On the road and on the T

I've found an interesting new philanthropic effort by a company called Out of Print, which produces t-shirts with illustrations from famous book covers now out of print.

Out of Print celebrates the world’s great stories through fashion. Its shirts feature iconic and often out of print book covers; some are classics, some are just curious enough to make great t-shirts, but all are striking works of art. They work closely with artists, authors and publishers to license the content that ends up in our collections. The nice thing is that for each shirt they sell, one book is donated to a community in need through our partner Books For Africa. So, it's not only a great gift but you make a worthy donation to improving literacy and education in Africa.

One of the items they have for sale is a t-shirt with Len Deighton's 1958 cover for André Deutsch of the UK edition of Jack Kerouac's seminal On the Road. As most readers are still not aware, before becoming a writer of note Len Deighton was a respected artist and illustrator, part of the fifties new wave in British design (along with the likes of Peter Blake, designer of The Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band) breaking from convention in design and adopting changes like bolder use of colour, abstract, print and other new modes of illustration.

This famous cover - a top seller in poster form - is redolent of Deighton's style, with the blocks of simple colour, the heavy black outlining and the jerky, sketched nature of the drawing. Deighton went on to produce at least 40 other cover designs for André Deutsch during a period when the publishing world was moving away from simple designs to more complex covers. In 1962, with the publication of Deighton's own The Ipcress File, his designer friend Raymond Hawkey defied publishing convention with the first book cover with the majority of it white; up till then, covers had never been produced in white as booksellers found that they became dirty after being handled by customers.

All-night bomber raid?

Another interesting little follow-on article in The Independent this week following the announcement of the long list for the Lost Man Booker Prize from 1970 (see postings below), for which Bomber is on the long list.

Arts critic Tom Sutcliffe is clearly busy as a bee reading through some of the novels for the Man Booker prize, judging by the second piece in his column, as he has found the pleasure of reading books in one sitting. His contention is that doing so brings something different to the reader's experience of a book.

He seems, as a result, to be anticipating a positive reaction for any of the Lost Man Booker Prize judges reading Bomber in one go (a real challenge - it's 560+ pages):

"I strongly recommend that when they read Len Deighton's terrific novel Bomber – which follows the events of a single wartime raid over the Ruhr – they buckle up on page one and don't unclip the straps until it's all over. It's very good in parts... but I bet it's absolutely terrific as an unbroken whole."

Guardian blogger roots for Deighton 1970 Booker win

Guardian blogger Sam Jordison has written an interesting comment piece on yesterday's story of the Lost Man Booker Prize from 1970, for which a panel of three judges is producing a short list of novels from that year which missed out on the chance of winning the Booker Prize due to changes in the competition.

Jordison writes that Bomber by Deighton is an intriguing case, given the company it's in on the list, and wonders whether the snobbery of the literary elite may play against it, the book being firmly rooted in the thriller/war story genre:

"It's a moot point. What I am sure of is that if they had dismissed Deighton, they would have been wrong. He is a superb writer, long overdue serious recognition from the literary establishment, so Booker can only be applauded for his nomination. I recently re-read his Game, Set and Match trilogy and the novels seemed stronger than ever. The fact that they now tell of a (thankfully) lost era has only sharpened their edge, while the grumpy, messed-up and too-often-messed-with Bernard Sampson is one of the most compelling characters in recent fiction."

Jordison is clearly a fan of Deighton and marks Bomber out as a dark horse for winning this unusual competition; he read it twenty years ago, recalling the sweaty palms of excitement as he turned each page, the sign of a compelling story:

"I'd be tempted to aim the much-overused word masterpiece at it. But don't take it from me. Take it from Kingsley Amis, who rated it one of the top 10 British novels of the 20th century. As the author of Lucky Jim (which might just squeeze into the top five), he ought to know what he's talking about!"

I may follow Jordison's example and put a couple of quid on Deighton to win!

Bomber omission? Deighton up for prize ... 40 years after the event

In 1984 writer Kingsley Amis named Len Deighton's Bomber as one of his 99 books of the twentieth century. 40 years on from its publication, Bomber may be up for another - albeit belated - prize.

Len Deighton is just one of a panoply of great British authors - including Susan Hill, David Lodge, Ruth Rendell and Patrick White  - who are being given the chance to win the Man Booker prize, forty years after the prize should have been awarded. The Lost Man Booker Prize, which has been unveiled today with some good media coverage, is a one-off prize to honour books published in 1970 which missed out on the opportunity to win the Booker Prize.

As the official Man Booker Prize website states: "In 1971, the Booker Prize ceased to be awarded retrospectively and became, as it is today, a prize for the best novel in the year of publication. At the same time, the date on which the award was given moved from April to November. As a result of these changes, there was whole year's gap when a wealth of fiction, published in 1970, fell through the net. These books were simply never considered for the prize."

Three judges - all of whom were born in or around 1970 - has been appointed to select a shortlist of six novels from those books. They are journalist and critic Rachel Cooke, ITN newsreader Katie Derham and poet and novelist Tobias Hill.

