Len Deighton: Only When I Larf (1968)

Edition: Sphere, 1968 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 1220

At this point in his career, Deighton seems to have been searching for a new direction. The three novels and the short story collection - An Expensive Place to Die, Only When I Larf, Bomber and Declarations of War - which include Deighton's effective abandonment of his Harry Palmer character are the most diverse of his career. Only When I Larf is the only one of his novels, for example, which could be classified as a comic thriller. (His other works may have comic elements, but here the comedy takes centre stage.) So Only When I Larf and the short stories of Declarations of War mark dead ends, as Deighton never wrote anything like either of them again.

Only When I Larf (joke answer to the question "When does it hurt?") is the story of three confidence tricksters: Silas, an upper class older man whose distinguished war record hid the beginnings of his criminal career; Bob, young and working class, and tired of always playing subordinate roles; and Liz, Silas' girlfriend, whose beauty is often an important part of building up a relationship with the mark. The novel is told from the point of view of each of these characters in turn, a device which enables Deighton to clearly show the reader the development of tensions between the trio, which gradually build throughout the story, especially after a big con goes badly wrong.

In most of Deighton's novels, the prevailing atmosphere is one of cynicism, leavened with satirical black humour. Here, the proportions are reversed, though the humour is not as amusing as the nuggets in, say, The Ipcress File. What drives the plot is the combination of different kinds of differences between Silas and Bob (temperament, generational and class); Liz is a peripheral observer of the friction between the two of them.

I can see why the comedy was something Deighton wanted to try, with humour playing an important part in the earlier novels; and I can see why he never made it quite so central again. There is a bitterness to Only When I Larf which makes it hard to like as a comedy, and much though I admire some of the ideas in it and the way it is written, it will never be one of my favourite Len Deighton novels.

Len Deighton: An Expensive Place to Die (1967)

Edition: Jonathan Cape, 1967
Review number: 1218

The fifth Len Deighton novel narrated by Harry Palmer is in some ways more like The Ipcress File than Billion-Dollar Brain (its predecessor) is. The cynical dark humour returns, and this gives the novel a similar atmosphere. It is, though, a more sordid novel, its subject being a high class Parisian brothel which has a sideline in blackmail, but it also shares the impression that the narrator has very little idea of what is actually going on - something which enables Deighton to spring surprises on the reader.

There is actually very little more to the plot than the existence of the brothel; all that really concerns the reader is to work out which of the characters in the novel is involved in investigating, protecting or running it. This is not very satisfactory from the point of view of the action in the story, something important in the thriller genre; it remains too unmotivated.

Harry Palmer continues to be anonymous, identified only as "the Englishman" by the other characters. In a new departure, his is not the only narrative voice. This is presumably so that the scenes can be rather more varied, with descriptions of events outside the Englishman's viewpoint. However, the scenes narrated from the point of view of other characters do not work so well; Deighton seems to have problems imagining how they will respond to the events they witness.

The novel, whose title comes from an Oscar Wilde quip about Paris, is something of a mixed bag. As a thriller, it isn't really exciting enough, but makes up for this in atmosphere. The plot is too diffuse, but it can be interesting guessing exactly who is on which side. While its predecessor Billion-Dollar Brain is really only for those who want to read everything Deighton wrote, An Expensive Place to Die would probably interest any fan of spy thrillers who picked it up.

Len Deighton: Billion-Dollar Brain (1966)

Edition: Jonathan Cape, 1966
Review number: 1214

The fourth Harry Palmer novel (in which he is still an unnamed narrator; the name was given him for the films) is the most dated of all of them. It relies on a plot device straight from James Bond or even The Man From UNCLE - the network of agents run by a computer. The novel begins with a Finnish journalist making waves when he starts investigating what he thinks is a massive British Secret Service operation in Finland - but there isn't one, so Palmer and his superiors want to find out just what he has stumbled across. The trail leads to a private army, assembled by a rabidly anti-Communist American billionaire, whose technicians have built the computer (in typical sixties style, one which fills several floors of a large building) to run the group's operations.

In the end, the computer is relatively unimportant, but it certainly does mark out Billion-Dollar Brain as a product of its time. As a spy thriller, though, the novel is something of a let-down for other reasons, which may well be why Deighton abandoned his Palmer character at this point. Indeed, it seems as though he has already, because almost all the quirkiness which marks the earlier novels is by now missing. By comparison with the earlier writing, it fails to be more than a run of the mill spy thriller. While still of the opinion that this is Deighton's poorest novel, it doesn't seem as bad this time around as I remember it (the computer plays a smaller part than I recalled, which may be part of the reason that this is the case). Nevertheless, it is still at least as good as its forgotten contemporaries - of which it would probably have been one without Deighton's name attached.

Len Deighton: Funeral in Berlin (1964)

Edition: Penguin, 1966 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 1209

Because it is the main focus of the Bernard Samson novels, Berlin might appear to be something of an obsession with Deighton. It actually features remarkably rarely in his other novels, particularly considering its unique position during the Cold War as a bastion of the West surrounded by the Soviet bloc. It does, however, feature heavily in the third Harry Palmer novel, as the title obviously indicates.

