Vote early. Vote often!

A reminder to readers of this blog to head over to Mister 8's blog tomorrow for the big bout of the first round of the Mister 8 May Madness contest:

Harry Palmer - hero of Funeral in Berlin, Billion-Dollar Brain and The Ipcress File  vs.  Jack Ryan, Tom Clancy's ex-Navy CIA agent.

It should be a tough fight but, surely, style should overcome brawn.

Vote Palmer!!

Enter now! Mister 8's cool new competition

Blogger extraordinaire and connoisseur of the design aesthetic and the many tropes in espionage storytelling Armstrong Sabian - he of the fantastic Mister 8 blog - is taking a well-deserved rest from his marathon stint blogging about all manner of things concerning Len Deighton's Harry Palmer stories and films. Having reached October, with 37 blogs on The Ipcress File alone (after originally pitching it as a month-long review), Armstrong is metaphorically pitching camp a quarter of the way up Mount Palmer, taking some oxygen, and planning for his next assault.

To keep readers amused he is running a little competition with the chance to win a Trivial Pursuit card which has been signed by Len Deighton himself, along with some other (yet to be advised) prizes. Your task: provide a glimpse of what an adaptation of Horse Under Water might look like. Design a movie poster, a scripted scene, a theme song, an animation, a trailer, a level from a video game, a comic, a selection from a radio play, etc.

Easy. Right? Of course, Horse Under Water is the great 'unfilmed' Harry Palmer/Michael Caine story (though Harry Saltzman had the rights) and was a departure from the other three films in that it was more adventure story rather than classic espionage tale, bringing together heroin smuggling (the 'horse' in the title'), Nazis (always good for a ripping yarn!) and scuba diving (flippers!) And it was set in Salazar's Portugal, not Eastern Europe. Plenty of scope for letting your imagination's run riot.

I'd encourage anyone visiting this blog to check out Armstrong's competition.

Armstrong's a talented chap - he did the excellent illustration of Len Deighton which is on the front page of my Deighton Dossier website.