Berlin Pension plan ...

These images were sent to the Dossier by a German visitor, Peter Hegenbarth, a resident of Kissinger Strasse in Berlin, who wrote me the email from an office just above where Checkpoint Charlie used to be. They are of the grand nineteenth century house on Bleibtreustrasse, number 49, in the Charlottenberg district.

Eagle-eye readers who've seen the bootleg copies of the never-repeated Granada TV Game, Set and Match series from 1988 may recognise it as the location of Pension Hennig, the German family hotel in which Bernard Samson grew up, and in which he stayed when on a mission "drüben" ("over there") in East Berlin.

Peter writes:

"I came from the Palmer movies to read the books behind them. So then, I took a great interest in the other of Deighton’s books which were made into movies. Hence, to the 'Game Set & Match' TVseries that I found on YouTube. And after that, I found my way to Dossier dossier and its page on the series."

The hotel featured in the opening titles of the TV series and in the books, it is to his old childhood room, underneath the roof - with no bathroom - that Bernard Samson often retreated after a mission. A great example of a Prussian family townhouse that was converted into a pension.

Not soft, but hard boiled

Some eggs, yesterday.

Last year, on this blog, I posted up link to an article by Dr Robert Lance Snyder, a retired US academic, in an English literature periodical looking at the literary context and impact of Len Deighton's first book, The Ipcress File.

Well, over the winter, Dr Snyder's clearly been busy. He's recently produced another lengthy academic textual analysis of Len Deighton's fiction more broadly, which is published in last month's edition of Papers on Language & Literature, 54.2 (Spring 2018): 155-86.

Titled "Arabesques of the Final Pattern", his paper draws links back to Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe and the 'hard-boiled' detective story, and uses this genre as a jumping off point to explore how Deighton uses elements of this literary style in his Cold War fiction.

Dr Snyder's shared with me a .pdf copy of the article, which Dossier readers can access via this Dropbox link.