Len Deighton was born in 1929 in London. He did his national
service in the RAF, went to the Royal College of Art and designed
many book jackets, including the original UK edition of Jack
Kerouac's On the Road. The enormous success of his first spy novel,
The IPCRESS File (1962), was repeated in a remarkable sequence of
books over the following decades. These varied from historical
fiction (Bomber, perhaps his greatest novel) to dystopian
alternative fiction (SS-GB) and a number of brilliant non-fiction
books on the Second World War (Fighter, Blitzkrieg and Blood, Tears
and Folly).
His spy novels chart the twists and turns of Britain and the Cold
War in ways which now give them a unique flavour. They preserve a
world in which Europe contains many dictatorships, in which the
personal can be ruined by the ideological and where the horrors of
the Second World War are buried under only a very thin layer of
soil. Deighton's fascination with technology, his sense of humour
and his brilliant evocation of time and place make him one of the
key British espionage writers, alongside John Buchan, Eric Ambler,
Ian Fleming and John Le Carre.
The film industry is in many ways the ideal subject for Mr
Deighton's talents.
*Times Literary Supplement*
Immense skill ... a stylish and stimulating performance.
*The Times*
The richness, the sardonic humour, the wheeling and dealing world
of the films with its parties, its highly coloured characters ...
The power of the book is undoubted.
*Evening Standard*
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