Their shortlist will be chosen from a longlist of 22 books which would have been eligible and are still in print and generally available today. Bomber is on that shortlist. 

It would be nice to think that fans of Deighton's wartime fiction could get an opportunity to vote for Bomber if it appears on the shortlist. But that is in the say of Cooke, Derham and Hill...and Deighton's up against some stiff competition. Let's see if they make a wise choice!

The long list in full

Brian Aldiss, The Hand Reared Boy
H.E.Bates, A Little Of What You Fancy?
Nina Bawden, The Birds On The Trees
Melvyn Bragg, A Place In England
Christy Brown, Down All The Days
Len Deighton, Bomber
J.G.Farrell, Troubles
Elaine Feinstein, The Circle
Shirley Hazzard, The Bay Of Noon
Reginald Hill, A Clubbable Woman
Susan Hill, I'm The King Of The Castle
Francis King, A Domestic Animal
Margaret Laurence, The Fire Dwellers
David Lodge, Out Of The Shelter
Iris Murdoch, A Fairly Honourable Defeat
Shiva Naipaul, Fireflies
Patrick O'Brian, Master and Commander
Joe Orton, Head To Toe
Mary Renault, Fire From Heaven
Ruth Rendell, A Guilty Thing Surprised
Muriel Spark, The Driver's Seat
Patrick White, The Vivisector

He's the Mole from the Ministry*

Interesting article up on the BBC website this week about Stephen de Mowbray, former MI:5 agent who left the agency in 1979 after senior officials failed to take seriously his allegations of Soviet infiltration high up in the security service. He has come to the surface, so to speak, following last year's publication of the official history of the Secret Service, Defence of the Realm.

In the book, De Mowbray's claims are the subject of a chapter subtitled "Paranoid tendencies" which recounts his work as well as that of two colleagues, Peter Wright (author of the controversial Spycatcher) and Arthur Martin. The book quotes an MI5 director saying of the group: "Involvement in counter-espionage cases induces in some a form of paranoia." De Mowbray himself is referred to - although not by name - as "the leading SIS (Secret Intelligence Service) conspiracy theorist"; he is connected to the work of 'spycatcher' Peter Wright, whom the government sought to silence in the eighties for his embarrassing revelations about the service. The official line seems to be that in his search for infiltrators de Mowbray became over-zealous and prey to the exaggerations of the agents providing the information.

It's an interesting article which is definitely worth reading; gives another angle to the 'official' perspective offered in Defence of the Realm. Of course, infiltration in the secret service is a familiar subject in spy fiction - I mean, it forms the main plot theme for Len Deighton's Game, Set and Match trilogy, in which the main character Bernard Samson uncovers what he thinks is a Soviet infiltration at the highest echelons of 'the department'.

[* XTC fans may get in title reference to the track from the Dukes of Stratosfear's 25 o'clock album!]

The reissues (8) - Funeral in Berlin

A little later than expected, I've got round to considering the new edition of Funeral in Berlin, my personal favourite of the first four novels of Len Deighton. It is a novel in which the city of Berlin is as much a lead character as the unnamed agent who narrates the story.

The plot of the book should be familiar to most readers. The W.O.O.C.(P). agent - who subsequently became the Harry Palmer character in the film adaptation - is required to travel to a divided Berlin to arrange the defection of a Soviet scientist code-named Semitsa, using the cover of a funeral transfer from East to West. The handover is brokered by Johnny Vulkan, a rogueish member of the Berlin intelligence community and someone who shares a murky, black market past with the protagonist. Despite the unnamed agent's initial scepticism, the deal seems to have the support of Russian security-chief - the lugubrious Colonel Stok - and the high-ups in the Home Office. The fake documentation for Semitsa needs to be precisely specified in the name of Paul Louise Broum. The twist comes in the shape of beautiful but deadly Israeli intelligence agent named Samantha Steel, who is also interested in the content of this fake identity, but for wholly different reasons. Add into the mix agents of the Gehlen network of former Nazis charged with exfiltrating the 'body' into the West and the machinations of the KGB, and the denouement leaves the reader - and the unnamed agent - questioning just who is on the side of whom in the Cold War in Berlin.

The new introduction
This is one of the longer introductions Deighton wrote for the eight new editions relaunched in 2009 and is the most revealing, detailing as it does the relationships he developed with East Berliners which ensured that his storyline - and his portrayal of the city - was as authentic as it could be given the obvious restrictions. Deighton has met an East German film director Kurt Jung-Alsen at the National Theatre and formed a friendship with him (Jung-Alsen died in 1976 and was famous in the East for films such as The Vengeance of Private Pooley, at the showing of which Deighton first met the director). Deighton recounts how, acting as guide for Jung-Alsen during his stay in London, they were having coffee together when news of the building of the Berlin Wall appeared on the news. A stroke of luck for the director, one might have thought, but Deighton recounts that, while no loyal communist, Jung-Alsen returned because all his possessions and his family were in the East, and he had a successful career there.

