Game, Set & Match - Len Deighton

[Bern]

Len Deighton turned 80 recently. I read The IPCRESS File off my dad's bookshelf when at school, then read Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy and XPD. But nothing since (20 odd years).

So I'm glad to have caught this revival piece in the Guardian just before a long weekend away because Game, Set & Match made great holiday reading.

There's an element of nostalgia in reading about Cold War Berlin and London - Game, Set & Match was written more than 40 years ago - but recently we have had the radiation poisoning of a turned Russian spook in a sushi restaurant in Soho and a KGB Russian president.

The bonus is that there's no green plot tacked on to make it contemporary - like in the latest Bond.

Game, Set & Match has Bernard Samson as its main protagonist - an intelligence officer, middle-aged and cynical, brought up in Berlin by his father (also a spook) after the war. As befits an agent, Samson is always out of place. He feels more German than English, has difficult relationships with his superiors (whose class is always telling) and can't even be sure of his standing in the bedroom. Michael Caine played Harry Palmer - another of Deighton's heroes - the characters are similar.

Game, Set & Match asks the question - if you cheat in your personal life, can you be trusted to be impeccable in your professional duties?

The answer might lie in the follow-up trilogy Hook, Line & Sinker.

Worth pursuing are Len Deighton's The Action Cook Book and Où Est Le Garlic (both 1965) as well as the guidebook London Dossier (1967) that is praised by the Guardian writer. "In it I found everything from what was on the menu at Ronnie Scott's to the history of Chinatown – but most of all I found the atmosphere of the era, captured in a beautifully written snapshot."

HarperCollins will republish Len Deighton's complete list of novels, with the first 8 to come in 2009. Mosman Library has a few earlier editions on the Fiction shelves. This magazine article - an appreciation - is also worth reading.

[Bern]

Just finished Hook, Line & Sinker - the second trilogy in the triumvirate - and via Twitter came across the Deighton Dossier. Some good design pieces in there.