About Len Deighton
Leonard Cyril Deighton ( DAY-tən; 18 February 1929 – 15 March 2026) was a British author. His publications included cookery books and works on history, but he was best known for his spy novels. After completing his national service in the Royal Air Force, Deighton attended the Saint Martin's School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London; he graduated from the latter in 1955. He had several jobs before becoming a book and magazine illustrator and designed the cover for the first UK edition of Jack Kerouac's 1957 work On the Road. He also worked for a period in an advertising agency. During an extended holiday in France he wrote his first novel, The IPCRESS File, which was published in 1962 and was a critical and commercial success. He wrote several spy novels featuring the same central character, an unnamed, cynical and tough working-class intelligence officer. Between 1962 and 1966 Deighton was the food correspondent for The Observer and drew cookstrips—black-and-white graphic recipes with a limited number of words. A selection of these was collected and published in 1965 as Len Deighton's Action Cook Book, the first of five cookery books he wrote. Other topics of non-fiction include military history. Many of Deighton's books were 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. Deighton's fictional work is marked by complex narrative structures, extensive research and an air of verisimilitude. Several of Deighton's works were adapted for film and radio. Films include The Ipcress File (1965), Funeral in Berlin (1966), Billion Dollar Brain (1967) and Spy Story (1976). 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. Deighton said that observing her arrest was "a major factor in my decision to write a spy story at my first attempt at fiction".
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