Len Deighton, author of bestselling spy thrillers, dies at 97

British writer Len Deighton, who has died at 97, created the sardonic working-class spy played by Michael Caine in the 1965 Cold War film “The Ipcress File”. Deighton “passed away peacefully on Sunday”, his literary agent said, calling him “one of the greatest spy and thriller writers of the twentieth century”.

Deighton’s thick-bespectacled agent provided an antidote to the debonair Navy officer James Bond created by Ian Fleming. The character’s rough edges also set him apart from gentleman spy George Smiley featured in books by John Le Carre. Deighton’s spy was anonymous in his first book, “The IPCRESS File” (1962), and its sequels “Horse Under Water” (1963), “Funeral in Berlin” (1964) and “Billion-Dollar Brain” (1966).

But the anti-hero was baptised Harry Palmer for the hugely successful film version of the “Ipcress File” (the acronym changed to lower-case) starring Caine, which brought Deighton to a wider audience. Deighton, who like his spy also wore thick spectacles, lived life out of the limelight, rarely giving interviews. Yet he sold millions of books in the English-speaking world and was translated into 20 languages over a career spanning half a century.

Reflecting on Deighton’s legacy in 2021, the Financial Times newspaper mused that “The IPCRESS File” had “a plot that was impossible to follow, and a title that was an impenetrable acronym”. “Yet its appearance marked a sea change in the cold war spy novel and today the first edition is a collector’s item,” it said. In an afterword to the 2009 edition of the book, Deighton recalled the enthusiastic reviews it garnered when it published in 1962. “The critics were using me as a blunt instrument to batter Ian Fleming about the head,” he wrote.

This Jan. 9, 1973 file photo shows Len Deighton. Associated Press

IPCRESS stands for “Induction of Psychoneuroses by Conditioned Reflex under Stress”, the brainwashing to which a group of abducted British scientists are subjected in the novel. The role of Harry Palmer helped propel Caine, a porter’s son from gritty east London, to Hollywood glory.

Caine later praised writers like Deighton for giving him his big break. “They started writing for working-class people, and it made all the difference,” he said in 2017.

At the height of the Cold War in the 1980s, years before the Berlin Wall fell, Deighton produced what was widely considered his masterpiece: a set of three trilogies, largely based in his second home, Berlin, as well as in London.

Starting with “Berlin Game” (1983), “Mexico Set” (1984) and “London Match” (1985), he introduced another working-class spy: Bernard Samson, middle aged and jaded; and his defector wife Fiona. “My whole Bernard Samson series was based on the belief that the Berlin Wall would fall before the end of the century,” Deighton was quoted as saying in 2021, in Britain’s New Statesman magazine.

Deighton also gained renown for his works on World War II military technology and techniques. An inveterate foodie he also penned five cookery books, including “Len Deighton’s Action Cook Book” (1965), that were based on cartoon strips, and worked in the 1960s as a travel writer for “Playboy”.

Deighton was born in Marylebone, London, on February 18, 1929 to parents in the employment of the gentry — his father a chauffeur and his mother a cook.

He did his military service in the Royal Air Force, shortly after World War II, and was trained as a photographer.

He then studied art and, after stints as an air steward and assistant pastry chef, became an illustrator and graphic designer for publishing and advertising firms in the UK and United States. He designed the UK first edition dust jacket of Jack Kerouac’s beatnik novel “On the Road”.

Deighton’s interest in spy fiction was inspired by witnessing, as an 11-year-old boy, the arrest of a neighbour of White Russian descent, Anna Wolkoff, who turned out to be a Nazi spy.

Agence France-Presse