Monday - CBC documentary on Len Deighton

Earlier this year I spent a day with radio producer Philip Coulter from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's Ideas programme, a long-running radio documentary programme. He was interviewing Len Deighton for a profile which looks at his career and in particular at the themes of human loves and fears, and office politics too, which drive the world of espionage in Len's novels.

Philip approached me, as the creator of the Deighton Dossier website, to contribute my thoughts to this programme which I was glad to do. We spent a morning walking around London chatting about Deighton's books and characters in the locations where some of the great scenes in the book take place.

[Update]

The profile was very interesting. Philip interspersed selections from his interview with Deighton with readings from Game, Set and Match and contributions from me from our day-long walk around London. I think it came across quite well, and there were some interesting new insights from Deighton about his approach to writing the book and his motivations behind the creation of the iconic Bernie Samson character. Also touched on was his views on the English class system, on the motivation of spies and his approach to writing.

Blog readers should check out the Ideas website. The show was broadcast on Monday evening, 1930h Canadian time, on a number of digital channels; it can also be found on listen again on the CBC website. The programme also has a podcast, so it should be possible for readers to listen to the programme in one way or the other.

If you listened to it and enjoyed it, share some of your thoughts on the Deighton Dossier forum or in the comments section of this page.

Four eyes better than two

Interesting little article in the Daily Telegraph yesterday. The journalist - with the delightfully exotic name of Henry de Quetteville - opines on the possible demise of spectacles not just as a solution to myopia but as a part of everyday life, and popular culture too. In it, he picks up on the image of Michael Caine as Harry Palmer in the three films from the sixties and the iconic status of his tortoiseshell glasses. Though not explicitly referenced in the books, Caine's decision to wear these glasses (he was short-sighted) in the film turned a character into an icon, such that's it's difficult to disassociate the books, the character and the films from the glasses, to a large degree.

What did it signify, back then? This was a spy with imperfections. A man who, after making love to a flighty young dolly bird had to reach across to his bedside table to grab his specs before he could make a cup of coffee (recall the use by director Sidney Furie of shots of the main character shot through his own glasses). Someone who gave the appearance of an upper working class clerical officer who was able to bump off Eastern Bloc's finest. He was an everyman spy to the like the cinema-going public in the sixties; they could be him. Bond, in contrast, was the escapist fantasy, the public school educated hero and action man.

All through what was effectively a simple choice of costume!

Michael Caine on the erroneous return of Harry Palmer

(c) Ian Derry

Interesting article in the Daily Mail this weekend - a long career retrospective interview with 78-year-old Michael Caine, film star and English hero.

The piece, written by Caine, talks about some of his struggles in the middle part of his career when great characters started to dry up and his career was at a crossroads ... which his decision to film On Deadly Ground with martial arts champion Steven Seagal in 1994 did little to address.

The year after, during this career slump, he talks about revisiting an old friend - his character of Harry Palmer, which he'd made internationally famous in the sixties with The Ipcress File, Funeral in Berlin and Billion-Dollar Brain.

Interestingly, Caine says his decision to go back over old ground "almost finished me off". Some interesting experiences with the local Russian Mafia and the Russian security forces had Caine questioning quite what he was doing:

"The filming itself was a joke. The final blow came when we were shooting in the Lenfilm studio itself. I wanted to go to the toilet and they directed me to it. I could smell it 50 yards away and it was the filthiest lavatory I have ever seen."

That seems an appropriate reference. Both Bullet to Beijing and Midnight in St. Petersburg are pretty poor films, and not a great legacy in light of the earlier masterpieces which put Deighton's unnamed spy on a cinematic par with Bond.

Though billed as Len Deighton's Bullet to Beijing, the film script was written by Peter Wellbeck and, of the two movies, this is the better, though both are dragged down by Jason Connery's wooden acting (his performance giving the lie to the idea that star quality passes down in the genes).

Len Deighton is involved as a co-writer of the script for Midnight in St. Petersburg, though the idea is not based on any existing Len Deighton novel. There is ample evidence to suggest that much of Midnight in St. Petersburg is cobbled together with edited-together out-takes from the earlier Bullet to Beijing filming, and the storyline is definitely threadbare.
 

Midnight in St. Petersburg, is actually a made-for-TV movie was produced for a pay-TV channel in the states, Showtime, part of the deal with Caine being that he would only make it if the big-budget movie - Bullet to Beijing - was made alongside it. It shows - it has the feel of a straight-to-cable movie.

