My On Crime Fiction, True Crime & Thrillers Column: Rereading Len Deighton's Reissued Spy Thrillers

I was sorry to read that one of my favorite writers, Len Deighton (seen in the below photo), died last month. But at 97, he certainly lived a good, long life.

Although he had not published a book in many years, his obituary appeared in nearly every newspaper and Internet website.

You can read his obituary and about his life and work via the link below:

Spy thriller author Len Deighton dies at 97 | AP News

Although he wrote close to 40 books, his best-known novel was his first, The Ipcress File, which featured a nameless narrator. The narrator, a spy, was unlike most other fictional spies in that he was a working-class smart aleck.

I liked the Deighton narrator and his sardonic voice. I also liked Deighton's clever plots and his vivid descriptions of characters, places, things and food (Deighton is an accomplished cook).   

I also enjoyed actor Michael Caine in the film series based on Deighton’s novels, The Ipcress File, Funeral in Berlin, and Billion Dollar Brain.

Over the years, I’ve read nearly all of Deighton’s novels, including his WWII military history 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. 

Prior to his death, Deighton must have been pleased that in 2022 British ITV offered a series adapted from The Ipcress File. The series runs on AMC+ in the USA. I’ve not yet seen the series as I don’t subscribe to AMC+, but I’ll certainly watch it when it moves to Netflix or Amazon.  

And Len Deighton must have been pleased that Grove Atlantic began reissuing his novels. I have copies of the reissued The Ipcress Files, Funeral in Berlin, and SS-GB, three of my favorite Deighton thrillers, and I reread them. I believe they hold up nicely after all these years. 

Grove Atlantic also reissued Deighton’s Yesterday's Spy, Billion Dollar Brain, An Expensive Place to Die and Spy Story. 

As I read about Len Deighton’s death, I happened to be reading Grove Atlantic’s reissued The Horse Under Water, which featured the first-person narrator from The Ipcress File. It is a fine thriller in which the narrator spy is sent to France to deal with a sunken WWII Nazi sub, drugs and a cast of clever characters.

Afterwards, I began reading Grove Atlantic’s reissued Twinkle, Twinkle Little Spy, which is another fine thriller. The narrator spy is sent to the Sharara Desert to meet a defecting Soviet scientist. Like Len Deighton’s other thrillers, this one has interesting characters, clever narration and dialogue, and a fine plot.

If you have not read Len Deighton, I suggest that you do so. If you have not read him in years, I suggest you do so again.  

Note: You can read my other online On Crime columns via the link below: 

Paul Davis On Crime: My Online On Crime Columns 

Yesterday's Spy Writer: My On Crime Fiction, True Crime & Thrillers On The New Batch Of Len Deighton's Reissued Paperback Spy Thrillers

When I was a teenager back in the 1960s, I was a huge fan of crime and spy thrillers (and I remain so today). 

I was weaned on Ian Fleming, and after he died in 1964 and I had read all of his James Bond novels and short stories, I looked for other spy thrillers to read, especially British spy thrillers. 

I read and enjoyed Eric Ambler, Graham Greene and John le Carre. I also read another British spy thriller writer named Len Deighton. 

Deighton’s protagonist in his first series of spy thrillers, in contrast to Ian Fleming’s high-living James Bond, was a working-class smart aleck. 

Deighton employed a first-person unnamed narrator for The Ipcress File and the other early thrillers. I liked the Deighton narrator and his sardonic voice. I also liked Deighton's clever plots and his vivid descriptions of characters, places, things and food (Deighton is an accomplished cook).   

When Michael Caine portrayed the unnamed spy in the 1960s film versions of The Ipcress File, Funeral in Berlin and Billion Dollar Brain, Caine suggested to the producers that they call him Harry Palmer. I thought Michael Caine nailed the character, and I enjoyed the films nearly as much as Deighton's novels.     

Over the years I’ve read nearly all of Deighton’s novels, including his WWII military history 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. 

Deighton, today at 96, must be pleased that Grove Atlantic is reissuing his novels. I have copies of the reissued The Ipcress Files, Funeral in Berlin, and SS-GB, three of my favorite Deighton thrillers, and I recently reread them. I believe they hold up nicely after all these years. 

