Mister 8

Through July, or at least until I run out of things about which to talk, we’ll be looking at the Harry Palmer series of novels (in which the character doesn’t actually have a name), their author — Len Deighton, the films based on them, the star of those films — Michael Caine, and the television movies that followed. I will be re-reading the whole series of novels, re-watching the films, and giving my thoughts on all I encounter. I’ll inevitably be drawing heavily on the collection of Kees Stam, author of The Harry Palmer Movie Site, and Rob Mallows, creator of the Deighton Dossier, and other odds and ends that I’ve turned up over the years.

Len Deighton: though interviews are not his style, he advises other authors to do publicity.
From Publishers Weekly, July 12, 1993
By Lisa See Kendall

Though most authors would give their eyeteeth for publicity, Len Deighton, best known for his British espionage thrillers beginning with The IPCRESS File, hasn’t granted an interview in at least 10 years. The publicist at HarperCollins, who is trying to promote Deighton’s new book, Violent Ward (Fiction Forecasts, June 21), has never spoken to the author, doesn’t know where he lives, doesn’t know if he’s married or if he has children. To set up an interview during Deighton’s visit to Los Angeles, PW calls the publicist, who faxes the agent, Jonathan Clowes, in London, who, one assumes, contacts the author. After a time and place are agreed upon–a hotel coffee shop, with the reservation under PW’s name–the whole communication process works in reverse. Two days before the interview, as Los Angeles waits nervously for a verdict on the Rodney King beating, Deighton’s wife (so he has a wife!) calls to verify. She leaves a number–not her own, mind you, but that of a go-between–and an alternate plan is formulated in case the verdict comes in and the city erupts once again in violence. Either Len Deighton is a spy–which book jacket photos of him in a trenchcoat certainly suggest–or he’s doing a superb job imitating the suspicion, intrigue and mystery of a clandestine agent.

Contrary to every expectation, Deighton turns out to be an affable, outgoing man. Within minutes, he’s describing his home–a 250-year-old house perched on rocks above the sea in Portugal; his wife, a Dutch woman who’s fluent in eight languages; and his two sons, who have lived and attended school in 10 countries in the last 15 years. A clever disguise for a clever espionage agent? Hardly. Just consider the man’s work habits. There simply couldn’t be enough time in the day to write as prolifically as he does and still do his bit for the British Empire.

Since 1962, Deighton has published 36 or so books: 23 novels, guidebooks to London, three cookbooks (including French Cooking in 50 Lessons– which grew out of his cooking comic strip for the London Observer–and The Action Cookbook), nonfiction works (Fighter: The True Story of the Battle of Britain, Airshipwreck and Blitzkrieg: From the Rise of Hitler to the Fall of Dunkirk), and technical treatises on the postal system of Germany in 1928 and the flying post office of the Graf Zeppelin. He’s been published in this country by a veritable smorgasbord of houses: Simon & Schuster, Putnam, Harper & Row, Mysterious Press, Atheneum, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich and Knopf.

In 1989, after Spy Line was issued, and after his editor Bob Gottlieb left Knopf for the New Yorker, Deighton moved to HarperCollins, where he received what was described at the time as a $10 million deal for four books: Spy Sinker (the last in the Bernard Samson series), MAMista (a tale of revolution and espionage set in a South American jungle), City of Gold (set in WW II Egypt), and now Violent Ward (which takes place during last year’s Los Angeles riots). To support Deighton’s latest effort, HarperCollins has planned a $100,000 marketing campaign and is sending Deighton on a five-city tour.

The author’s daily routine is anything but suspenserut. By 9:00 a.m. every day he is at work on his word processor. At 1:00, his wife serves his lunch and he listens to the news on the radio or TV. At 2:30, he goes back to his office and works until 7:00, when he and wife have dinner, after which he attends to the mail and looks at the newspaper. Just before bedtime, at 10:30, he reads through what he has written during the day. He follows this routine six days a week, and works on Sundays until lunchtime. He doesn’t smoke. He doesn’t drink. He’s simply a working machine who says he never gets tired, just “optical tired.”

Deighton took a circuitous route to the career that has brought him fame and fortune. A native of London, he was raised in a house that epitomized the highest strata of society. He often tells people, “I was born in a house with 15 servants,” then adds that his mother was the cook and his father the chauffeur. His first ambition was to be an artist. At the age of 18, he was drafted into the RAF where he became a photographer, shooting operations in a service hospital and dashing to crime and accident scenes with investigative units. Two years later, he took advantage of the British equivalent of the GI Bill and entered St. Martin’s School of Arts; then he artended the Royal College of Art. After graduation, he moved to New York where he worked as a magazine illustrator for Esquire and Good Housekeeping, and occasionally got a chance to design a book jacket.

In 1960, while on a three-month working vacation in the Dordogne, Deighton began writing The IPCRESS File–purely “for fun. I had the book around for a long time,” he notes. “I’d work on it, put it aside, go on vacation again, work some more. I thought I’d go on that way for the next 20 years.”

A series of fortuitous events changed all that. At a party in London, he met agent Jonathan Clowes, who soon afterward sold Deighton’s manuscript to Hodden & Stoughton in London and to Bob Gottlieb, than at Simon & Schuster. The book was oprioned by producer Harry Saltzman, who had just finished his first James Bond film, Dr. No, which, according to Deighton, was bruited in advance as a sure flop. The surprising success of that movie sparked an interest in the espionage genre, and The IPCRESS File did very well. Later, the film would make a star of Michael Caine–whose first hardcover book purchase had been The IPCRESS File–and the producer would ask Deighton to consider writing a sequel.