The following year, the introduction continues, Deighton made a return visit to see Kurt Jung-Alsen in Berlin, who clearly had a priveleged life by DDR standards:

"Kurt more than returned any favour I had done for him in London. He introduced me to many people and made me feel at home. As I said to him, no once buy many times, that of all my friends he was the only one who enjoyed the bourgeois benefits of domestic servants and a valuable art collection. And this was communism? I made a few forays into West Berlin and came back with all manner of desirables for Kurt and his friends. A child's wheelchair, asparagus, and ladies fahion magazines such as Burda was one consignment. The wheelchair was a tight fit in my car and I was grilled about it but Burda magazine was the only thing confiscated that time; I suppose the border guards had fashion-conscious wives."

While in the East, Jung-Alsen made Deighton a production staff member on a film which the former was making about the Spanish Civil War. This necessitated Deighton spending large amounts of time in East German cities like Leipzig and Weimar. In the Elephant Hotel in the latter, Deighton ended up staying in the room favoured by Adolf Hitler on his visits to that city! Clearly what this time in the East gave Deighton as a writer was a golden opportunity to tap into local sources of colour and history, to understand the city and its inhabitants, to feel the impact of the Berliner Luft on the soul. This is all clearly evident in some of the descriptive passages in the novel.

"Berlin was soon a second home to me. I became obsessed by Berlin. I studied its history and collected old photographs of its streets, street life and architecture. I talked to many who had served and many who had suffered under the Third Reich. I still can wander through its streets and alleys and see the past, even when there is little evidence of the past remaining. I learned about its electricity, gas and sewerage systems, much of which could not be divided and had to be shared; a fact kept secret by both sides. The whimsical way in which the town was divided made it even more bizarre. It was a microcosm of a divided world."

Deighton's knowledge of Berlin - and more importantly, Berliners - is part of what makes this novel a success and his plot twists and rich dialogue mean that, 45 years since publication, it still has a real zip and zing about it. Great stuff.

The new design
This is in my opinion the coolest of Arnold Schwartzman's new cover designs. Again the smoking and chessboard motifs are present, emblematic of Cold War Europe. As Schwartzman writes:

"Deighton had likened a spy story to a game of chess, which led me to transpose the pieces on a chessboard with some of the relevant objects specified in each book. Since smoking was so much part of our culture during the Cold War era, I also set-about gathering smoking paraphernalia."

The Cinzano ash tray is referenced in the text, and Schwartzman recounts how in its familiar triangle he saw an analogy with the three Allied powers occupying Berlin, the three cigarettes on the cover point at each other like the loaded barrels of occupiers' guns. The British Woodbines and the American Camel Zippo lighter represent the West; the KGB lighter and identity pass - sourced in Ukraine by Schwartzman - represent the Eastern bloc. The pack of Gauloises cigarettes - featured on all four covers as a semiotic pointer to the protagonist - and red pawn are, crucially, placed on the eastern side of the wall on the map, pointing to the character's frequent trips across the wall. The back of the jacket shows a US Army Berlin District badge, a DDR 5 Mark coin, and cigarette cards referring to key plot developments throughout the novel.

This design, like all the others, represents visually the complexity of Deighton's story construction and also the authenticity which he brings to both the plot but also the details of the dialogue and the character development. That's why, forty-five years or so after publication - and with the Wall now a distant memory - the book still possesses the capacity to enthrall.

The Sun is on the case...eventually

Good to see that Natasha Harding, the book editor of the The Sun newspaper, the UK's top tabloid, has finally caught up with the big Deighton news of 2009, namely the reissuing by Harper Collins of Deighton's first four spy novels plus four other of his best-selling novels.

In a feature entitled Cold War writer who's still red hot - in the Friday 15 January edition of The Sun, in its Something for the Weekend section  - one of her reviewers reflects on the reissued books and in particular the lead character of the first four novels, "Deighton's chippy spy...and under-paid, under-appreciated anti-hero." The films are classics, the reviewer writes, but the books are even better and have been reissued by Harper Collins (only seven months behind the news curve, but qudos to The Sun for picking up the story - perhaps the press release slipped down the side of the editor's desk!).

The review is actually very complimentary of all the eight reissued novels, in particular the Harry Palmer quartet, and does well in identifying the characteristics that make a Deighton novel what it is, without necessarily adding anything new in terms of textual analysis:

"Deighton reinvented the spy novel in the sixties, giving it a rough, working-class edge. The tough, cynical humour makes his books closer to the American private eye novel than the world of 007.


...Deighton's a master of narrative and mood and his painstaking research means everything feels 100 per cent authentic. It's those qualities that make his non-Palmer novels a must-read too... The thing about Deighton is, he always seem to know something we don't."

The last line a good summation of the narrative hook that has made Deighton a global best-selling writer. However, the review is slightly spoiled by the art desk using the front cover of the 1995 HC edition of The Ipcress File rather than featuring the new cover with the great new design by Arnold Schwartzman.