And this August Grove Atlantic will reissue Deighton’s Yesterday's Spy, Billion Dollar Brain, An Expensive Place to Die and Spy Story. 

Grove Atlantic offers descriptions of the upcoming reissued thrillers: 

Steve Champion as a flamboyant businessman, former leader of an anti-Nazi network in the Second World War and a man surrounded by mysteries. There are rumors he is still in the spying business. The Department is nervous, so Champion’s oldest wartime ally is sent to the South of France to investigate. 

It’s time to re-open the file on Yesterday’s Spy ($17 paperback, 224 pages; ISBN: 978-0-8021-6325-7; Aug. 12, 2025), even if that could mean killing an old friend.

Billion Dollar Brain ($17 paperback; 304 pages; ISBN: 978-0-8021-6327-1; Aug. 12, 2025) is a classic spy thriller of lethal computer-age intrigue and a maniac’s private cold war, featuring the unnamed narrator from The IPCRESS File. He travels from the bone-freezing winter of Helsinki, Riga and Leningrad to the stifling heat of Texas, and soon finds himself tangling with enemies on both sides of the Iron Curtain.   

In An Expensive Place To Die ($17 paperback; 240 pages; ISBN: 978-0-8021-6323-3; Aug. 12, 2025), an unnamed spy is sent to Paris to deliver a file of nuclear secrets to a French doctor but soon finds himself sucked into a twilight world of sex, blackmail and hidden motive, where friend and enemy become indistinguishable.  

After six weeks in a nuclear submarine gathering computer data on Soviet activity, the mysterious, bespectacled spy known as Patrick Armstrong is desperate to return home in Spy Story ($17 paperback; 224 pages; ISBN: 978-0-8021-6319-6; Aug. 12, 2025). But when he arrives at his London flat, it appears to be occupied by someone who looks just like him—and he finds himself propelled into the heart of a conspiracy stretching from the remote Scottish Highlands to the Arctic ice. 

Grove Atlantic also offers a brief bio of Len Deighton (seen in the above photo from the 1960s): 

At the Royal College of Art his teachers called him subversive, but it was his first novel — The Ipcress File — that sealed his reputation as an iconoclast. Ian Fleming called it his “Book of the Year.” Through humor, characters with real depth, and impeccable research, Len Deighton’s original voice revolutionized the modern spy thriller. 

The enormous success of The Ipcress File and the subsequent Harry Palmer spy films made Michael Caine an international star. Bomber (perhaps his greatest novel) calmly and powerfully narrates the horror of war. SS-GB, a dystopian alternative history of the Nazi occupation of Britain, challenges us to think about how we relate to authoritarian government. 

Deighton is best remembered for Cold War spy novels with defiant, working-class heroes, including the famed Bernard Sampson series and the Pat Armstrong Quartet. Deighton’s work has entered the zeitgeist and that influence can be seen today from Motörhead’s album “Bomber,” to Austin Powers’ glasses, to references to his work in the films of Quentin Tarantino.

Born in 1929, Deighton is acclaimed as not just one of the greatest thriller writers of the 20th Century but a military historian, cookery writer, and graphic artist. His extraordinary career spanned four decades, selling over 30 million books, being published in 20 languages, and never falling out of print. 

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/ 

Secret life Of The SS-GB Spymaster: How Author Len Deighton, Who Lived Next Door To A Nazi Spy In The War, Created A Nightmare Vision Of Britain Under The Jackboot

Nicole Lambert at the Daily Mail offers a piece on one of my favorite writers, Len Deighton, the author of The Ipcress File, Funeral in Berlin, Bomber and SS-GB, which has been adapted for TV and is now airing on the BBC.

He has dined with everyone from Nazi criminals to the cream of British society; from rock’n’roll royalty to eminent philosophers. He has lived all over the world and known spies and traitors. Some say he would have made a successful intelligence agent himself.

But he is also a man of many parts. Author, film producer and successful artist, published cook — who made it cool for men to be in the kitchen — and eminent historian: Len Deighton is all of these.

