Of all our great spy writers, Len Deighton tops the list (He knew a bit about cookery too)
Ennealogy. Handsome word, isn’t it? It means nine works of art, all connected but individual.
Master spy author Len Deighton wrote one. It was actually three trilogies leading to one great reveal: who was the high-ranking mole within British intelligence?
Each of the nine books was capable of being read as a self-contained novel. But all were part of an epic Cold War tale of professional treachery and strained family ties. The books in the first trilogy were called Berlin Game, Mexico Set and London Match.
The labyrinthine plot – fittingly for spy novels – raised as many questions as answers. So Deighton wrote the backstory of his characters, a doorstopper saga of an American-German family called Winter, fighting, ducking and diving in Thirties Berlin as the Nazis rose to power.
That alone was an extraordinary achievement but, not satisfied, he went on to write Spy Hook, Spy Line and Spy Sinker; then Faith, Hope and Charity. And all interspersed with cookbooks and learned military histories, including Fighter: The True Story of the Battle of Britain, which brought thrillingly to life one of the existential conflicts of the Second World War.
There is a tendency to dismiss spy novels as “soft” writing, not proper literature for grown-ups. But look at the writers who have dabbled in espionage (sometimes not just in their writing): Joseph Conrad, John Buchan, Graham Greene, W Somerset Maugham… they all wrote spy stories.
And of course John le Carré, who served in both MI5 and MI6 and is widely regarded as one of our best modern novelists, not merely a brilliant purveyor of spy fiction. None of them, not even le Carré, compared with Deighton, who chronicled our society in the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties as well as Dickens did the Victorian era.
He wrote astonishingly good heroes and villains: Harry Palmer, first seen in The Ipcress File, is smart, cynical, working class and came up against General Midwinter, a mad, power-crazed billionaire, in Deighton’s Billion Dollar Brain.
Michael Caine, with his laconic, disingenuous, passive-aggressive delivery, brought Palmer the everyman hero to life at a time when British society was changing and rounding on the Establishment and its upper class codes of behaviour.
They made a film of The Ipcress File and Hollywood executives were less than impressed when they saw the rushes.
“Dump Caine’s spectacles and make the girl cook the meal. He is coming across as a homosexual,” they ordered in a telegram to England where the movie was being filmed.
But this was 1964, London was swinging, women were seizing power where and when they could and Rotherhithe-born Caine knew a thing or two about working class culture.
He kept the black-rimmed glasses and his trademark deadpan stroppiness and knocked up a Spanish omelette, while the girl poured them large scotches.
Deighton and Caine became good friends and, if you watch Ipcress carefully, you’ll see Deighton’s cookery strips, which he wrote and partly illustrated for the Observer Magazine, pinned to the wall of Harry Palmer’s kitchen.
They were like an idiot’s guide to classic cuisine, aimed mostly at blokes like Palmer who knew that cooking was seduction. Deighton’s publisher HarperCollins turned the strips into a 1965 book that was reprinted in 2009. Like his novels they were immaculately researched and written in pithy, hard-boiled prose.
In the introduction to the later edition, he writes: “Of all the books I have written none of them is dearer to me or more personal than this one.”
He also explained how they came to have their unique layout. “Having carefully noted the details of each recipe, I pinned these up over the stove. I was an art student and it was inevitable that the notes included little diagrams and drawings.
“During a dinner party, Ray Hawkey, a graphics specialist who was at the time radically changing newspaper design, came into the kitchen and spotted the fluttering collection of recipe notes.
“He suggested that they could be published if they were more carefully drawn and my scribbled lettering replaced by that of a lettering expert. It was Ray who added the grid and generally supervised the improvements.
“Through Ray I found a lettering artist who was creative and resourceful. It was not an easy task for him, and I soon found that it was best to let him do the lettering first and then fit my drawings into the spaces. This is why some of the pots, pans and basins are of unorthodox shapes.”
Deighton and Hawkey studied together at the Royal College of Art and became great friends. Before he was a writer Deighton was carving out a notable career as a graphic artist for book and magazine publishers as well as advertising agencies.
Among many book covers, he designed the cover for the UK first edition of Jack Kerouac’s 1957 Beat Generation novel On the Road.
And Hawkey worked with Deighton on the simple, uncluttered, arresting designs of some of his best books, including the white cover of The Ipcress File and Spy Story, on which an eye peered through the O of Story.
Deighton is 96 now, and that realisation is what caused this piece to be written. I was wondering which new authors to buy for my Kindle when I passed a book cabinet containing the great man’s works. Never mind the Beaujolais Nouveau, I thought, let’s break out the finest vintages.
Deighton was born in Marylebone, London, the son of a chauffeur and mechanic who worked for Campbell Dodgson, the Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum.
His mother was a cook and worked for Anna Wolkoff, who was British but of Russian descent. Aged 11, Deighton watched as Wolkoff was arrested as a Nazi spy. She was charged with stealing letters between Churchill and Franklin D Roosevelt.
Deighton said that seeing her arrest was “a major factor in my decision to write a spy story at my first attempt at fiction”.
Thank goodness he did. Otherwise, we might never have had Harry Palmer, or the whip-smart Bernard Samson, played in the TV adaption of Game, Set and Match by Ian Holm.
Deighton tops the pile of spy writers because he wrote of his time. His contemporary, Ian Fleming, with his Bond stories clung to a vanishing era. And le Carré, while he perfectly captured the paranoia of the Cold War years, wrote awful dialogue and allowed his own politics to intrude on a good read.
Neither was a stylist to match Deighton. They certainly could not have come up with this gem from The Ipcress File: “His profusion of long lank yellow hair hung heavily across his head like a Shrove Tuesday mishap.”
I almost got to meet my literary hero. He was due to come to London to promote something – it might have been the reprint of his cookery strips – and his publisher suggested an interview. The Sunday Express books editor offered it to me.
Lucky for him. I would have killed for the chance, or at least left him with a serious limp, but at the last moment we heard that Deighton had been taken ill and would after all stay at home in southern California.
For me, it remains an abiding regret of my years in newspapers.
RICHARD DISMORE
29 October 2025
