Who can you believe in the world of spy fiction?

Christine Granville

I - and a number of other commentators - have read with interest a story being reported by Guy Walters in this week's Daily Telegraph about a new book on the origins of the James Bond story by Claire Mulley.

This book, cunningly titled The Spy Who Loved (do you see what the publishers did there?) is pitched as a history of espionage during wartime focusing on the life of agent Christine Granville - supposedly, the inspiration for the Vesper Lynd character.  As Walters writes, it has "that link with James Bond, with the implied licence to print money."

But, he writes, it’s all too good to be true. Much of what Mulley has written is as transparently wrong as a badly forged passport - and we owe the discovery of these facts in part to friend of this blog and "heir to Deighton" (c) Jeremy Duns, who has written a very long essay on the murky history of previous attempts to fabricate new wrinkles in the long literary history of Ian Fleming and the character of James Bond, and develop new theories about the origins of key characters, in particular the persistent link of Christine Granville with Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale.

Like an agent after two days of solid interrogation, Mulley's cover story it would appear is starting to unravel, and questions are now being raised about the publication of the book.

A tale about espionage, with duplicity, fabrication and cover-ups? There's a book in there somewhere.

Rest assured, on the Deighton Dossier, you'll only ever find fact about fiction, not fictional facts.

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).

New blog from Jeremy Duns

Spy fiction writer Jeremy Duns - author of last year's great Free Agent, which is now out in paperback and which I read as soon as it came out - has started a new blog!

It's called The Debrief (very good title, Jeremy!) and he refers to it as his "online playground". It has an interesting mix of writing about his books, links to stories about other fellow thriller writers, and the wider world of espionage and spy and thriller fiction.

It's well worth checking out. As Jeremy's linked to my blog, the only decent thing is for me to link back to Jeremy's blog. I'd encourage readers of this blog to check it out.

The Deighton File on Radio 4 again

Today on BBC Radio 4 The Deighton File - the 30 minutes radio documentary about the life and work of Len Deighton first broadcast in May 2009 - was re-broadcast. It will be available for another week to listen to on iPlayer. It's worth listening to to hear some new angles on familiar stories and understand how Deighton developed some of his key characters.

This was an excellent piece of storytelling by the producer Patrick Humphries, who as well as interviewing Deighton - his first broadcast interview for a few years - talks to Edward Milward-Oliver, novelist Jeremy Duns and Sir Max Hastings among others about the significance of Deighton's works and their impact on popular culture.

Heirs to Deighton? (2) - Rod Brammer

With each generation there come onto the scene writers in any genre of fiction who seek to mark out their own literary literary, take the genre down fresh pathways and give the reader something new to enjoy. But inevitably - and most would admit this - their writing is also influenced to a lesser or greater degree by the writers they themselves have read, devoured and been inspired by.

The publishing industry - recognising the marketing value of making links back to established icons of a genre - will often refer to an author as "the new XX" in their blurb. Clearly, most new writers want to be the new themselves but it's flattering and a great marketing boost to be compared to one of the acknowledged masters of a genre.

In the case of Len Deighton - now enjoying semi-retirement, and why not! - the question for fans of his books and the spy fiction genre more generally is: where do we turn for the same sort of thrill. Who can we consider an "heir to Deighton"? We already know that new writer Jeremy Duns - he of the excellent Free Agent novel published earlier this year - has been compared to Deighton; indeed, such a fan is he of Len's work that Jeremy contributed to the Deighton 80th birthday documentary on Radio 4.

I've been made aware of another contender to this crown. Elliott and Thompson publishers have alerted me to Rod Brammer, whose second novel Dismissed Dead was published just recently. A former naval intelligence officer, Rod has written a Cold War spy thriller set in East Berlin (that's already a plus), Russia and the UK. Brammer follows in the long line of Le Carré and Maugham and other intelligence operatives who have used their inside knowledge to create storylines that bristle with authenticity.