As a writer, he changed the way the world looked at spies with The Ipcress File, the 1962 thriller about a working-class spook (un-named in the book but christened Harry Palmer for Michael Caine’s screen portrayal) who is as interested in getting his expenses signed as in catching enemies of the state.

He also created a fascinating and terrifying alternative world in his 1978 book SS-GB, now adapted by BBC1 for peak-time Sunday viewing, set in a wartime England that has been invaded by the Germans and is under Nazi rule, with prime minister Winston Churchill executed and King George VI imprisoned in the Tower of London.

Deighton, who turned 88 last weekend, has dreamt up many fascinating characters in his novels but few are more intriguing than the reclusive man himself.

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

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-4254416/Author-Len-Deighton-created-nightmare-vision-Britain.html 

Note: SS-GB is one of my favorite Deighton novels. I look forward to watching the TV series when it airs in America.

Actor Sam Riley, James Bond Screenwriters In Talks To Make Film Of Len Deighton's 'SS:GB'

Ali Jaafar at deadline.com reports that actor Sam Riley and the James Bond screenwriters are in talks to make a film from one of my favorite thrillers, Len Deighton's SS:GB. 

EXCLUSIVE– Sam Riley is in talks to star in SS:GB, the Len Deighton adaptation that James Bond scribes Neil Purvis and Robert Wade are writing.  No deal has been set yet but this is a plum role in what is fast gearing up to be a prestige project. German director Philipp Kadelbach, who won plaudits and numerous awards including the International Emmy for German World War 2 mini-series Generation War, is attached to direct. The project, which is being exec produced by Sid Gentle’sSally Woodward Gentle and produced by Patrick Schweitzer (Doctor Who), is set up at the BBC.

SS:GB is set in a UK conquered and occupied by Germany during World War II. The title refers to the branch of the Nazi SS that controls Britain.  Detective Superintendent Douglas Archer, a British homicide detective assigned to Scotland Yard, is called in to investigate a murder of a well-dressed man. To his surprise, the case draws the attention of the highest levels of the German government. Archer soon finds himself in the middle of a struggle between powerful forces.  Filming is set to begin in the fall.

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

http://deadline.com/2015/08/sam-riley-neil-purvis-robert-wade-james-bond-spectre-007-ss-gb-sally-woodward-gentle-sid-gentle-downton-abbey-1201495096/

You can also read an interview with Len Deighton from this past June at deightondossier.net via the below link:

http://www.deightondossier.net/Author/Interviews/june2015.html 

BBC To Produce Mini-Series Based On Len Deighton's Alternative Historical Thriller 'SS-GB'

Imagine that America never entered World War II and Great Britain lost the war. And now the once proud British are occupied by the victorious German Army and the dreaded Nazi SS.

Len Deighton did this in his clever alternative historical thriller GS-GB.

I liked the book when I read it many years ago and I reread the thriller a few years ago.

Now The Hollywood Reporter reports the BBC is producing a mini-series based on SS-GB.

The BBC has ordered a drama that imagines a Britain occupied by the Nazis, penned by the writers of the most recent James Bond films based on an alternate history novel.

U.K. public broadcaster has commissioned ‎SS-GB from Bond writers Robert Wade and Neal Purvis and based on the novel of the same name by Len Deighton. The BBC order is for five hourlong episodes produced by Sid Gentle Films for flagship network BBC One.

... SS-GB is a thriller set in 1940s London under the premise that the Germans won the Battle of Britain and London is under Nazi occupation.

"Archer is a Scotland Yard detective working under the SS facing the dilemma of whether to effectively collaborate or join the resistance," according to a show description. It also says that the drama is "an explosive thriller that will ask: what would you do, faced with stakes as high as this?"

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

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/bbc-orders-drama-ss-gb-750236

Happy 81st Birthday To Michael Caine

As Biography.com notes, today is the birthday of one of my favorite actors, Michael Caine. He was born on March 14, 1933, in London, England.

Michael Caine went on to pursue a varied acting career. He starred as agent Harry Palmer in The Ipcress File before going on to be featured in projects like Alfie, The Italian Job, Sleuth, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight series and many, many more. He’s won two Oscars, one for Hannah and Her Sisters and the other for The Cider House Rules.

