Christmas wishes to all the website readers ....

Hours of endless waiting ahead on a cold Christmas night ....

"'Cheer up, Werner. It will soon be Christmas,' I said.
I shook the bottle, dividing the last drips of whisky between the two white plastic cups that were balanced on the car radio. I pushed the empty bottle under the seat. The smell of the whisky was strong. I must have spilled some on the heater or on the warm leather that encased the radio. I thought Werner would decline it. He wasn't a drinker and he'd had far too much already, but Berlin winter nights are cold and Werner swallowed his whisky in one gulp and coughed. Then he crushed the cup in his big muscular hands and sorted through the bent and broken pieces so that he could fit them all into the ashtray. Werner's wife Zena was obsessionally tidy and this was her car."

Whether you're on a stake-out or, more likely, drinking (or not!) at home with your kith and kin, the Deighton Dossier wishes its readers and contributors good wishes for this Yuletide and good hope for a book-filled, interesting 2017.

Thanks for visiting this blog, the main website, the Twitter and Facebook pages and contributing to lively discussion.

New trial website now up ....

After much shenanigans and failed uploads, I'm now in a position to upload the new design for the Deighton Dossier website.

The new design supports:

• Easier access from mobiles and tablets, alongside desktop PCs, as it's relational to the screen size now
• Makes it easier to support galleries and video embedding
• Has a cleaner overall look and feel to make working through the site easier
• Makes it easier to link to other related social media through the site

I hope readers like it.

It's still a work in progress. For example, although there is a menu item for blog, I cannot get that to work right now so that will come out temporarily soon.

However, I'd welcome your feedback.

Well, have you ....?

Spotted this week in Waterstone's at London Wall in the City:

I'm sure that next Spring, when the TV series begins on BBC TV, then a lot of people who've been 'meaning to' read this Deighton classic will spot the paperback edition and think, why not now?

Bag a Bit of Bagley ...

Sorry for the slow posting recently on this blog ... usual reasons of work etc.

However, I thought I should do a quick shout out to the sterling work of fellow Blogger and spy thriller fan Phil Eastwood who runs the Desmond Bagley Running Blind website.

Checking on it recently I also took the opportunity to read his new(ish) blog covering the works of UK-thriller writer Bagley more extensively, beyond the single book covered in his main website.

It's definitely worth checking out that he's added a series of podcasts by his friend and fellow Bagley-ite Nigel Alefounder, who runs a Bagley fansite. They're pretty interesting - I finished a couple of months ago my copy of Running Blind, having not read it before, and it's a great story.

The podcasts look in some detail at all aspects of Bagley's life; others look at the research techniques employed (like Deighton famously did) by Bagley to provide real verisimilitude to his stories; and a look at the silver screen adaptations of Bagley's works. Worth checking them out; they're on iTunes on or the site linked to above.