Len Deighton's novels were so authoritative the KGB used to go through them with diligence, even checking on STUCEN (real name Gruinard Island) where WWII anthrax experiments were carried out in his novel Spy Story.

When Len Deighton’s first novel The Ipcress File was gearing up for film production in the 1960s, the author and lead actor Michael Caine tried to persuade producer Harry Saltzman to let Caine wear thick glasses on screen.

Deighton and Caine both wore heavyset specs. The book’s hero Harry Palmer wore them too, but Saltzman wasn’t budging. “No, no, no. What film star have you ever seen wearing glasses?” Saltzman asked over supper one evening. Luckily, Harry’s wife Jacqueline was hosting the meal at their London home and interrupted: “Cary, darling. Cary Grant looks lovely in glasses.”

“Michael looked down at his plate,” Deighton recalled. “We had won.”

The Ipcress File: a game changer

It was a win not just for Deighton and Caine but for the working class. The Ipcress File was a game changer. For the first time in British film history, the espionage genre was no longer the preserve of the elite.

A new style of agent was born - an imperfect one with tortoise-shell glasses, a Cockney London accent, and a flippant attitude. Harry Palmer saw the world through the eyes of a man battling his duplicitous (and often incompetent) superiors.

Criminal intent

Five spy novels later, Deighton was a household name but he decided to shake things up by writing a crime novel, Only When I Larf (1967), about three con artists on the make - slick and self-assured Silas; his glamorous lover Liz, and; Bob, the young cockney upstart who may be falling for Liz. Critics were charmed by the ultimate con novel: “For sheer readability, he has no peer,” the Evening Standard wrote. The book was made into a movie starring Richard Attenborough.‍

Crime fans needed to wait until 1993 when Deighton struck gold again with Violent War, a Mickey Spillane-ish noir novel about streetwise Los Angeles lawyer Mickey Murphy who has a shabby office in a low-rent district and “the kind of clients who would plead the Fifth if they could count that high”. Mickey is thrown into a world of Hollywood stars, schemes, and murder.

Deighton went off-piste again several times during a writing career that spanned six decades - the talented spy writer has also written cookbooks, military history, and history although he’s best known for his espionage thrillers.

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Len Deighton and the birth of Harry Palmer

In fact, to understand the evolution of the spy genre in 1960s Cold War Britain, it is important to understand Leonard Cyril Deighton, born in 1929 in Marylebone, central London.

Deighton’s mother was a cook, which led to the author’s first brush with espionage in 1940. Neighbor Anna Wolkoff, a fashion designer who employed his mother, was arrested as a WWII Nazi spy and charged with passing the Germans letters between British PM Winston Churchill and US President Franklin D. Roosevelt. It was high drama for an 11-year-old and Deighton recalled it as a “major factor in my decision to write a spy story at my first attempt at fiction”.

“It was in early May 1940 that I heard cars arriving in the middle of the night. Crammed shoulder to shoulder with my parents, I leaned out of the window. There were two police cars in the mews and Special Branch officers were banging on her street door. They bundled her into a car and took her away to face charges of espionage,” Deighton said.

Deighton’s father was a chauffeur and a mechanic, and Deighton decided to make use of his own fascination with technology during his national service in Britain’s Royal Air Force (RAF). He specialized in photography using a Leica camera to take photos in an RAF hospital operating theater. “After that an assignment, [I was off] to the Fighter School where I spent many happy hours flying in Mosquito fighters operating cine cameras during mock combat,” he recalled.

Deighton later studied at London’s Royal College of Art and tried his hand at advertising and designing book jackets including the UK edition of American author Jack Kerouac's On the Road, a defining work of the postwar Beat and Counterculture generations: “London was warming up for the Swinging Sixties and I relished every minute of every day.”