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

http://www.biography.com/people/michael-caine-9234754

Note: Michael Caine was great in the films based on Len Deighton's spy thrillers. He was also great in John Houston's The Man Who Would Be King with Sean Connery. And he was outstanding in his supporting role in the Batman series of films.

I wrote about Michael Caine's performance as a hardcore criminal in Get Carter and as a crime writer in Pulp in my Crime Beat column on crime in the cinema. You can read the column via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2012/11/cinema-crime-wave.html

James Bond's WWI Origins

Benjamin Welton at the Atlantic offers a piece on the influence of WWI on the classic British spy novel.

This year marks the 100-year anniversary of the start of World War I—which brings with it a host of arguments among academics, journalists, and historians over the lasting legacy of the "War to End All Wars." But what's inarguable is that World War I profoundly changed literature. It was during the conflict's buildup and aftermath that detective fiction was fused with alarmist invasion literature to create a genre that remains popular today: the classic British spy novel.

In the popular imagination, spy stories are often associated with fast cars, cool gadgets, and high-class liquors dressed up in fancy glasses; fictional heroes like Ian Fleming’s James Bond and the anonymous secret agent of Len Deighton’s many thrillers are always off to some far-flung corner of the globe to foil their adversaries. Sometimes, these novels’ antagonists are the evil counterparts to the charismatic spies they hunt, but more often than not, they have big, bad plans for the world. The Soviet Union predominates as the main source of trouble.

Authors like Fleming and John le Carré have become synonymous with this fast-paced genre, while Graham Greene waits in the wings as a more literary-minded third. All three of these top spy fiction writers were born in England (Greene in 1904, Fleming in 1908, and le Carré in 1931), all were members of the British intelligence community (Fleming and Greene during World War II and le Carré during peacetime), and all saw their greatest fame as novelists during the Cold War—a period in the British spy novel, which consistently pitted the daring, heroic agents of MI6, SAS, and SBS against foreign and domestic threats, captured the world’s attention, even while the once mighty British Empire was reduced to a second-tier power on the world stage.

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

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/03/james-bonds-world-war-i-origins/284323/

Note: What Welton calls alarmist, I call security-conscious. I'm surprised that Welton didn't mention W. Somerset Maugham's Ashenden: The British Agent. Like Fleming, Greene and le Carre, Maugham served as a British intelligence officer. He based his Ashenden stories on his experience as a WWI spy.

Len Deighton's Spy Novels To Be Adapted For TV

 

The Hollywood Reporter offers a piece on the deal to adapt Len Deighton's spy novels for television.

LONDON – Oscar-winning writer Simon Beaufoy (Slumdog Millionaire) is set to turn his hand to adapting for television Len Deighton’s classic Cold War novels featuring iconic spy Bernard Samson.

 

British TV production banner Clerkenwell Films, co-founded by actor John Hannah and the company behind Misfits, is developing an 18-part series based on Deighton’s books.

With more than 40 million book sales, Deighton’s Samson novels are regarded by some as his masterwork and one of the greatest spy stories of all time.

Covering a vast array of international locations from London to Berlin to Mexico City and California, the series follows the exploits of Samson, an ex-MI6 field agent drawn back into active duty in a quest to uncover the truth about his wife’s defection to the KGB.

Beaufoy said: 
"Deighton's masterful series of novels draws the hidden political map of the late 20th century. It is all here: murders, honey-traps and spy swaps, the double-dealing and maneuvering of nations jousting for position at the height of the Cold War, with Bernard Samson, the Bond with brains, giving it an almost Chandleresque sense of cool."

Deighton added: 
"Writing it took well over 10 years of my life, and it was my hope and firm belief that some day a film company would want to bring the entire series of books to the screen. Now it has happened."