This review does not seem to be up on The Sun's website yet, however.

Brian Duffy documentary on BBC Four

Just been watching a very interesting documentary on BBC Four tonight about the photographer Brian Duffy, entitled The Man Who Shot The 60s.

Duffy was one of the figures of swinging sixties London, a fashion photographer who along with David Bailey and Terence Donovan was one of the "black trinity" of photographers who helped make London and Soho in particular the centre of the fashion and arts worlds. Duffy worked for Nova, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and The Sunday Times. Famously, in the seventies Duffy destroyed all his negatives.

Duffy was an art school friend of Len Deighton and took a number of publicity shots of him as he became famous following the publication of The Ipcress File. They both shared a connection with photography, Deighton having learned photography as part of his work in RAF intelligence during National Service. The photo on this blog post is from a Life article 'Hot Spy Writer on the Lamb' from 1966, and shows Duffy with Deighton explaining his approach to taking shots for a fashion shoot. Writers dropping in on film shoots for glossy magazines sort of sums up Soho in the sixties, really.

Duffy and Deighton's connection extended further into showbusiness when, as Duffy recounts on the documentary, he and David Bailey went to see Oh! What a Lovely War at the theatre in London. Duffy was overcome by the play - "I was in tears" he says - and decided that they should make it into a film. As I've covered on the Deighton Dossier website, Duffy and Deighton set up the Accord Production company, which purchased the rights to the film and recruited Richard Attenborough to act as director. However, the production was pretty difficult by all accounts and Bailey recalls how, quite shrewdly, he sold his share in the production to Deighton for £49 for an easier life. The film was Attenborough's first directing role and, while he went on to great fame and worldwide attention, he proved a handful for the fledgeling producers. Duffy refers to him in the documentary as "unctious"! The shooting of the film was traumatic and stressful, leading Deighton to take his name of the production credits, though Duffy kept his credit. The film was an artistic success.

Deighton, Duffy and Attenborough had first worked together on the film adaptation of Only When I Larf, on which Duffy had a production credit. What comes across clearly in this documentary however is that on their second time working together, Attenborough was already showing signs of being an awful 'luvvie' and evidently put Duffy right off further adventures in film!

Brian Duffy recently had a major retrospective exhibition of his works in London, which was covered on his blog. He certainly created some of the sixties' most iconic images .

The programme will be rebroadcast a number of times over the week on BBC Four and should be available on iPlayer on the web for the next week. A real slice of sixties' London to watch out for.

Tales of Dutch derring do

With Len Deighton in semi-retirement and off the radar screens of the media and increasing numbers of book readers - sadly -  for fans of his writing there's precious little new out there to read and enjoy. In recent years, one of the ways Deighton has contributed by way of the literary world is through providing forwards to a number of books on topics close to his heart: military history. Over time, I've been hunting down more and more of these.

One such example I found over the Christmas period is In Pursuit of Life by dutchman Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema, of whom I knew nothing until I picked up the first edition of this, his autobiography. I'm glad I did - he is evidently one of those characters from the wartime period (who sadly died in 2007) who combined a numerous careers and lives in one lifetime and undertook feats of courage and audacity which nowadays are unthinkable. He also personifies the bravery and cunning of the wartime military agents (particularly from the occupied countries) who risked everything to free Europe from tyranny of both kinds.

In many ways his story brings to mind to that of Merlin Minshall, a friend of Deighton's whose biography Guilt-Edged was published in the seventies and to which Deighton also provided the forward. Minshall was spy, adventurer, businessman, bon viveur, cad, Englishman, and he had a great story to tell. (A former colleague of Ian Fleming's in naval intelligence, Minshall was often cited as an inspiration for the James Bond character).

Hazelhoff too has some story to convey. Born in 1917 in Dutch colonial Java, during the second World War he was a soldier and freedom fighter who, after fighting in the Russo-Finnish war in the winter of 1939, found himself in London with the Dutch elite. In London, Hazelhoff and the General François van 't Sant, director of the Dutch CID (Central Intelligence Service) and Col. Euan Rabagliatti (of the UK's Secret Intelligence Service) set up a secret agent group known as The Mews, after Chester Square Mews where they lived in London. This group sought to connect with the Dutch resistance and prepare the ground for Dutch liberation; but MI6's networks in the Netherlands were pretty much broken by the Nazis and Hazelhoff escaped back to England. Later in the war he served with the RAF's elite Pathfinder Force and received the Dutch equivalent of the Victoria Cross before becoming an aide to Queen Wilhelmina and flying her back into liberated Holland.

His adventures in occupied Holland were subsequently filmed by Dutch film director Paul Verhoeven (who recently made the excellent Black Book). He turned Hazelhoff's war memoirs Soldaat van Oranje into the film Soldier of Orange, which starred Rutger Hauer as the character based on Hazelhoff and follows closely the exploits of The Mews. This is a title I've now added to my list of 'must see films'. It was, apparently, voted the second best Dutch film of all time.