The nature of this deal gives an idea of where Caine's career was at the time. Not in a great place. Possibly at an end. But as the rest of the article recounts, thereafter Caine saw an upswing in his career with meatier roles leading up to his Oscar winning performance in The Cider House Rules in 1998.

Very interesting article.

Bits and pieces for your delectation

Every once in a while browsing the Interweb I stumble upon articles referencing Len Deighton and the related world of spy espionage. Sometimes, too, readers send me links to interesting some if the farthest reaches of the World Wide Web.

I found two articles from The Guardian newspaper in the UK.  The first is a short piece from the lifestyle section on blenders. Yes, blenders - the electric kitchen utensil. The Deighton connection? Well, his dismissive reaction to these new gadgets in the 'sixties - recorded in his Action Cook Book - opens the piece. Of more direct Deighton interest is this review from last year, when that self-same book was republished - with much success - by Harper Collins. Cooking columnist Rachel Cooke - one of the journalists who last month put Action Cook Book at #44 in the all-time best cookbook list in The Observer - reviews this pioneering gastronomic guide for guys.

As well as being insightful, beautifully designed and promising the best meal of her life, the book "contains a very reassuring, no faffing, recipe for Béarnaise sauce".

Le Carre on Philby

(c) Paul Calver for Sunday Telegraph

I've read online today an interesting interview with David Cornwall - better known by his literary alter ego John Le Carré - in which he recalls his decision not to meet Kim Philby, the Soviet spy of Cambridge spy ring fame who, the article recalls, no doubt played a part in ending Cornwall's career in MI:6 and MI:6.

The Sunday Telegraph magazine article reveals the depth of contempt the writer feels for Philby. Offered the opportunity in the late eighties to meet with the famous double agent, Cornwall recalls his disgust at the prospect of meeting a man responsible for the demise of British agents:

'"I couldn’t possibly have shook his hand,’ he shudders. ‘It was drenched in blood. It would have been repulsive. Lord knows how many agents Philby betrayed. They were tortured in terrible ways.'"

This is a very long and detailed interview with the author - timed as part of the PR push around his new novel 'Our Kind of Traitor' - and it reveals a number of interesting anecdotes about as well as some familiar and unfamiliar tales about his childhood. His new novel is based in Russia and draws on the world of the Oligarch, inspired by a meeting Le Carre had with a big-time crook Dima just at the end of the Cold War:

‘After a long wait, Dima, flanked by a bevy of heavies and a posse of pretty, pouty, scantily clad young women, deigned to arrive. He was a big monster of a man who looked like Telly Savalas.’

Fascinating portrait of one of the collossi of British espionage writing.

Raymond Hawkey obituaries

(c) TOPFOTO

Two obituaries for the late Raymond Hawkey - whose death was covered last week on this blog and referenced elsewhere across the blogosphere - have appeared in today's papers, in both The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph. Both obituaries use the same photograph - reproduced here - of Hawkey in what I guess is the late sixties or early seventies, sitting aside some modernist designer furniture and demonstrating his impeccable dress sense which is remarked upon in both obituaries.

Both obituaries are well written and respectful portraits of a contemporary and lifelong pal of Len Deighton who in his own way made as much an impact on the 'sixties through his pioneering design work in publishing - particularly through The Ipcress File cover and later on the Pan Bond editions - and in newspapers and magazines, shaking up the media establishment with his introduction of photo realism and a new graphical approach to typography and illustration. His influence is still seen in the papers we read every day.

Len Deighton himself penned his own tribute in Sunday's Observer newspaper to a man who had been his friend since the fifties. "It was a great privilege to be Ray's friend", he writes. As there is no url link currently available on The Observer website, a copy of said article is reproduced below as an image.

(c) Guardian Media Group

A touching, personal note on an enduring friendship.

More twists than a bag of pretzels - Jeremy Duns' Free Country

Part two of the Paul Dark trilogy

Paul Dark - double agent and cold-hearted killer - is most definitely back. Jeremy Duns' sixties spy, fresh from dealing with the terrifying and life-threatening demands of satisfying two Cold War masters on two continents, reappears in Free Country (Simon and Schuster, £19.99 hb). And this time, the web of intrigue, deception and downright plot complexity is double what it was in the first of the trilogy, Free Agent.

This first book established the central conceit - Dark is an MI:6 officer who was recruited by the NKVD just after the war but, in 1969, is on the verge of being outed as a 'double'. He had managed to save himself from being uncovered, but only after some high-energy derring do in Nigeria and facing almost certain death from a deadly jungle virus and a battle with Soviet agent with a tale to tell.