Len Deighton: From artist to writer‍

Deighton bounced around between jobs. His roles included a stint as an airline steward for British Overseas Airways Corporation but he resigned (the rumors say it had something to do with gold smuggling and Hong Kong) and worked as a food correspondent for The Observer newspaper. He wrote and illustrated 'cookstrips' - black and white graphic recipes - later published as his 1965 Action Cook Book for bachelors, the first of his five cookery books.

While working as a travel editor for Playboy magazine, he’d stay at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion in Chicago and jet around the world: “The grandest trip was to Hawaii where I had a helicopter to use like an air taxi hopping from place to place.”

Len Deighton: the life of a spy writer

Somewhere along the way, Deighton married twice, had two sons (both pilots and excellent cooks), and wrote a long section of his first book, The Ipcress File, while vacationing in France. The draft was heavily influenced by a controversial psychology book, Battle For The Mind by William Sargant, which Deighton re-read several times. Sergeant’s book explained basic techniques used by evangelists, psychiatrists, and brain-washers. The following year, Deighton visited France again and slowly brought his draft novel to a conclusion.

“It would probably still be sitting on the shelf except I met Jonathan Clowes, a literary agent, at a party,” he said. “What began as an episodic scribble (perhaps ideas for an amateur movie) became a short story and then rambled on - written, revised and rewritten many times - to become a book.”

The Ipcress File's impact

The Ipcress File introduced a cynical protagonist called ‘Harry’ (although the character said he didn’t actually remember if he’d used that cover name while spying). A generation of 1960s anti-establishment fans were hooked on the acerbic, delinquent spy. Critics praised one of Deighton’s follow-up novels in the Palmer series, Funeral in Berlin (1966).

The New York Times’ Charles Poore said Deighton had bested even British spy writer John le Carré: “Len Deighton has written a ferociously cool fable of the current struggle between East and West, Funeral in Berlin. It is even better than The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, which was set in the same locale. You will be hearing a lot about this book’s sardonic scorn of all authority.”

Film and media historian Alan Burton said The Ipcress File and The Spy Who Came In from the Cold changed the nature of British spy fiction, introducing “a more insolent, disillusioned and cynical style to the espionage story”.

The Reluctant Writer

Despite his success, Deighton was never completely content as a writer. “One time I wanted nothing other than a career as an illustrator. Photographers, illustrators, and art directors are a congenial fraternity; a little world of cheerful friends. Writers are far more competitive,” he told the Deighton Dossier fan website.

He never really saw himself as a ‘class warrior’ although Harry Palmer was considered a working-class spy.

“I respect and admire skills and education. Britain’s public schools have a long tradition of teaching the Victorian virtues; a belief in God, loyalty, modesty, justice, prudence, patriotism, and sacrifice: I value those characteristics. When I poke fun at authority it’s not a matter of class. It is because authority is too often given to lazy and incompetent cronies. Prejudice of any sort is evil; it is illogical and destructive.”

Despite his reticence, Deighton published 23 books including Où est le garlic, a French cookbook, nine fiction novels centered on Bernard Samson - a tough, cynical, and disrespectful MI6 intelligence officer - several military history books, and too many others to mention. 

Len Deighton: writing secrets

Back in 2011, while in his 80s, Deighton was still writing notes every day. “Some people have the enviable ability of arranging their knowledge in a chosen sequence and having it at their disposal by means of their memory. I can’t do that. The only way I can retain and arrange material is by writing it down.”

His great pleasure remained reading war history books and reference books of all kinds; from books about art and graphic design to photography and cookery. (“I avoid literary novels as I find them too cryptic,” he said.)

Deighton has always considered himself an artist and recalled his humble beginnings and graduation from the Royal College of Art where his diploma came directly from Prince Philip.

“In the speech he made to us wide-eyed little van Goghs, he said that artists were lucky. Artists, he said, could wend their way through all sections of society and all classes too. I took him at his word,” Deighton said. “I have found that a clean shirt and sober tie - plus a sense of humor - overcomes many social limitations.”