Who is the greatest spy fiction author ever? It’s someone you probably haven’t read yet

Every year or two, I do a housecleaning of my books. The shelves are filled with books that I bought but never read—the Japanese have a specific word for this, tsundoku—and also books that I enjoyed, but will never read again. They take up precious space. I give the books away to a charity, which sells them to raise money for the work they do. My exercise has nothing to do at all with the quality of the books. It’s just that I don’t need them any more and other readers could derive a few hours of pleasure and thought from them.

So last month, I had a pile of possibly 200 ready-to-go books on the rocking chair in my study when a friend, an extremely well-read person, came visiting. He picked up a few from the lot, and then looked at my shelves. “You have a full shelf of books by Len Deighton and you are not giving them away!” he said. “Who is this fellow?”

Ah well. Deighton is little-known in India, and it is difficult here to find his books. But in my opinion, he is the greatest spy fiction author ever. This is not to disrespect others like John le Carre, the man who is generally regarded as the best. I have a shelf-full of Deighton. I also have a shelf-full of le Carre.

Deighton’s espionage books can be broadly classified into two categories—the ones that feature an anonymous British agent and the nine-book saga of Bernard Samson. Except for one, all are first-person accounts. The Samson story is quite simply the most monumental achievement in spy fiction—Berlin Game, Mexico Set, London Match, Spy Hook, Spy Line, Spy Sinker, Faith, Hope and Charity.

Nothing here is what it seems to be. This is the Cold War at its chilliest and most dangerous, and everything you see or hear is dubious—from instructions from spymasters who could very well be working for the other side, to what your wife casually mentions.

And then Deighton adds on a new layer—that at least some of what Bernard tells you may be just his flawed perception, not reality. You will not find that in Fleming or le Carre. So what do you do as a reader? You are faced with the prospect of having to read the stuff all over again! This is cruel. Deighton carefully built an elaborate edifice based on half-truths, lies and double and triple crosses that leaves you with more doubts than certainties.

The hero of the other great set of Deighton’s novels is an unnamed British secret agent who is called Harry Palmer in the films—The Ipcress File, Funeral in Berlin, Billion Dollar Brain and a recent remake of Ipcress—and played memorably by Michael Caine with a cockney London accent and thick tortoise-shell glasses. In the books, his voice is laconic and matter-of-fact and all that we know about his physical appearance is that he may be getting a bit overweight. He reports what he sees, but reveals nothing of what he thinks. Often, it is only in the last few pages of the book that the reader can figure out what has been going on right under their nose. In this, Deighton possibly followed the style of the Continental Op stories of Dashiell Hammett.

(Image via Wikimedia Commons)

Which brings me to the thing called literature. A story about crime, detection, espionage is quickly classified as genre fiction and not granted the status that comes automatically to any tale about an orphan, a dysfunctional family, cultural exile and a number of other themes that I am too bored to even mention. Let me make a proposition here: Literature, just as art, is about how you represent something and not merely the what. We do not love Van Gogh’s Sunflowers because we love sunflowers. Deighton transcends his “genre” in two important ways.

One, his spy stories are fundamentally about class. However complex the plot, it is about how power in Britain is wielded by people who went to Eton and Oxford. Deighton’s father was an auto mechanic and his mother a cook. Bernard Samson, who never went to college, stands no chance in the British secret service bureaucracy. Idiots who have the right resume will always call the shots. This is not something that le Carre thought about. After all, George Smiley is an Oxford alumnus.

Two, the writing. Some years ago, I had given a Deighton novel to a friend to read. My friend, who is a well-known author and columnist, was astonished. He said: “There’s so much that he says in the blank space between two paragraphs!” That is Deighton. There is a reason why the works of crime fiction writers like Raymond Chandler are today recognized as literature. It’s the writing, the easy grace and speed of the language, and plots that hint at something much more rotten than the nitty-gritty. These authors write so well that you don’t really care who the villain or murderer is and reread the books.

Deighton belongs in that echelon. His spy stories can keep people busy for ages.