Len Deighton, bestselling author of thrillers that reinvented the spy novel, who has died aged 97, didn’t much like his job.
‘The best thing about writing books,’ he confided, ‘is being at a party and telling some pretty girl that you write books. The worst thing is sitting at a typewriter and actually writing the book.’
Not that there weren’t other compensations. As his career took off in the mid-1960s, with the movie of his unique espionage tale The Ipcress File, he briefly became more feted than its star, Michael Caine.
‘Of course,’ Deighton added, with his typical blend of anti-establishment mischief and self-deprecation, ‘he overtook me like a skyrocket, but there was a brief period when I was more famous.’
Playboy magazine named him its travel correspondent. A Sunday newspaper made him its star food writer. Plunging into films, he produced the most controversial musical of the decade, Oh! What A Lovely War.
In an era when readers demanded factual detail, he was lauded for the depth of research that went into every book. But he never let background get in the way of action. One Daily Mail reviewer exclaimed: ‘His plots grip like Princess Anne‘s jodhpurs!’
Multi-talented doesn’t begin to describe Deighton. Yet his status as a poster child for the egalitarian Sixties, the working-class lad who could peer down his nose at the snobs, left him looking dated as Britain turned its back on the ideal of upward mobility.
His aggressively proletarian anti-hero – nameless in the books but called Harry Palmer in the hit films – dislikes violence but he’s not above stealing. His heavy-rimmed NHS specs were identical to the ones Deighton wore and which became a Michael Caine trademark.
Len Deighton, a best-selling author credited with reinvetning the spy novel genre, has died at the age of 97
Deighton and his work were characterised by the working-class experience in a world dominated by publicly-educated men
Michael Caine starred in the 1965 film adaptation of Deighton’s spy novel The Ipcress File
Palmer doesn’t try to hide his contempt for university-educated, well-heeled, urbane MI6 types. In short, he’s the polar opposite of James Bond. No wonder, when ITV tried to resurrect Harry Palmer in 2022, with Joe Cole in the lead role, viewers were left baffled. Where was the glamour, the kiss-kiss-bang-bang everyone expects from espionage?
Once Britain’s most bankable thriller writer, Len Deighton saw his fame wane dramatically in the late 1990s. By the end of his life, he couldn’t even find a publisher for his last book, a history of the aero engine.
His final novel, Charity – the last in a nine-book series about another jaded secret agent, the middle-aged Bernard Samson – appeared 30 years ago, in 1996, after which he realised he simply didn’t want to keep writing.
He made a habit of turning down all honours, including a rumoured offer of a knighthood, and refused to appear at literary festivals, telling one organiser: ‘The only thing I would like less than going to your festival and reading from my latest book is to be at your festival and to hear other writers reading from their latest books.’
He was always scathing about his talents. At the end of the Sixties, with multi-million-sellers behind him, he declared himself to be, ‘the most illiterate writer ever… I’m not a writer. Anything that is good in my books tends to be descriptions that an art student would provide’.
Critic and thriller writer Julian Symons disagreed, saying: ‘The constant crackle of his dialogue makes Deighton a kind of poet of the spy story.’ But he could never shake the feeling that he had stumbled into a world peopled with mediocrities who thought themselves superior because they’d gone to public school.
His performance in The Ipcress File was among those that first brought Caine to fame
The Ipcress File was Deighton’s debut book, written on holiday in France in 1960 and published in 1962
Born in 1929 and christened Leonard Cyril, he always claimed his mother Dorothy gave birth in the workhouse, because the maternity hospital had no bed for her. His parents lived in a mews in Marylebone, at the back of a big house where Dorothy worked as a cook and her husband Leonard was a chauffeur.
They remained in London during the Blitz. Deighton recounted how, after a night of bombing, he looked into an air raid shelter and discovered 20 bodies. ‘Come out of there, son,’ a warden told him.
The horror of the war, and his childhood terror of a German invasion, fuelled the nightmare vision of his 1978 novel SS-GB, which imagined an England under Nazi rule. It was adapted as a BBC1 serial in 2017.
But the wartime memory that did most to shape his writing was of Special Branch officers hammering at the house next door and arresting its occupant, a 38-year-old Russian emigre named Anna Wolkoff. She had fled to England in 1917 after the Revolution, with her parents. Secretly, she was a Nazi spy.
Among her targets was the US ambassador, Joseph Kennedy. Wolkoff was sentenced to ten years for relaying secrets to Berlin. Her arrest, Deighton said, ‘was a huge, exciting event for a boy. Things stick in the subconscious and germinate’.
After the war, he served in the RAF as a photographer, before studying art at St Martin’s College in London and the Royal College of Art. A year as a cabin steward with BOAC followed, before he started work as a graphic designer and an illustrator at an advertising agency.
‘Every other director was not only a graduate of Eton, they’d all been there at the same time, and they all called each other by names like Piggy and Wiggy,’ he recalled. ‘I felt rather out of place.’
Deighton was 10 years old when the Second World War broke out, and his experiences of wartime London could be seen in his storylines
ITV resurrected The Ipcress File in 2022, with Joe Cole (pictured) playing the protagonist Harry Palmer, but audiences did not connect with it so well
Despite excellent sales and broad commendation, Deighton was usually scathing about his own abilities
That inspired him, while on holiday in France in 1960, to start writing a novel about a working-class secret agent. He said: ‘The Ipcress File is about spies on the surface, but it’s also really about a grammar-school boy among public-school boys.’
He pitched the book to a literary agent, Jonathan Clowes, and, after suffering two rejections from publishers, saw it become an instant bestseller – partly thanks to the first 007 movie, Dr No, which premiered a week earlier. The initial print run of 4,000 copies sold out on the first day, helped by its distinctive white, embossed cover which Deighton designed and partly subsidised.
At the same time, his cartoon-style Cookstrips, cramming recipes and cookery tips into a single panel, began appearing in a Sunday newspaper. These were inspired, Deighton explained, by his habit of scribbling notes as he cooked.
Like his creator, Harry Palmer is a talented cook, and in one Ipcress File scene he cracks two eggs into a bowl simultaneously with one hand. Caine couldn’t get the hang of it, so it’s Deighton’s hand that appears on camera.
His first marriage to designer Shirley Deighton was already on the rocks, so much so that she refused to go to the movie premiere in 1965, telling reporters that she was too busy with her own career. They married in 1960 but lived apart for years before divorcing in 1976.
In 1980, he married his second wife, Ysabele de Ranitz, who survives him. They had two children. By then he was a tax exile, living largely in Portugal and complaining bitterly that Labour’s top income tax rate of 95 per cent had driven him out of the country.
A lifelong fascination with war history saw him write two books about RAF operations, Fighter and Bomber – the latter inspiring one fan, vocalist Lemmy of the heavy-metal band Motorhead, to write an album with the same title.
Deighton preferred classical music to rock. But he enjoyed the explosive power his work could have. ‘When you make a book,’ he said, ‘it’s like making a hand grenade. It’s a dull process… but when you throw it, the person at the other end gets the effect.’