The life he'd let up to that point achieved more than most men achieve but through reading his story it's clear that this was just the prelude to more achievement and success for Hazelhoff. Moving to the US after the war he was a writer and co-creator of NBC's Tonight show; in the fifties he became a director of Radio Free Europe working with the CIA. He was even at one point a tramp on the streets of New York!

Hazelhoff's writing is excellent, his story telling precise and rich in form and colour. He is a fascinating character, part of a breed of gentleman spy and adventurer for whom risk, danger and variety were the ingredients of a fulfilled life.

In his foreword to the book, Deighton highlights the qualities of a man who had lived "a hundred lives":

"Nothing stops him, whether it's a ticking bureaucrat or a ticking time-bomb. Erik the amateur pilot flying countless missions over wartime Germany or the short-sighted applicant surviving countless physical examinations in order to join the RAF's most élite Pathfinder Force. Equally gripping is Erik's postwar encounter with an American employment agency, and his misadventures in the jungles of Hollywood. But he always emerges apparently unscathed: like a plastic duck plunging over Niagara falls he surfaces and darts away to new waters.


"For if there is something enduring about him, it's the cheerful way in which he faces every trial. And his optimism is well founded. When someone asks him for a light it is likely to be a billionaire, when he shelters from bombs under a table he will meet a member of the royal family there. Penniless in Manhattan; hold on, here comes a school friend. There's no point in resenting his staggering good luck, it's just the way he is."

This book was a real find and adds another layer to my knowledge of the wartime intelligence fight in Europe.

Writers on war

Back in the 1960s, the Vietnam War was the Cold War equivalent of today's conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan: American-led, hugely-divisive, expensive (in terms of money and lives on both sides), multi-national and contextualised - certainly on the American's side - as part of a wider geopolitical struggle. In the case of Vietnam, this was the effort to prevent the domino effect of south east Asian states toppling to communist rule. Vietnam was a major topic of debate and discussion by the elites and the wider public in the sixties, but one conducted in an era of communications before the Internet when debate was dominated by the printed page. It was a polarising conflict.

I recently came across a fascinating snapshot of contemporary opinion on Vietnam in a book entitled Authors Take Sides on Vietnam, edited in 1967 by US literary editors Cecil Woolf and John Bagguley. Prompted by the example of W H Auden in 1937 -  who invited one hundred and fifty British and American authors to say whether they were for or against the Republican government in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, and published the results in a pamphlet Authors Takes Sides on the Spanish War - these two writers repeated the process with Vietnam, seeking opinion and viewpoints from many of the leading literary figures of the day. Each contributor was asked two simple questions:"Are you for, or against the intervention of the United States in Vietnam?" and "How, in your opinion, should the conflict in Vietnam be resolved?"

Len Deighton is one of those who gave his opinion in this book. His entry is reproduced below:

"The US intervention in Vietnam was neither benign nor clever. The present situation is morally wrong as well as exceedingly dangerous, but it would be a mistake to imagine that there is now any lasting solution that would be quick or easy, or one that can be described in a few words. There are men of bad will on both sides who wish the war to continue and public statements by individuals or groups often cynically utilised by such men. Antiwar sentiments of an oversimplified, ingenuous type can have the reverse effect of the one intended."

But Deighton's is only one of more than a hundred and fifty other voices from the cultural voices of the 'sixties, many of which are far more black and white in their expressions of support or disdain for the conflict. There are some fascinating contributions in the book from famous western writers: some tremendously insightful, some incredibly näive and misguided.

Graham Greene, for example, opposed the war and dismissed the link to an international communist threat: "The excuse of containing communism assumes that communism everywhere is evil. Anyone with any experience of Vietnam knows this is not the case."

Philosopher Bertrand Russell took a firmer stand, his comments echoing many of the sterner critics of George W Bush's foreign policy: "I regard the policy makers in Washington who preside over both the aggression and the atrocity to be war criminals, in the precise send laid down at the Nuremburg trials."

Daphne du Maurier, on the other hand, offered up a refreshingly straightforward and no nonsense response, as a novelist, to the realities of Cold War geo-politics: "Although I am in principle against the intervention of the United States or any other power in the war in Vietnam, I do not feel I am sufficiently well-informed on the subject to make a statement." (If only some of today's celebrity commentators were so self-aware!)

Poet Kathleen Raine too was equivocal: "I think America must hold the frontiers against communism, and Vietnam is at present the scene of a conflict which might become a great deal worse if America were to withdraw."

Fast forward to today. Replace Vietnam with Afghanistan and it could be argued that this range of assessment is broadly similar to what one would find today. Afghanistan has become a proxy for a wider political debate - particularly in the US - around the idea of a new cultural conflict between West and East, but this time the East is the East of Islam. Islam has replaced communism in much of the media discourse in the US as the archetypal 'other', the external threat to the status quo. But unlike the Cold War threat from communism, the 11 September attacks in 2001 and others since showed the potential for a 'hot' war of low-level conflict close to home. While al Qaeda may be seeking the destruction of the west, in the terminology of Cold War systems analysis its battle with the West is assymetric in the extreme.

The Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts and the fight against the indicated threat from global terrorism too have attracted comment from writers, much like in the above book. Martin Amis, for example, in his book The Second Plane tackled the nihilism of the Islamist death cult and the threat facing America; Christopher Hitchens, while no friend of George W Bush, in the last decade became a vociferous and brilliantly incisive polemicist on the new global war, defending the principle behind the toppling of Saddam Hussein and taking issue with the cultural relativists who seem immune to the realities of life under the middle ages sensibility of the Taliban or the experiences of ordinary Iraqis under Saddam. Hollywood actors too like Sean Penn and Martin Sheen have been vocal opponents in the press and on TV of America's position.

What has changed is that the Internet has made volumes like Authors Take Sides on Vietnam largely superfluous in the modern age. Now, through global media, opinions are instantly communicated and with the explosion of blogging and social networking, everyone seems to want to express that opinion. Perhaps Facebook or Twitter is now the modern equivalent of the anti-war pamphlet? Opposition to the war can be expressed directly, instantly; it does not require an editor to collate and present it in book form months later. Commentary has been democratised. Whether this has improved the quality of the discussion within the political elites or among the cognoscenti, however, is debatable.

Did these interjections in the sixties from the artistic elite make any different to the course of events? Difficult to say, but clearly those who saw their job as making sense of and portraying the world around us - in fiction or non-fiction form - clearly felt the urge to contribute to the wider public debate. That is still valid now.

As an interesting postscript to this story, Deighton did in the 'sixties contemplate writing a spy thriller novel around the Vietnam theme (aside from Berlin, Vietnam was the other obvious totem of Cold War tensions in the sixties and seventies). However, the closest he got was a short story called 'First Base' in his collection of 12 short stories based around military themes, Declarations of War. The story follows two solders, Dutch and Des, who discover an abandoned US air base in the Vietnamese jungle full of stores meant for the conflict. After crashing their track on the base, Dutch is seriously injured, and the two men must wait in the base for what they hope will be their eventual rescue. It is fascinating to contemplate what a Deighton Vietnam novel would have turned out like - Harry Palmer in the jungle, or something more akin to Mamista?

The inevitable end of year 'top ten' list

In today's Guardian food writer Nigel Slater has picked his top ten food books of the year.

In amongst them is Harper Collins' reissue of Len Deighton's Action Cook Book, the only cookery book any self-respecting chap needs to get him through life!

Update

A journalist on The Bournemouth Echo also thinks that the reissue of the Action Cook Book is one of the coolest cookbooks out there.

The reissues (7) - Billion-Dollar Brain; soundtrack redux

First published in 1966 by Jonathan Cape, Billion-Dollar Brain was Len Deighton's fourth novel in the 'secret file' series featuring the unnamed spy, who would later become famous as Michael Caine's Harry Palmer. Set largely in the Baltic, Palmer - his career seemingly on the skids - is given a lifeline with a job by the mysterious Midwinter, whose computer 'Brain' apparently holds the secret to defeating communism. What follows is a lesson in the lengths to ideology and money can lead a man.


The new introduction
Readers will find some interesting new observations from Deighton in this new edition, with most anecdotes new rather than reproductions of stories from the jubilee editions (see last blog on the reissues). With this fourth novel, Deighton went far behind the iron curtain both thematically and in reality. The lengths to which Deighton legendarily went to research his books and get right the details which authenticate his narratives are recounted here, as he recalls the troubles he took to get to visit Riga in Latvia, where much of the action takes place. Back in the sixties, travel to the East was heavily controlled and outside the purview of most westerners. Deighton's impressions of Soviet Latvia seem now, in the twenty-first century, chillingly evocative of a recent history many of us have forgotten. Back in the sixties, it was all too real:

"This satellite of the Soviet Union, deep behind the iron curtain, and in a region the Russians considered strategically vital, was astonishing. The wartime England in which I'd grown up was a dismal and deprived place but visiting Riga at that time was like a giant step back in time. The people in wartime England had never lost their underlying optimism that one day the war would be won, and good times restored. But the city of Riga was a quite different environment; a large prison camp with an occupying Russian army arresting anyone who smiled." During his visits Deighton writes how he was accompanied at all times by an interpreter/guide and was closely watched until it was determined he was not a threat to the soviets!

Deighton recounts how with this book he was settling into his stride as an author and carving out his own writing and characterisation techniques which would pay dividends through the rest of his career, but which ran up against literary norms of the time. "This was my fourth book and I needed to keep a close watch on the characters, some of whom had appeared in other books and might take part in future ones. Writing has always been hard work for me but I was beginning to enjoy the fun that made the hard work worthwhile. I am not a natural writer; I am a natural reviewer and rewriter and rewriter. Editors and publishers ... pressed me to conform to the orthodox methods of 'popular fiction'. For instance, they were united in expecting a full description of each character at the first entrance. I resisted all this fiercely."