In this second book, the awkwardness of his situation becomes apparent and exposure seems imminent. We find our hero operating in London and Rome. (Question - can the reader emphasise with a "hero" character who kills his own boss? Of course ... who hasn't thought about murdering their boss during a particularly dull team meeting! More seriously, he has enough redeeming character traits and his unique situation creates an element of sympathy for someone who seems permanently trapped and on the run).

Kiss me, then Kill me! New exhibition on the art of Cold War espionage fiction

Poster for the new exhibition

A new exhibition is opening in Hertfordshire this week looking at the aesthetics of design in the Cold War era, celebrating the the unique graphic art and forgotten spy films of Cold War Europe.

Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill opens at the University of Hertfordshire Art and Design Gallery, Hatfield. The University is jointly curating the exhibition with the Hertfordshire Film Consortium.

Centred on the kitsch designs produced across Europe during the Cold War, Kiss Kiss Kill Kill is the first exhibition of a collection of newly restored posters from Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France, Italy, Poland, Romania, Spain, the U.S.S.R, East and West Germany and the UK. The different graphic styles in the East and West provide an expansive portrait of European taste, national identity and politics of the period, with the brash super kitsch of Italian cinema posters juxtaposed compellingly with the lo-tech golden age of non commercial Czech film poster design.

Oh! What a Lovely Start to a Film

Raymond Hawkey designed the opening titles to the 1969 Bryan Duffy and Richard Attenborough produced film (Deighton took his name off the production credits) of the stage play Oh! What a Lovely War. A great opening sequence with the Hawkey touch, some of the images suggest an antecedence from the approach taken on the The Ipcress File cover.

Raymond Hawkey - a personal note from Edward Milward-Oliver

Following yesterday's announcement of the death of Raymond Hawkey, Deighton's biographer Edward Milward-Oliver - also a friend of Hawkey - offered to share some reflections on the noted designer’s legacy. I'm happy to print them below:


Ray Hawkey - a reflection by Edward Milward-Oliver

"Shit. No day that starts with me finding out that Raymond Hawkey died has half a chance of turning out well. RIP"

 – A posting on Twitter 

Raymond Hawkey's graphic design work across newspapers, magazines and publishing, had a significant influence on the visual culture of Britain in the second half of the Twentieth Century. His early interest in American graphics while a student at the Royal College of Art subsequently helped change the look of British newspapers and magazines. He was Design Director at the Daily Express in its heyday from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, where he introduced illustrated graphic panels into the news pages (a concept quickly adopted by other newspapers), and then served as Presentation Director of the Observer and Observer Magazine for eleven years until 1975. He advised The Independent and IPC Magazines through the following decade, while establishing himself as a best-selling author.

Hawkey is more widely known for his 30-year association with Len Deighton, and his black and white photographic jacket for The Ipcress File, published in 1962, had a major influence on the evolution of British book jacket design.

He produced only one drawing, which Deighton approved immediately. Robin Denniston, Deighton's editor at Hodder & Stoughton, was equally taken with the concept but had to overcome the fierce opposition of the sales force who felt it was too unorthodox. After the publisher declined to pay more than its usual 15 guinea design fee, Deighton topped it up to £50, which Hawkey split with Daily Express news photographer Ken Denyer.

What Hawkey did was to apply magazine and advertising techniques to the execution of what would later be recognised as a groundbreaking design. The jacket was shot on a half-plate camera in the Daily Express photographic studio using high-key lighting, which at the time was very much in vogue for taking upmarket fashion photographs. Although the content of the photograph was both menacing (the Smith & Wesson revolver and bullets) and dirty (the chipped cup of cold tea and the stubbed out cigarette), Hawkey thought it important that the overall look should be cool and sophisticated. In order to achieve this, Hawkey and Ken Denyer built a tent of white tissue over the set, through which it was lit, with a hole for the camera lens. The result was what Mike Dempsey, a former President of DAD, has described as ‘one of the key moments in design history’ when considered within the context of the period.

In addition to working with Len Deighton, Raymond Hawkey designed jackets and promotional material for many authors including Kingsley Amis, Frederick Forsyth, John Grisham, Ruth Rendell and Ian Fleming. His cover for the 1963 Pan paperback edition of Thunderball is possibly the most important jacket in the whole of the Ian Fleming/James Bond publishing history. His prescient design signalled that a new cinematic phenomenon had been born. Hawkey proposed that for the first time ‘James Bond’ should be elevated above the title – where it remained for nearly four decades. Not only that, he decided ‘James Bond’ should be twice the size of the title and author’s name, thus anticipating that the films would become the critical element in the marketing and success of the books.

