Long Fiction:
The Ipcress File, 1962
Horse Under Water, 1963
Funeral in Berlin, 1964
The Billion Dollar Brain, 1966
An Expensive Place to Die, 1967
Only When I Larf, 1968 (pb. in U.S. as Only When I Laugh)
Bomber: Events Relating to the Last Flight of an R.A.F. Bomber over Germany on the Night of June 31, 1943, 1970
Close-Up, 1972
Spy Story, 1974
Yesterday’s Spy, 1975
Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy, 1976 (pb. in U.S. as Catch a Falling Spy)
SS-GB: Nazi-Occupied Britain, 1941, 1978
XPD, 1981
Goodbye, Mickey Mouse, 1982
Berlin Game, 1983
Mexico Set, 1984
London Match, 1985
Winter: A Berlin Family, 1899-1945, 1987
Spy Hook, 1988
Spy Line, 1989
Spy Sinker, 1990
MAMista, 1991
City of Gold, 1992
Violent Ward, 1993
Faith, 1995
Hope, 1995
Charity, 1996
Short Fiction:
Declarations of War, 1971 (pb. in U.S. as Eleven Declarations of War)
Drama:
Pests: A Play in Three Acts, pb. 1994
Screenplay:
Oh! What a Lovely War, 1969
Teleplays:
Long Past Glory, 1963
It Must Have Been Two Other Fellows, 1977
Nonfiction:
Action Cookbook: Len Deighton’s Guide to Eating, 1965 (pb. in U.S. as Cookstrip Cook Book)
Où est le garlic: Or, Len Deighton’s French Cook Book, 1965, revised 1977, revised 1979 (as Basic French Cooking), revised 1990 (as Basic French Cookery)
Fighter: The True Story of the Battle of Britain, 1977
Airshipwreck, 1978 (with Arnold Schwartzman)
Tactical Genius in Battle, 1979 (with Simon Goodenough)
Blitzkrieg: From the Rise of Hitler to the Fall of Dunkirk, 1979
Battle of Britain, 1980
The Orient Flight: L Z. 127-Graf Zeppelin, 1980 (as Cyril Deighton; with Fred F. Blau)
The Egypt Flight: L Z. 127-Graf Zeppelin, 1981 (as Cyril Deighton; with Blau)
ABC of French Food, 1989
Blood, Tears, and Folly: An Objective Look at World War II, 1993
Edited Texts:
Drinks-man-ship: Town’s Album of Fine Wines and High Spirits, 1964
The Assassination of President Kennedy, 1967 (with Michael Rand and Howard Loxton)
London Dossier, 1967
Leonard Cyril Deighton (DAY-tuhn) is regarded as one of the most accomplished spy novelists of his generation, although his talents and varied interests have frequently led him beyond the genre and beyond fiction as well. The son of a cook and a chauffeur, he was born and grew up in the London district of Marylebone. During World War II he served in the Royal Air Force, developing skills in photography, weaponry, aviation, and diving–exacting fields, the details of which he would later draw upon in his writings. After the war, Deighton attended St. Martin’s School of Art and the Royal College of Art, both in London, and began a successful career as a commercial artist in London and New York. He has also been employed in a number of other fields, traveling widely, for instance, as an airline steward and even working briefly as an assistant pastry chef. He and fellow illustrator Shirley Thompson were married in 1960.
Aside from an unpublished description of life as he found it in the United States, The Ipcress File was Deighton’s first piece of writing and marked an auspicious beginning to a prolific career. Deighton had begun the novel as a lark on vacation in France in 1960, finishing it the following year on another vacation. A chance conversation with a literary agent led to the manuscript’s being submitted to several publishers, with publication following in 1962. The novel features an irreverent espionage agent of working-class background caught up in a series of dangerous and dauntingly complex events. It proved highly popular with the public and with most critics, although one of the latter complained that the story read as if every other chapter had been deleted.
Deighton followed The Ipcress File with seven other novels featuring essentially the same protagonist, though he is usually unnamed, and his characteristics undergo changes from time to time. (When several of the novels were adapted for a popular series of films starring Michael Caine, the character was given the name “Harry Palmer.”) Funeral in Berlin and Yesterday’s Spy are usually named as being the most successful of this series. All illustrate Deighton’s attention to the technical details of surveillance, information gathering, and so on–an emphasis that Deighton contrasts ironically with his characters’ inability to determine the “truth” about any particular situation or even communicate clearly with one another. Appendices and footnotes buttress their seeming factuality. All display a cynical attitude toward the British class system and politics in general, an attitude born of revelations in the 1950’s and 1960’s that well-placed members of the British espionage system, such as Harold “Kim” Philby, were actually Soviet agents. So successful were Deighton’s books that he was eventually forced for tax purposes to spend much of the year outside Britain, establishing residences in California and Ireland as well as in London.
Deighton has also published nonfiction throughout his career. From 1962 through 1966 he prepared illustrated “cookstrips” for the British weekly The Observer, eventually incorporating them into his first two cookbooks. Deighton has also written extensively about World War II, on which he is a recognized authority. His books Fighter and Blood, Tears, and Folly are notable (and in some quarters moderately controversial) for their evenhanded treatment of German and British viewpoints, and the former drew the praise of prominent historian A. J. P. Taylor.
Deighton’s interest in World War II and Germany is also reflected in his fiction, beginning with Funeral in Berlin and continuing with Bomber, which tells the story of an allied bombing mission gone terribly wrong. In SS-GB he imagined in somber, convincing detail a Great Britain vanquished by Nazi Germany. Berlin Game heralded the beginning of a new series of novels–eventually encompassing three trilogies–about British spy Bernard Samson, a more sophisticated, realistic version of Deighton’s earlier nameless protagonist. Deighton’s interest in Germany culminated in Winter, a lengthy historical novel about the contemporary German experience that also explores the backgrounds of several characters in the Samson series.
Although Len Deighton clearly values technical accuracy, he has repeatedly asserted that his only goal is to entertain. At their best his works display a terse, cinematic style reminiscent of the novels of Graham Greene. Drawing upon a tradition of realistic spy fiction pioneered by writers W. Somerset Maugham, Eric Ambler, and Greene, Deighton and his contemporary John le Carré have revolutionized the genre, distancing it from the lightweight James Bond thrillers of Ian Fleming. Although frequently compared to his disadvantage with le Carré, Deighton has produced at least two novels–Funeral in Berlin and Berlin Game–that rank among the very best of the genre. Among critics of speculative fiction, the grimly realistic SS-GB is regarded as a landmark work of “alternate history.”