![]() It is because authority is too often given to lazy and incompetent cronies. ![]() When I poke fun at authority it’s not a matter of class. Britain’s public schools have a long tradition of teaching the Victorian virtues a belief in God, loyalty, modesty, justice, prudence, patriotism, and sacrifice: I value those characteristics. “I respect and admire skills and education. He never really saw himself as a ‘class warrior’ although Harry Palmer was considered a working-class spy. Writers are far more competitive,” he told the Deighton Dossier fan website. Photographers, illustrators, and art directors are a congenial fraternity a little world of cheerful friends. “One time I wanted nothing other than a career as an illustrator. Deighton later studied at London’s Royal College of Art and tried his hand at advertising and designing book jackets including the UK edition of American author Jack Kerouac's On the Road, a defining work of the postwar Beat and Counterculture generations: “London was warming up for the Swinging Sixties and I relished every minute of every day.”ĭespite his success, Deighton was never completely content as a writer. “After that an assignment, to the Fighter School where I spent many happy hours flying in Mosquito fighters operating cine cameras during mock combat,” he recalled. He specialized in photography using a Leica camera to take photos in an RAF hospital operating theater. Deighton’s father was a chauffeur and a mechanic, and Deighton decided to make use of his own fascination with technology during his national service in Britain’s Royal Air Force (RAF). They bundled her into a car and took her away to face charges of espionage,” Deighton said. There were two police cars in the mews and Special Branch officers were banging on her street door. Crammed shoulder to shoulder with my parents, I leaned out of the window. “It was in early May 1940 that I heard cars arriving in the middle of the night. It was high drama for an 11-year-old and Deighton recalled it as a “major factor in my decision to write a spy story at my first attempt at fiction”. Neighbor Anna Wolkoff, a fashion designer who employed his mother, was arrested as a WWII Nazi spy and charged with passing the Germans letters between British PM Winston Churchill and US President Franklin D. ![]() In fact, to understand the evolution of the spy genre in 1960s Cold War Britain, it is important to understand Leonard Cyril Deighton, born in 1929 in Marylebone, central London.ĭeighton’s mother was a cook, which led to the author’s first brush with espionage in 1940. Len Deighton and the birth of Harry Palmer Mickey is thrown into a world of Hollywood stars, schemes, and murder.ĭeighton went off-piste again several times during a writing career that spanned six decades - the talented spy writer has also written cookbooks, military history, and history although he’s best known for his espionage thrillers. ![]() The book was made into a movie starring Richard Attenborough.Ĭrime fans needed to wait until 1993 when Deighton struck gold again with Violent War, a Mickey Spillane-ish noir novel about streetwise Los Angeles lawyer Mickey Murphy who has a shabby office in a low-rent district and “the kind of clients who would plead the Fifth if they could count that high”. Critics were charmed by the ultimate con novel: “For sheer readability, he has no peer,” the Evening Standard wrote. Five spy novels later, Deighton was a household name but he decided to shake things up by writing a crime novel, Only When I Larf (1967), about three con artists on the make - slick and self-assured Silas his glamorous lover Liz, and Bob, the young cockney upstart who may be falling for Liz. ![]()
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