Brammer's agent hero, Keith Finlay (who featured in Brammer's first novel A Flag on the Abbey, a book I haven't enjoyed yet) is caught up in the world of espionage with a mission to meet a German professor who will help him smuggle a secret bullet prototype out of Berlin (echoes of Funeral in Berlin or Bullet to Beijing?). Captured by the Russians and subjected to brutal interrogration, and presumed dead by those back home, Finlay faces his toughest challenge yet.

Sounds fascinating. A review copy of the book is on the way and I aim to have a review of it up here on the Deighton Dossier blog. It already sounds to have all the ingredients of a great Cold War thriller and I'm sure Brammer's intelligence background will add tonnes of authenticity.

His publishers, in their marketing spiel, say this of Brammer: "Thrilling and suspenseful throughout, Dismissed Dead will appeal to lovers of the work of John Le Carré, Len Deighton and those intrigued by the mysterious world of Cold War espionage."

If anyone's read the book already and has thoughts on it - and how well it compares to Deighton's and Le Carré's novels - do leave comments on the blog. I'll share my thoughts when I've got through the book. Be interesting to hear anyone's opinion on what differentiates the work of the spy-turned-writer from that of the regular fiction novelist.

Spy Fiction and Spy Fact - the connections

Interesting article in The Times from May 2009 by friend of this blog Jeremy Duns, who has re-tweeted about it (?!). He demonstrates that the creation of the MI-5 service in the UK - about which I'm reading currently in the excellent Defence of the Realm book - was in part influenced by the mania before and during the First World War for spy fiction, particularly stories about the threat of German espionage. Colonel James Edmonds was friends with William Le Queux, a writer who'd written a novel about the existence of German spy rings in the UK in a novel called The Spies of the Kaiser.

Duns goes on to recount how the path of spy fiction's growth mirrored closely the real-life development of the secret service during the thirties, when Somerset Maugham (himself an agent) and Eric Ambler set the scene for the genre to develop further as a form of fiction. Bringing his review into the sixties, Duns writes about the twist in the genre, with the uncovering of the Cambridge spy ring leading to a trend for stories about 'moles' by Deighton and others in the sixties and seventies. Despite the ending of the Cold War leading to the 'retirement' of some spy fiction authors, Duns notes a renaissance in the genre with in particular the Bourne films and the books of both Alan Furst and, of course, his good self, with the great reception for his Free Agent book.

An excellent article by Jeremy. Hat-tip to him, as the custom is nowadays (though few bloggers, in my experience, actually wear hats).

Len Deighton news round-up

Jeremy Duns - whose debut novel Free Agent I'm reading at the moment - has an article in The Sunday Times today in which he recounts how spy fiction and the harsh reality of espionage and the Cold War have often been more closely connected that you might think. He highlights for example that Somerset Maugham had previously worked for British Intelligence. He makes a brief reference to writers like Deighton, Fleming and Le Carré.

In other news, the re-issuing of the Action Cook Book has received a lot of good write-ups...particularly from food writers, many of whom recall just what a phenomenon this book was when it came out in the sixties. In Saturday's Daily Mail there is a story by Tom Parker-Bowles in which he looks back at how Deighton combined changing the course of spy fiction with being a trained chef and a renowned gourmand in sixties SoHo. He provides comments from fellow food critics:

"'I love the book because of its brilliant design and because of all those classic recipes that I still adore,’ says Simon Hopkinson, author of another classic, Roast Chicken And Other Stories.
‘They’ll never go out of fashion.’

Food writer and broadcaster Matthew Fort agrees. ‘It arrived like a breath of fresh air, full of wit and humour and decent recipes. And it demystified cookery, too, with those wonderful strips, and transformed the life of the Sixties bachelor. The book was decades ahead of its time.’"

For most people, Len Deighton is still associated just with the spy novels, and 'Harry Palmer' in particular. The masterstroke of re-issuing first the Action Cook Book before the subsequent re-issuing of his best spy novels is that it reminds the book-buying public of how Deighton, in the sixties certainly, was justifiably renowned in two separate spheres of achievement.