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

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/simon-beaufoy-adapt-len-deightons-437736

The Book-Writing Machine: Len Deighton's 'Bomber' Was The First Novel Written On A Word Processor

Matthew Kirschen at Slate wrote an interesting piece about the first novel written on a word processor:

Would best-selling novelist Len Deighton care to take a walk? It was 1968, and the IBM technician who serviced Deighton’s typewriters had just heard from Deighton’s personal assistant, Ms. Ellenor Handley, that she had been retyping chapter drafts for his book in progress dozens of times over. IBM had a machine that could help, the technician mentioned. They were being used in the new ultramodern Shell Centre on the south bank of the Thames, not far from his Merrick Square home.

A few weeks later, Deighton stood outside his Georgian terrace home and watched as workers removed a window so that a 200-pound unit could be hoisted inside with a crane. The machine was IBM’s MTST (Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter), sold in the European market as the MT72. “Standing in the leafy square in which I lived, watching all this activity, I had a moment of doubt,” the author, now 84, told me in a recent email. “I was beginning to think that I had chosen a rather unusual way to write books.”
 

Today, of course, many—surely most—fiction writers work with computers, laptops, and word processors just like the rest of us. Literary scholarship generally credits Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi with being the first manuscript submitted to a publisher in typewritten form. Would it be possible, I wondered when I began my research into the literary history of word processing a year and a half ago, to locate a corresponding first for the digital age? The answer turns out to be the book Deighton published in 1970 with the aid of the MTST: a curiously apropos novel about World War II, titled Bomber.

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

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2013/03/len_deighton_s_bomber_the_first_book_ever_written_on_a_word_processor.html

You cam also read an earlier post on Len Deighton via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2013/02/happy-belated-birthday-to-thriller.html 

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

An Interview With Spy Thriller Writer Len Deighton

The HMSS Weblog, an always interesting web site, guided me to an interesting interview with Len Deighton, one of my favorite writers from the 1960s. Deighton wrote The Ipcress File, Berlin Game and many other fine spy thrillers.

You can read the interview via the below link:

http://deightondossier.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/deighton-dossier-exclusive-new-q-by-len.html

 
You can also read my earlier post on Len Deighton via the below link:

http://pauldavisoncrime.blogspot.com/2011/04/len-deighton-on-writers-facing-hard.html

The Classic Thrillers Of Len Deighton And Alistair MacLean To Be Reprinted

The web site Booktrade.Info reports that Sterling and HarperCollins will team up to reprint the complete works of Len Deighton (seen in the above BBC photo) and Alistair MacLean.

I enjoyed the thrillers of both writers in the 1960s and I look forward to rereading MacLean's The Guns of Navarone, When Eight Bells Toll, Ice Station Zebra and his other thrillers. (Howard Hughes reportedly watched the film version of Ice Station Zebra over and over again when he was hiding out in his high-rise apartment in las Vegas).

I also look forward to rereading Deighton's early spy series with the intelligence officer with no name, (he was called Harry Palmer in the Michael Caine film series based on the books) like The Ipcress File, Horse Under Water and Funeral in Berlin, as well as the Bernard Sansom series  - Berlin Game, Mexico Set and London Match - and his other interesting thrillers.

I hope the reprints of the classic thrillers will be read and appreciated by a younger generation.

You can read the Booktrade.info piece via the below link:

http://www.booktrade.info/index.php/showarticle/33836

Len Deighton On Writers Facing The Hard Questions Before Chapter One

Len Deighton, author of 40 books, wrote an interesting piece for The Wall Street Journal on how writers should prepare to write a book.

You can read the piece via the below link:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703916004576270890356713596.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

I've been reading Deighton since the 1960s. I've enjoyed his spy thrillers, which include The Ipcress File, and Funeral In Berlin, as well as his historical fiction, such as Bomber and Fighter: The True Story of the Battle of Britain. Deighton's spy thrillers were made into a successful film series starring Michael Caine as the working class spy hero.

Deighton has also written cookbooks and a very clever alternative history-thriller called SS-GB. I've reread the novel several times over the years.

SS-GB is set in a Great Britain defeated by Nazi Germany. In this alternative history, America did not become involved in the war.

Deighton's novel was published in 1978, years before Robert Harris wrote a similar novel called Fatherland in 1992.

You can read a good piece about Deighton in the British newspaper The Guardian via the below link:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/feb/19/len-deighton-revival