraph republished Jake Kerridge's interview with
Len Deighton from 2009.
Deighton is famously
publicity-shy, and I did wonder whether getting to interview him would be what
the acronym-loving secret service bureaucrats of his early spy novels would
call a high D of C (Difficulty of Completion) mission. But here he is, relaxed,
jolly, indecently sprightly for a man who will celebrate his 80th birthday this
week, and quietly pleased that HarperCollins will, from June, be reissuing
several of his novels (with new cover designs by his old friend, the
Oscar-winning documentary-maker Arnold Schwartzman), culminating in a golden
jubilee edition of The Ipcress File in 2012.
“I was on holiday, I was restless, I started
this story, then I put it to one side and got on with my life. And then I met a
guy at a party and he said ‘I’m a literary agent.’ He was a literary agent like
I was a writer, to tell you the truth.” Jonathan Clowes, his agent to this day,
sold what became The Ipcress File to Hodder & Stoughton.
“It might have sunk without a
ripple but Harry Saltzman had just made the first Bond film [Dr No, 1962] and
it did very well, but that was really because the critics used me as a blunt
instrument to beat Ian Fleming over the head.” Saltzman bought the film rights
to Ipcress, and Deighton found himself a professional author.
His 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.”
He hopes new readers will
“get a laugh” out of his books. Does he think other spy writers are too solemn?
“It’s difficult to be sure sometimes what is intended humour and what is
unintended, isn’t it?”
… Deighton admits he felt bad
that he did not predict how brilliant his friend Michael Caine would be as the
hero (newly christened Harry Palmer) in the 1965 film of The Ipcress File;
Harry H Corbett was his choice for the role. By this time Deighton was famous.
He was seduced by the celebrity lifestyle for a period (becoming the travel
editor of Playboy), but soon swore off interviews and parties: “Two things
destroy writers: praise and alcohol.”
… “I’m seriously thinking if
I can persuade my wife to live in Japan.” Any other ambitions? “I’ve always
wanted to land a jet on a carrier. But I’m content. Nobody could have had a
happier life than I’ve had.”
You can read the rest of the
piece via the below link:
You can also read Len
Deighton’s piece on his meeting with fellow thriller writer Ian Fleming (Deighton is on the left in the above photo and Fleming is in the center) via the below link:
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