Len Deighton was a revolutionary

Too many of Britain’s espionage writers were melancholy public schoolboys – Deighton was their antidote

“I walked up the steps where the sun was warming up a pint of Jersey and a banana-flavour yoghurt. Tucked behind the bottles a Daily Mail peeped its headline, ‘Berlin, a new Crisis?’” This is how Len Deighton’s unnamed secret agent makes his entrance in Funeral in Berlin, published in 1964 by the thriller writer, who has died at the age of 97. This is a spy story with more than a whiff of the kitchen sink about it. A fruit-flavoured dairy product going on the turn is not in the same wheelhouse – or bar – as a martini, whether it’s shaken or stirred. But then Deighton, who was born in a London workhouse in 1929 to parents who were in service, was unlike his fellow espionage writers, including James Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming, whatever the obituarists might say.

Other canonical spy writers, if you can talk of such a group – Graham Greene, Fleming, John le Carré – came from middle-class or upper-middle-class backgrounds and went to public schools. Their fiction often frets over the honourable course of action for their protagonists. In the novels of Le Carré, especially, the plodding, cuckolded Smiley is contrasted with the dashing scoundrels who betray their own side for half-understood political philosophies or hard cash.

Deighton could be forgiven for having little time for those who “let the side down”, though he might not have put it in such arch terms. When he was a boy during the Second World War, one of his neighbours was arrested as a spy. He told an interviewer, “My mother sometimes cooked for her. [She was] anti-Semitic, a Nazi sympathiser. My dad fought the Germans in the trenches in World War I. In 1939, he commanded a civilian first-aid post. Her betrayal had a profound effect on my family.” Deighton’s unnamed hero – who was called Harry Palmer in the film version of The Ipcress File and its follow-ups and was played by Michael Caine, famously working class – doesn’t waste any time wondering where his loyalties lie or indeed examining his motives in general. He knows what he likes: to get the job done, to be paid on the nose, and to share a bistro table and more besides with Jean, his (posher) colleague from the office.

When Mike Myers was sending up Swinging London in the Austin Powers films, his “shagadelic” alter ego was based on 007. But Deighton’s spy was much closer to the spirit of the age. Like him, Deighton was a self-made man, kicking over the traces. The writer has more in common with working-class authors such as Alan Sillitoe and David Storey, the “angry young men”, and indeed with figures like the photographer David Bailey and the Beatles, than with the gentleman spy authors – though he was on good terms with several of them. The reader has no idea where Palmer went to school or who his tailor is (almost certainly Burton’s). He’s less than deferential to his tweedy boss, who would probably have thought of Palmer as a counter-jumper. There is not much fetishising of gadgets in Deighton’s books, though Billion-Dollar Brain (1966) includes a touchingly vast and clunking computer, which laboriously coughs up gobbets of intel on index cards.

To be fair to the author, the book was written close to the dawn of the computer age, and technology was one of many subjects he took an interest in. It is said that his Second World War book Bomber (1970) was the first to be written on a computer: an IBM MT/ST (Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter). Bond fussed like Bertie Wooster about how his breakfast was prepared; Deighton’s agent – a new man, at least in the kitchen – prefers to rustle up dishes himself. This reflects another interest of his creator. Deighton wrote a cookery column in the form of a strip cartoon for the Observer, and his recipes were collected in a couple of books, one with a hint of spycraft about the title – Action Cook Book (1965) – and the other with absolutely none: Ou est le Garlic? (also 1965). Despite this, Deighton’s stories clearly anticipate a fictional spy with the palate of a wharf rat: the Pot Noodle-necking Jackson Lamb from Mick Herron’s Slow Horses.

Some of Deighton’s readers might miss the shabby dolefulness of Le Carré: one of his books set in Berlin, his breakout success The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), is steeped in melancholy and resonates with the anxiety of the then-divided city. That said, Deighton could sketch a scene with enviable skill when the occasion demanded. He describes Western newspapermen climbing up to a lookout position to watch the tense scenes at Checkpoint Charlie: “Journalists go crowding up the short flight of stairs like it’s the royal box for the last public hanging.”

What Deighton also offered was pep and vim. His secret agent talks out of the side of his mouth like a Raymond Chandler character. (“In large capitals was written, ‘Lost – Siamese cat, Answers to the name Confucius.’ Answers what?”) He claimed that he read everything when he was a young man, doubtless working his way through a lot of pulp novels when he was in advertising in New York during its Mad Men heyday. Deighton was plying his trade as an illustrator. He had studied at the Royal College of Art and went on to design jackets for books as well as writing them. His efforts included the cover of Kerouac’s On the Road for its first British publication. His resumé also included spells as a railway clerk and an air steward.

He published his last novel in 1996, though many of his titles were reissued as Penguin Modern Classics in 2021. He enjoyed a long retirement. Aware of his formidable age, I tried to secure an interview with him but to my regret this was unsuccessful. He wasn’t one for a literary jamboree, but he did throw a party for his fellow thriller writers when one of them, Eric Ambler, turned 75. “He blazed a path for many of us and I arranged a lunch to celebrate him,” Deighton recalled in 2023.

The do was at the Savoy: a little more Bond’s style than Palmer’s. “I invited 12 people to join Eric and me, including John le Carré, Frederick Forsyth, Kingsley Amis, Ted Allbeury and John Gardner. I called Graham Greene, but he sent a message instead. It congratulated Eric on his longevity but didn’t say much about his literary career. After lunch I arranged for a photographer to take a picture of us all. That photo hangs on my dining room wall with a menu we all signed. Sadly, Freddy and I are the only two left.” Forsyth died last year. And now Deighton, a writer of modest origins but considerable class – what a stroke of confidence to have a hero with no name! – has quit the scene with the same lack of fuss as his secret agent writing up his exes and booking leave.

[Further reading: John le Carré, the great deceiver]