Len Deighton

Many of Deighton's books have been best-sellers and he has been favourably compared both to his contemporary John le Carré and his literary antecedents W. Somerset Maugham, Eric Ambler, Ian Fleming and Graham Greene.

In 1988 Granada Television produced the miniseries Game, Set and Match based on his trilogy of the same name, and in 1995 BBC Radio 4 broadcast a real-time dramatisation of his 1970 novel Bomber.

[3] His father was the chauffeur and mechanic for Campbell Dodgson, the Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum; Deighton's mother was a part-time cook.

[9][10][b] After leaving school Deighton worked as a railway clerk[12] before being conscripted for national service at the age of 17, which he completed with the Royal Air Force (RAF).

While in the RAF he was trained as a photographer, often recording crime scenes with the Special Investigation Branch (SIB) of the military police as part of his duties.

[16][c] Following the publication of one of Deighton's cookstrips in the Daily Express in 1961, The Observer commissioned him to provide a weekly series for its own magazine, which he did between March 1962 and August 1966.

Funeral in Berlin stayed on The New York Times best-seller list for twenty weeks and sold over forty thousand copies in hardback in 1965.

[17] Two further novels in the spy series followed—Billion-Dollar Brain (1966) and An Expensive Place to Die (1967)—after which he published his first historical non-fiction work, The Assassination of President Kennedy (1967), co-written with Michael Rand and Howard Loxton.

[g] He and the publishers Jonathan Cape were sued for libel; they apologised, withdrew the suggestions made in the book by amending the claim in unsold editions and paid substantial damages.

[28] In September 1967 he wrote an article in The Sunday Times Magazine about Operation Snowdrop, an SAS attack on Benghazi during the Second World War.

Stirling sued Deighton and Times Newspapers for libel the following year as the implication was that his indiscretion had endangered the lives of his men.

[31] During the mid-1960s Deighton wrote for Playboy as a travel correspondent, and he provided a piece on the boom in spy fiction; An Expensive Place to Die was serialised in the magazine in 1967.

[19] Taylor wrote the introduction for the book, describing it as a "brilliant analysis";[40] Albert Speer, once the Minister of Armaments for Adolf Hitler, thought it "an excellent, most thorough examination".

[41] Fighter was followed in 1978 by another novel, SS-GB, the idea for which came from Ray Hawkey, Deighton's friend from art school and the designer of the covers of several of his books.

While the two were discussing what would have happened if the Germans had won the Second World War, Hawkey asked Deighton if he thought there could be an alternative history novel.

[44] Reviewing for The Times, Henry Stanhope considers the work "extremely readable", although he questions the structure of the book which focuses on different theatres of war, rather than using a purely chronological history.

[45] The historian Allan R. Millett considers that the book would have been improved by wider research into the Russian, Japanese and American aspects of the war.

Winter, a companion novel dealing with the lives of a German family from 1899 to 1945, which also provides an historical background to several of the characters from the trilogies, was published in 1987.

[55][56] According to the Gale Contemporary Novelists monographs, Deighton and fellow author John le Carré follow in the same literary tradition of British espionage writers as W. Somerset Maugham, Eric Ambler and Graham Greene.

Deighton acknowledged that his career had benefited from the enormous popularity of Bond, although he denied any similarity between his and Ian Fleming's books except being about spies.

[67] The academic Clive Bloom considers that after Funeral in Berlin was published in 1964, Deighton "established a place for himself ... in the front rank of the spy genre, along with Graham Greene, Ian Fleming and John le Carré".

[71] Several of Deighton's novels have been adapted as films, which include The Ipcress File (1965), Funeral in Berlin (1966), Billion Dollar Brain (1967) and Spy Story (1976).

[81] In 2017 the BBC adapted Deighton's novel SS-GB for a five-part miniseries, broadcast in one-hour episodes; Sam Riley played the lead role of Detective Superintendent Douglas Archer.

[85] In Letters from Burma, the politician Aung San Suu Kyi mentions reading Deighton's books, while under house arrest.

Suu Kyi wrote that she was passionate about Arthur Conan Doyle's tales of Sherlock Holmes and the spy novels of le Carré and Deighton.