His cover design was then replicated on Pan’s other Fleming paperback titles. The inspired choice of Hawkey was that of Bond co-producer Harry Saltzman, who convinced the chairman of Pan Books that the paperback editions – with their passé narrative illustrations - should be redesigned. And with the Pan Thunderball cover Hawkey also broke new ground in having bullet holes die-cut into the Brian Duffy photograph of the girl's back. He repeated the effect with the keyhole cut-out cover revealing Twiggy for the Penguin edition of Len Deighton's London Dossier in 1967.

A modest, generous man, always immaculately dressed, Raymond Hawkey was once talent-spotted by MI6 . . . but that story is for another day.

Edward Milward-Oliver is currently writing a biography of Len Deighton. For anyone interested in Hawkey's career, he offers a number of suggested sources of further reading:

• Raymond Hawkey. ‘Advertising: no skeleton in anybody’s cupboard’ in ARK, The Journal of the Royal College of Art. Issue 5. RCA, 1952. 
• Raymond Hawkey. The Penrose Annual: Graphic Arts International. Volume 66. Lund Humphries, 1973. 
• Alex Seago. Burning the Box of Beautiful Things. Oxford University Press, 1995. 
• Stephen Kent. ‘James Bond Gets a Facelift’ in One-off: A Collection of Essays by Postgraduate Students on the Victoria & Albert Museum/Royal College of Art Course in the History of Design. V&A/RCA, 1997. 
• Alan Powers. Front Cover: Great Book Jackets and Cover Design. Mitchell Beazley, 2001. 
• Rick Poynor (Editor). Independent British Graphic Design since the Sixties. Laurence King Publishing, 2004.

Raymond Hawkey - designer of iconic Ipcress File front cover - passes away

I've been advised by Deighton's biographer and friend Edward Milward-Oliver of the sad passing of graphic artist and author Raymond Hawkey. A friend and fellow art school graduate of Len Deighton, Hawkey was one of the pioneers of graphic illustration in the UK in the sixties - particularly in book cover design - and will be best remembered for his iconic front covers for Deighton's first four novels - The Ipcress File, Horse Under Water, Funeral in Berlin and Billion-Dollar Brain. All four of these were landmarks in the development of dust cover design, particularly because of Hawkey's use of large amounts of white space and black and white photography at a time when book covers were still largely in colour and illustrated. Hawkey had a long working relationship with Deighton and provided the covers and associated marketing material for many other of his works.

From the BBC archives - Deighton and Bragg

Thanks to eagle-eyed blog reader Nick Elliott I've come across a little gem hidden away in the dark recesses of the BBC's website, in the 'archive' section.

It's an episode of The Lively Arts from BBC 1, broadcast on 18 December 1977 and is one of the very few lengthy to-camera interviews Deighton has given in his life, the other being the The Truth about Len Deighton documentary from BBC4 in 2006. As such, it's an insight into the author's life and work at a time when he was pre-eminent among fiction authors in the UK, following the success of Bomber, and he was becoming equally well-known as a historian with the publication of Fighter: the true story of the Battle of Britain.

The programme is filmed partly in London and party on the Algarve coast in Portugal, where Deighton lived for much of the year (partly for tax purposes in the 'seventies, no doubt). It starts off in biographical mode, referring to Deighton's early 'Dickensian' life from the workhouse to the kitchen to the designer's desk. The first interesting  anecdote concerns the genesis of his first book, The Ipcress File. Deighton emphasises that he came to writing completely ignorant of the process and the expectations associated with being a writer. He wasn't, he says, intimidated by the knowledge of how much work was associated with: "you just sat down and started writing a book and by the weekend it would be finished." He wrote it for amusement and put it aside for a year, finishing the rest of it on his next holiday in France. At the time, he says, he didn't have a strong ambition to be a writer. The nature of the book is, he says, "the most self indulgent book ever written"; it was not written with a view to getting published ... but it subsequently sold over 2 million copies. Deighton seems genuinely surprised in the interview about its success.

What comes across in the discussions is Deighton's unique approach to bringing research to his novels and drawing on the fascinating people he had already met during his life. For example, he talks of the many people he'd met at the time who "had experience of spying" or who covered espionage in the media, and from them he got some fascinating stories. People offered up to him freely with increasing regularity after the publication of his first book. "I attract people who like to talk", he says.

A fascinating interview which has some new insights I've not heard or read in previous media interviews.

Them communists was quite handy with the ball, you know.

