An Interview With British Thriller Writer Len Deighton, The Author Of 'The Ipcress File,' 'Funeral In Berlin' And 'SS-GB'

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:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/len-deighton-interview-nobody-could-have-had-happier-life-had/

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:

https://literary007.com/2013/12/13/len-deighton-lunches-with-ian-fleming/ 

Raymond Chandler: Master Crime Writer

On Raymond Chandler's birthday, Jake Kerridge at the British newspaper the Telegraph looks back at the late great crime writer.

When Raymond Chandler began to write for pulp magazines in the Thirties, he planned from the first to smuggle something like literature into them.

Most of these magazines hooked their readers with a mixture of sex and violence – “they have juxtaposed the steely automatic and the frilly panty and found that it pays off”, wrote SJ Perelman. But Chandler wanted to do more than titillate: he had designs on his audience’s subconscious. He planned to sneak into his stories a quality which readers “would not shy off from, perhaps not even know was there … but which would somehow distil through their minds and leave an afterglow”.

When he embarked on full-length novels he was still essentially writing pulp stories with a subversive twist. His hero, Philip Marlowe, may have been as tough as any other Shamus, Dick or Peeper who appeared in Black Mask magazine, but he was also a sensitive soul, the kind of man who would knock out a thug with ease and then start musing about why the guy turned crooked and whether he had a wife and kids. And he was even known to refuse sex: “It’s great stuff, like chocolate sundaes. But there comes a time when you would rather cut your throat.”

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/10195308/Raymond-Chandler-Master-crime-writer.html

Note: To learn more about Raymond Chandler, I recommend Tom Hiney's Raymond Chandler: A Biography.

Happy Belated Birthday To Thriller Writer Len Deighton

Yesterday was Len Deighton's birthday.

I happen to rereading one of Deighton's spy thrillers from the 1960s, The Billion Dollar Brain. I enjoyed his spy stories when I was a teenager in the 1960s and I came across a couple of old paperback copies of The Funeral in Berlin and The Billion Dollar Brain.  

I like his unnamed narrator in the early novels (called Harry Palmer in the Michael Caine films). He is sort of a British Philip Marlowe working the espionage beat.

I have in my library several of Deighton's hardback books, including his Bernard Sansom spy series.

I recall in the sixties that some critics and reviewers called Deighton's working class hero the "anti-Bond," but I like both Fleming and Deighton. Their thrillers were different, but both were well done in their own way.

I also liked the Michael Caine films made from Deighton's novels and the later TV series starring Ian Holm as Bernard Sansom. 

You can read Jake Kerridge's 2009 interview with Len Deighton in the British newspaper the Telegraph via the below link: 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/4681966/Interview-with-Len-Deighton.html