Showing results by author "Len Deighton" in All Categories

A high-ranking scientist has been kidnapped. A secret British intelligence agency must find out why. But as the quarry is pursued from grimy Soho to the other side of the world, what seemed a straightforward mission turns into something far more sinister. With its sardonic, cool, working-class hero, Len Deighton's sensational debut The IPCRESS File rewrote the spy thriller and became the defining novel of 1960s London.

31 June, 1943. An RAF crew prepare for their next bombing raid on Germany. It is a night that many will never forget. Len Deighton's devastating novel is a gripping minute-by-minute account of what happens over the next 24 hours. Told through the eyes of ordinary people in the air and on the ground - from a young pilot to the inhabitants of a small town in the Ruhr - Bomber is an unforgettable portrayal of individuals caught up in the wreckage of war.

Skilled Royal Air Force bomber pilot Sam Lambert is exhausted, and his veteran crewmen have just been replaced by an inexperienced new team. Victor von Löwenherz, a German night fighter pilot who intercepts RAF bombers in his Junkers Ju 88, looks on with horror at the Nazi regime. And Hansl, a German boy in the small market town of Altgarten, sleeps at home. Lambert and his crew prepare for a bombing raid on the Ruhr area. It’s a night that many will never forget. Bomber is a masterful, gripping minute-by-minute account of what occurs over the next twenty-four hours.

What Bernard Sampson, protagonist of Berlin Game, Mexico Set, and London Match, is about to know may hurt him. When word gets to London Central that a cache of millions of pounds has disappeared inside the Service, Samson is determined to learn the truth. But not even that discovery will help if the Department itself wants his blood....

What kind of woman would leave her husband, her children, and her home to live behind the Iron Curtain and work for the KGB? From the brilliant Oxford graduate who understands the espionage game better than her male colleagues, to the beguiling woman who uses her charm and brains to deceive everyone around her, Fiona Samson presents a complex puzzle. She is by no means alone.

In this expansive, rich, and deeply tragic portrait of a German family from 1899 to 1945, Len Deighton brilliantly weaves a portrait of the fortunes of two sons, and a nation, over half a century.

It is 1941 and Germany has won the war. Britain is occupied, Churchill executed, and the King imprisoned in the Tower of London. At Scotland Yard, Detective Inspector Archer tries to do his job and keep his head down. But when a body is found in a Mayfair flat, what at first appears to be a routine murder investigation sends him into a world of espionage, deceit, and betrayal.

Norfolk, December, 1943. A group of US fighter pilots is camped at an air base; their job is to escort bombers over Germany. Each mission could be their last. Goodbye Mickey Mouse is a vivid evocation of wartime England and a brilliant, multi-dimensional picture of what it is to be at war. At the center of the novel are two young men—Captain Jamie Farebrother, estranged son of a colonel, and cocky Lieutenant Mickey Morse (nicknamed "Mickey Mouse"), well on his way to becoming America's Number One Flying Ace.

With the Cold War drawing to a close in the East, Bernard Samson is still haunted by the events that have turned his life upside down over the last ten years. But when he takes a train from Moscow to Berlin, he stumbles across a clue that may lead him to the truth at last—even though, in finding the answers, he could lose everything. Bringing the Faith, Hope, and Charity trilogy and Bernard Samson's story to a stunning conclusion, this final volume brilliantly shows the human cost of the spying game.

In 1987, as the Cold War reaches a climax, British agent Bernard Samson confronts difficulties at home and on the job as he copes with an affair with a coworker, his wife, ethical conflict, and high-level government scandal.

Berlin Game begins with a plea from “Brahms Four,” one of Britain’s most valuable agents stationed in East Germany: He wants to cross the Iron Curtain and come to the West. Bernard Samson, the former field agent now stationed in London, is tasked with the rescue. But before he even sets out on the mission, suspicions arise that there is a traitor in the MI6, likely one of his closest colleagues.

Bernard Samson suspects there is a traitor within his department of MI6. A jaded but highly skilled British intelligence agent nearing the end of his career, Samson already got KGB major Eric Stinnes to defect. But when a British KGB agent makes a sweeping confession with a suspicious undertone, the finger points straight back to London—where Stinnes is locked up, refusing to talk.

Bernard Samson is a spy on the run, forced to abandon his life and job and plunge into hiding. But in the murky, dangerous streets of Berlin, he knows where to hide. Wanted for an act of treachery he has not committed, he must not only escape the grasp of London Central, but get to the bottom of a tangled conspiracy that is about to change everything. In the thrilling penultimate installment of the Hook, Line, Sinker trilogy, Bernard's personal and professional life collide with devastating consequences.

In 1963, Berlin is dark and dangerous. Len Deighton's skilled, jaded, anony­mous hero of The IPCRESS File is now set to arrange the defection—and fake the death—of a leading Soviet scien­tist. "A ferociously cool fable" (New York Times) and one of the first novels written after the construction of the Berlin Wall, Funeral in Berlin revels in the fraught, chilling atmosphere of a divided city.

When disaffected KGB major Erich Stinnes is spotted in Mexico City, British intelligence agent Bernard Samson must entice him to take the final step and defect. With his domestic life in shambles and his career heading towards disaster, Bernard needs to prove his re­liability. And he know Stinnes already: Bernard had been interrogated by him in East Berlin. But now, Bernard risks being entangled in a lethal web of old loyalties and old betrayals.

A high-ranking scientist has been kidnapped, and a secret British intelligence agency has just recruited Deighton’s iconic unnamed protagonist—later christened Harry Palmer—to find out why. His search begins in a grimy Soho club and brings him to the other side of the world. When he ends up amongst the Soviets in Beirut, what seemed a straightforward mission turns into something far more sinister.

Paris in the 1960s caters for every taste, and nowhere more than at the private "clinic" run by the enigmatic Monsieur Datt on Avenue Foch, which supplies psychedelic drugs and sexual favors to the city's elite—all the while secretly filming guests in order to blackmail them. Into this decadent underworld steps a bespectacled British spy. Sent on what seems like a simple mission, he soon finds himself playing a game where the rules are unknown—and even victory could be fatal.

It's 1979, and a group of former SS officers are devising a plan to seize power in West Germany. XPD is a brilliant novel constructed around a supposition that Churchill secretly met with Hitler in 1940 to discuss terms of a British surrender.

Long-suffering spy Bernard Samson has, against all the odds, enticed a Soviet agent to defect to London - but this proves to be the start of something even bigger. For he learns that there is treachery within his own Service, and no one is free from suspicion. To discover who really controls the game of spies, he must attempt a desperate gamble. As the Game, Set and Match trilogy reaches its shattering finale, who will make the winning move?

In Len Deighton's second novel of the classic spy trilogy, Faith, Hope, Charity, Bernard Samson is trying to readjust his life after his wife, Fiona, defected to the East. As the Berlin Wall begins to crumble, loyalties seem to change along with the freezing wind. Caught between his job and his ethics, his past and his future, and the two women he loves, Samson embarks on his most sensational mission yet—from rural Poland to London Central. In this intricately plotted novel of changing loyalties, deception, and danger, Bernard Samson is in top form. And he has only himself to depend on.