Dukla Prague away-kit

Interesting little snippet  from this weekend's Observer newspaper, reviewing a new biography of former Spurs manager Bill Nicholson, who took the club to the league and cup double in 1960/61 and then to the semi-finals of the European Cup. Back in the day .... when it was a proper cup ... played by the proper champions of each league.

Rob Bagchi writes how the author of the biography Brian Scovell paints a vivid picture of European football behind the iron curtain:

"the tales of trips behind the Iron Curtain to play Poland's Gornik Zabrze and Czechoslovakia's Dukla Prague have a distinctly Len Deighton-ish air with their misty train platforms, journalists taken into custody and bug-ridden beds"

'Len Deighton-ish'. Pretty self-explanatory adjective, which fits nicely into the lexicon of 20th century shared cultural references. Demonstrates the extent to which Funeral in Berlin and The Ipcress File have become literary and historic short-hand for conjuring up popular images of the Cold War.

The book sounds very interesting. Back in the sixties and seventies Eastern Europe was another world for most people. The footballers, like the Eastern bloc military and spy networks, were regarded as ruthlessly efficient, lacking in art but dedicated to the inevitable (!) victory of international socialism on the playing field as well as the battle field. 

As anyone who's read the book Behind the Iron Curtain by Jonathan Wilson will know, the links between the Communist parties and the secret police in most Eastern European countries were frequent, pernicious and sometimes pretty transparent, as was the case with Dynamo Berlin, which was the Stasi's pet club. 

Another list ....

Sometimes, if you're an editor stuck for content, there's nothing easier than slipping in a 'top twenty', a 'best of'. The Observer Food Monthly magazine has put a panel of its best cookery and food experts on the case to find the 50 best cookbooks ever published.

Len Deighton's Action Cook Book makes it into the top 50 at 44, sandwiched in between The Art of Mexican Cooking and Indian Vegetable Cookery. There's a culinary joke in there somewhere ... can't think for the life of me what it is!

Notching up the thrill rating

More good new from Mike Ripley, author and contributor of the 'Shot in the Dark' section of the excellent online Shots Magazine, who is also now running Ostara Publishing’s Top Notch Thrillers imprint. This aims to revive Great British thrillers ‘which do not deserve to be forgotten'. Mike's got a knack for picking out long-forgotten titles, giving them a spit and a polish and putting them back on display for a reading public who otherwise would be none the wiser.

The new titles coming include: a 50th anniversary reissue of a classic manhunt, the story of a World War II conspiracy from one of the biggest selling authors of the 1970s, an award-winning against-the-clock thriller and a Gothic chiller from an author described as the literary link between Dennis Wheatley and James Herbert.

Watcher in the Shadows by Geoffrey Household is the tense, spare story of a manhunt across England’s green and pleasant countryside in 1955 which has been described by one critic “As if Gunfight at the OK Corral had been transposed to St Mary Mead.”

Geoffrey Household, the writer widely considered to be the natural successor to John Buchan, had an unrivalled feel for the English countryside and the primitive bond between hunter and prey. First published fifty years ago in 1960, Watcher in the Shadows is a masterly description of a deadly game of cat-and-mouse which ranks comfortably alongside Household’s legendary Rogue Male.

Black Camelot, first published in 1978, combines a superbly researched wartime conspiracy plot with blistering action and rightly led to the author, Duncan Kyle, being favourably compared to Alistair Maclean and Desmond Bagley.

Under his real name, John Broxholme was a distinguished journalist and Chairman of the Crime Writers’ Association, but it was as Duncan Kyle that he achieved international fame from the moment his first thriller, A Cage of Ice, became an instant bestseller on publication in 1970.

Francis Clifford was one of Britain’s most respected thriller writers from his first well-crafted mysteries in the late 1950s to his untimely death in 1975. His 1974 novel The Grosvenor Square Goodbye was a sensation on publication, won the Crime Writers’ Silver Dagger and was serialised in national newspapers.

The action of the book takes place in less than 24 hours and begins with a crazed lone gunman bringing the West End of London – and the American Embassy – to a violent halt. But nothing, absolutely nothing, in this ingenious ticking-clock thriller can be taken for granted.

The Young Man From Lima, first published in 1968, shows all the trademark touches which made author John Blackburn “today’s master of horror” (Times Literary Supplement).

Blackburn held a unique place among British thriller writers of the 1960s, adding his own taste for the Gothic and the macabre to the conventions of the thriller, the spy story and the detective novel, and always at a ferocious pace. As a writer he is seen as the literary link between the work of Dennis Wheatley and James Herbert and many of his plots were based on scientific or medical phenomenon presaging the work of writers such as Michael Crichton.