Deighton made a decision to re-introduce and build up the character of Harvey Newbegin, who had made a brief appearance in Funeral in Berlin, as a counterpoint to the unnamed spy character, in the manner that Conan Doyle's Watson provided a story telling device for the Sherlock Holmes character (Deighton was a Holmes fan), a character who can keep the plot moving along through dialogue and retelling, and draw out new aspects of the lead character. Dawlish was a London man, not the sort of character who would share adventures with the lead character deep in Soviet Russia; for this, Deighton needed someone more adventurous, a more rogueish and mysterious figure. "But few readers will hold hands with Harvey in the way that they would with Doyle's Watson or my Dawlish. So who was there to like? The reader had only the hero. But as it turned out, I needn't have worried. Despite his many faults the reader like the hero."

Overall, this is one of the more interesting new introductions by Deighton. Though only five pages long, with the scarcity of previous articles and biographical by and about Deighton in the last few years, it's interesting to find some new perspectives you haven't read before.


The new design

In the sixties, Deighton's publishers had sent to booksellers an envelope containing a letter and various bits of ephemera from Finland and Riga which were symbolic of some of the key locations and scenes in the book, as part of the marketing push. Included in this envelope (see picture) was a facsimile of a notebook by Deighton, in which he records some of the details and images which would make the narrative such a compelling read.

Arnold Schwartzman's theme of the chessboard decorated with associated ephemeral items associated with the characters brings that to mind. Again, he's created another iconic front cover, for which he provides some interesting notes in this edition. Colonel Stok is a significant character in this novel again, at the heart of Soviet efforts to defend communism from General Midwinter, and elements of the front cover point to his character: "KGB officer Colonel Alexeyevitch Stok's relish for caviar is matched only by his scholarly passion for the works of Robert Burns. A portrait of the poet sits beside a pack of Russian cigarettes illustrated with a map of the Soviet Union. The pack provides a haven for the "Red" pawn." The bronze bust of Lenin rests on a box of computer punch-cards and a cen

The (new) soundtrack

Less immediately catchy than the John Barry soundtrack to The Ipcress File with its haunting zither theme, Richard Rodney Bennett's rousing score to Ken Russell's adaptation of Billion Dollar Brain certainly has much to commend it. Label Kritzerland has just released a 1000-copy limited edition of the soundtrack and it's well worth a listen.

Bennett uses a full orchestra, with up to three pianos and a lot of brass. This strident tone comes across well with the theme for the scenes in the church and in the opening title sequence around King's Cross when 'Harry Palmer' walks to his office above a shop and receives the telephone message from the computer, offering a new freelance intelligence job.

Interestingly, the tracks on the album are out of sequence with the associated scenes in the film, but it doesn't detract from an album that does capture the nordic iciness and the insanity of General Midwinter's headlong rush to bring down communism in the Baltic States. It is also the only album I know of which uses an instrument called an Ondes Martenot, a keyboard instrument rather like a Theremin; this gives the wispy refrain associated with Anya, the Soviet agent who tracks Harry Palmer to Helsinki, and the trips they make by skidoo to the island house where Palmer meets old friend Harvey Newbegin.

A new perspective on Fleming and Deighton

007 Magazine's latest edition, now in its thirtieth year, has in its latest edition a very interesting article - accompanied by some great press photos taken for the Daily Express - of the time when Len Deighton, creator of 'Harry Palmer' and Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, met over lunch.

In 1963, when The Ipcress File was riding high in the sales charts - Fleming had chosen it as one of his books of the year - Deighton was very much the arriviste in the spy fiction world. Peter Evans of the Daily Express brought the two authors together over lunch in The White Tower restaurant on Charlotte Street (together with designer Raymond Hawkey, though he is rarely mentioned in the subsequent article). This is quite a famous interview, which appeared in For Bond Lovers Only in 1965, along with the images reproduced in the magazine.

The magazine's editors have got quite a coup by getting Len Deighton to write a few words of recollection about this interview. Fans of both Deighton and Bond will be fascinated to read the new detail about this auspicious meeting. Sample quote from Deighton's new contribution:

"He [Fleming] was fussy about his food and wine and he knew I was writing about food in The Observer newspaper. I seem to remember we talked a lot about the menu before ordering the meal."

The magazine retails at £9.99 online. Well worth a look.

The André Deutsch archive

André Deutsch was one of the most familiar names in British publishing until its independent status was lost when it became part of the Carlton Imprint. Started by Hungarian emigré Deutsch in 1952, the company went on to publish works by some of the most seminal writers of the second half of the twentieth century, writers like Jack Kerouac, Margaret Attwood and Norman Mailer.

Len Deighton, recent graduate of St Martin's School of Art and the Royal Academy, was one of Deutsch's go-to designers for both book covers (Deighton famously designed the front cover for the UK first edition of Jack Kerouac's On the Road) and other marketing work for the company between 1956 and 1963, after which he turned full time to writing.