The plot of Funeral in Berlin is apparently the mirror image of The Ipcress File, with Palmer trying to arrange the reception for a Russian scientist defecting via West Berlin. But it soon becomes obvious that this isn't quite what is going on - why, for example, are those involved so insistent that the scientist's fake papers should be in a particular name when any would do for what they are claiming to want them for?

The whole of this novel, like Deighton's first two, revolves around things not being quite what they seem, right up to the ending with its particularly surprising revelations. (This was not the first time I'd read the novel; I'd forgotten the details but remembered the gist - and still found it exciting.) Deighton's novels do tend to be designed around this kind of misdirection, and it is of course a style particularly appropriate to the spy novel.

The setting of Berlin is atmospheric, more because it is full of nervous, posturing tough guys (both would-be and really tough); the descriptions are not as fully developed as they became in later years when Deighton's novels increased in length (Funeral in Berlin is less than half as long than Berlin Game, for instance). The most sympathetic character, as far as Palmer is concerned, is a Russian KGB colonel; for him, the distinction in the espionage business is between professionals and amateurs, rather than between friends and enemies.

The world of the spy as documented by Deighton continued to be a male dominated one through his entire career, and in fact never completely loses the old boy network feel that Palmer is so cynical about in The Ipcress file (Bernard Samson complains about this twenty years later on). Here, the two female characters are good looking young women, one Palmer's secretary and lover who does most of the routine work assigned to him, and the other a rather naive agent for some other power, whose seduction of Palmer seems to have slipped out of a James Bond story. Having mentioned Ian Fleming's famous spy in this context, though, I should point out that Deighton has moved on from Fleming's insistent misogyny. (Palmer is a much brighter but less flamboyant character than Bond, too.)

Apart from The Ipcress File, Funeral in Berlin is the best of the Harry Palmer novels, sharing its best quality - an ability to surprise even after all these years.

Len Deighton: Horse Under Water (1963)

Edition: Penguin, 1965
Review number: 1205

When The Ipcress File was such a huge success - it became an instant classic, and almost immediately a hit film - there must have been a great deal of interest in the follow-up. In fact, it plays safe, and is more of the same - a straight sequel. Indeed, throughout his career, despite occasional experimentation in novels such as Bomber and SS-GB, Deighton tended to return again and again to the disillusioned spy story of the type which made his name.

Harry Palmer is once again the narrator, of a story of treachery which has its roots in Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists and the activities of several of its members during the war as well as the international drug trade (the "horse" of the title being, of course, heroin). Many things are much the same (down to Palmer's continued ineptitude for crosswords). But Horse Under Water is no Ipcress File; it is slower and more obvious, giving the reader time to wonder about things they shouldn't think about when reading a thriller (such as why a senior figure like Palmer, an expert in international financial dealings, is the operative sent on a diving course so he can search a sunken U-boat off the coast of Portugal - surely a job for an experienced diver and a more junior officer). There is something of afeeling of a lost age, too - a time when the best known fact about Málaga was its bombardment during the Spanish Civil War. Even so, Horse Under Water is not as dated as many other spy novels of the sixties and seventies.

It is not really to be expected that Deighton's second novel would be equal to such an explosive début as The Ipcress File, and Horse Under Water is constantly good enough not to be a disappointment.

Len Deighton: The Ipcress File (1962)

Edition: Hodder & Stoughton, 1965
Review number: 1201

In today's thrillers, we have come to expect that the heroes are likely to be flawed, disillusioned characters. Go back a few decades, and all that was different. I'm talking straight thrillers, here, not detective stories; a significant source for the change to the the thriller genre was the hardboiled detective school of fiction. Graham Greene was probably the writer who introduced this style to the spy story, but Len Deighton was not far behind. followed in his turn by John le Carré.

Spies also tended to be upper class (think James Bond), and it was really Deighton who popularised the alternative. Harry Palmer (the narrator, not actually named in this novel) is a bright man with a good war record, who has had a successful postwar career in intelligence (at the beginning of the novel, he is about to become second in command of a powerful department). Yet he has an obvious chip on his shoulder; he says things like "Ross was a regular officer [i.e. a gentleman]; that is to say he didn't ... hit ladies without first removing his hat." The whole of the novel - and its sequels - makes the narrator's constant sneering at the upper classes a major feature, something which must have seemed quite revolutionary in the Britain of 1962. (It was, after all, the year in which the prosecuting lawyer in the Chatterley trial could say, "Is this a book you would want your servants to read?")

The plot seems at the start to be standard sixties spy thriller fare, as Palmer starts investigating some mysterious defections and strange behaviour among senior British scientists. It turns into an attempt to frame Palmer as a traitor, a charge which in those post-Burgess and MacLean days he can only refute by uncovering the colleague who is really in the pay of the other side. The Ipcress File is one of the earlier spy novels with a betrayal scheme, even if it is an extremely familiar plot to readers of Deighton and Le Carré's later novels.

While many of the positive features of The Ipcress File became staples of the spy thriller genre, making them now seem less innovative, it still has nice touches all of its own. The ironic chapter headings, supposedly Harry Palmer's newspaper horoscope for the day, form one which I particularly liked. The Ipcress File is a paramount classic of the genre, establishing the mould for hundreds of imitators ever since, both as novels and in film.