“I didn’t know what a serial character was,” says Deighton. “It had taken me several years to write The IPCRESS File, but I was so caught up in the exciting milieu that had come to me I said I’d do two a year.” Eventually Deighton was to produce another half-dozen books featuring the character of Harry Palmer. Not coincidentally, he became a magnet for people who claimed either that they were spies or the friends of spies. Most of the information he learned in this way was anecdotal; he incorporated much of it into his books, giving them the ring of authenticity.

As his readership continued to grow, Deighton began to explore the difference between English and American literary tastes. “I think Somerset Maugham said that it’s a characteristic of English literature that no one knows how to plot anything. English writers care about atmosphere, character and motivation. But in America, plot is very important. In this country, all you have to do is go into a restaurant, order a ham sandwich and a martini, and you’ll see a whole story unfold. Do you want rye or wheat, mayo or butter, the martini up or on the rocks? Americans are very immersed in the precision of the language. Americans read a work of fiction like a menu–what kind of ham sandwich will it be? If you bring the British demands for atmosphere and character together with the American demands for precision and plot, then you can have a very good book.”

To meet these demands, Deighton works five years in advance, planning several books at a time. Once he decides to go ahead with a particular concept, he spends six months on plot and research. “One of the richest things in a writer’s life is that people will cooperate with you,” he says. That cooperation has put him in the back of an F-4, the cockpit of a Concorde, the kitchen of the Savoy and the backseat of an LAPD squad car.

Perhaps his books are compulsively over-researched, Deighton muses, but his reasons run deep. “All you need is a profound inferiority complex: no training as a writer and growing up a victim of the English class system.” He thinks his persistence pays off. “Americans want all the loose ends tied up. If I forget something, I can always put it in the next book,” he says.

For a man who professes not to “mix with writers much,” preferring the company of cops, private investigators and artists, he is quite forthcoming with thoughts about writing and the business of publishing: “Plot is always the product of the scene in which it’s set.” “I always tell illustrators that book jackets are to prevent people who won’t like the book from buying it and bad-mouthing it.” “I tell young writers to write a blurb, pin it up and write to it.” In a more expansive moment, he says: “For simplicity, I say there’s no such thing as art. There’s only entertainment. Once you say that, a lot of things become clarified. It’s the difference between Renoir and Andy Warhol. The first needs no assistance from anyone to be entertaining. The second has a terrible need to be explained. When you think in terms of entertainment, the work can be so much broader.”

The Bernard Samson series is probably Deighton’s most successful “entertainment.” The seed was planted when a philandering friend asked Deighton to cover for him if his wife called. “I didn’t like that, so I suppose I thought about it more than I would have otherwise,” Deighton remembers. The writer part of him began to muse: “If you have a man, a spy, who’s married to another spy, then their marriage becomes a matter of life and death.” Deighton hung a chart on his office wall and began to plot the first six Samson novels, which would tell the story of how English agents helped to bring down the Berlin Wall.

The first three–Berlin Game (1984), Mexico Set (1985) and London Match (1986)–end up with Fiona Samson defecting to the east, the next two–Spy Hook (1988) and Spy Line (1989)–bring her back, and the final one–Spy Sinker (1990)–ties together all the “loose ends.” In 1987, between the two trilogies, Deighton wrote Winter, which covered the story of Bernard Samson’s family as well as 50 years of German history. “When I started writing the series, I had no idea the Wall would actually come down. But I think that even if that hadn’t happened, the story still would have been valid. There were signs in the German economy that it might happen, but it could have taken another 10 years.”

His prescient writer’s instinct again came into play with Violent Ward. Four years ago, he thought up the title and created the characters. When he finally sat down to write the book, he already suspected that Mickey Murphy–a criminal lawyer with a house in the San Fernando Valley and an office in the low-rent district of downtown L.A.–would become another serial character. “Here I was writing a book called Violent Ward and all of a sudden the first Rodney King verdict came in and pop, pop. The riots certainly weren’t part of the planning, but there they were.”

The book owes much to the tradition of Raymond Chandler. “I grew up reading Chandler. I think he was able to produce a wonderful effect by combining the serious and the funny,” Deighton observes. Violent Ward also presented the author with the opportunity to write about Southern California, where he has taken to spending several months a year, avoiding the rainy seasons of whatever country he is living in at the time.

Deighton is currently putting the finishing touches on a 15-year project, a 700-page nonfiction book titled Blood, Tears and Folly. He calls it “a hobby. The book asks the question, ‘If we won the war, why are the Japanese and the Germans so rich?’ “Deighton elucidates. “It’s a history of World War II that attempts to show that some things are inevitable.”

Once Blood, Tears and Folly is behind him, Deighton will go back to his five-year plan. He’s working on notes for his next novel and putting together some ideas for another cookbook. Bernard Samson fans will be pleased to know that Deighton has hung a chart on his office wall and is plotting another three-book series tentatively called Faith, Hope and Charity. (So far, no publisher has been announced for these four books.)

Finally, Len Deighton has come in from the cold, as it were, leaving the solitude of his word processor to display his considerable charm to a long ignored public. “I advise writers to do publicity,” he says. Realizing the irony of this statement, he laughs, then adds, “I always have good advice, but I don’t always follow it myself. Interviews are very stressful for me. The greatest thing you can tell a writer is, ‘You don’t have an interview appointment for 10 years.’”