Much of his design work is still unknown and rarely seen. A recent visit to the UK André Deutsch archive at Oxford Brookes University led me to uncover the full range of covers which Deighton designed for the André Deutsch book catalogues, all of which demonstrate his distinctive use of black outlining and contrasting colour.

A selection of them is reproduced below:

The reissues (6) - Horse Under Water

I've been a bit tardy in following up on my plans to review the next four of the new reissues by Harper Collins of Len Deighton's first four novels. So, to rectify that, here's the spec on the new edition of his second ever novel, Horse Under Water, the only one of the Harry Palmer novels not filmed (more's the pity).

The new introduction
The story is, unlike The Ipcress File which precedes it, a less familiar part of the popular culture of the sixties thanks mostly to the aforementioned lack of a film adaptation (as a result of the lacklustre reception to the - in my opinion rather good actually - Ken Russell film of Billion Dollar Brain). Nevertheless, Deighton repeats the successful formula of the 'Harry Palmer' series in this book, which transports our working class, sardonic, wise-cracking un-named agent to the shores of Salazar's Portugal, where he finds a heady cocktail of hard drugs, money and neo-Nazis.

In his new introduction, much is - in fact - well, not new. More....recycled. Many of the anecdotes are familiar to those who have the 25th anniversary editions, but re-told and re-worded. Deighton in his publicity and his retelling of his career is wont to repeat old favourites, shall we say. Perhaps, in retirement, one can forgive the old man the chance to embellish, rather than start from scratch!

Deighton recalls how his decision to use a sunken submarine as a central motif sprang from his lifelong love of military machinery (about which he has written extensively). So, here he re-tells the tale of his time spent in the Imperial War Museum looking at newly released German maritime records on advances in undersea warfare, and spending so much time with them he ended up cataloguing them. He goes on: "At the time, I had no idea that the notes I made would be used for anything other than my interest in history. It was during my stay in Portugal [on holiday], when I was asking local people about German activity there during the war, that I recalled all that underwater material. The book's plot fell into place and I started writing."

In choosing to use again the unnamed character from his first novel, Deighton recalls that he recognised then the advantages that could bring him as an author. Again, a subject touched upon in his previous commentary on the book, but here with some subtle changes: "I had not named the hero of The Ipcress File. A Canadian book-reviewer said it was symbolic and pretentious but in fact it was indecision. Now, writing a second book, I found it an advantage to have an anonymous hero. He might be the same man; or maybe not. I was able to make minor changes to him and his background. The changes had to be minor ones for the W.O.O.C.(P). office was still in Charlotte Street and Dawlish was still the hero's 'chief'. There were very few modifications but I realised that (although Deighton is a Yorkshire name, and I had lived briefly in the city of York) identifying him as a northerner would make demands on my knowledge that I could not sustain. It would be more sensible to give him a background closer to my own." There are, certainly, in a thorough reading of the character, autobiographical elements of Deighton which come through.

Finally, he writes about his - now legendary - approach to researching the subjects of his novels and getting as much practical as well as historical knowledge under his belt: "Having no underwater skills, knowledge or experience, I went to the Royal Navy and asked for help. Everyone at the Admiralty was one hundred per cent helpful. They sent me to the Royal Navy's diving school and this experience is described here more or less as it happened. It was only when I was half-way through the course, and up to my neck in water on the ladder of the diving tank, that I confessed I could not swim. They were shocked and apprehensive about it on my behalf, but as I said: 'What is the point of wearing all this scuba gear if you can manage without it?'"

The design
Continuing his chessboard theme set with the first novel in this series, Arnold Schwartzman OBE RDI again presents a fascinating smorgasbord of ephemeral items, each of which points to a story motif. So, on the front cover the readers finds a cornucopia of clues which whet the appetite. A tin of sardines (empty) represents the Portuguese coast, as does a cigarette card of said sardine. But, as Schwartzman notes: "Finding a contemporary, key-opened Portuguese sardine tin became virtually impossible. Discovering the illustration of a sardine on a cigarette card and crested souvenir spoon form Lisbon became much easier, thanks to eBay!"

As he has told me in correspondence about these designs, much of his time was indeed spent sourcing numerous items from around the world, in his search for authentic items which would capture the sixties feel he wanted in the design. The 1960s Times newspaper, open at the crossword, links to the fact that the protagonist is regularly completing such a puzzle; indeed, in the sixties, first editions of the book came with a laid-in crossword puzzle which readers could solve based on clues in the book.

As with the four other books in this reissue series, the spine image is of a postage stamp which picks out a core theme in the book. On this cover, it is a U-Boat. On the back, there is another nautical clue. As Schwartzman explains: "The group of cigarette cards on the back of the cover spells out in semaphore K.U.Z.I.G. and Y. The nautical interpretation of these letters is referred to in the book as 'Permission granted to lay alongside.'"

A fantastic cover worthy of sitting alongside the original Ray Hawkey cover from the sixties, I think. Schwartzman put a significant amount of work into this commission from Deighton, and it works in making the novel appear contemporary to the average book browser, even though the story is now over forty years old.