Author Len Deighton, who wrote a string of spy thrillers including The IPCRESS File, has died aged 97.
The British author’s defining novel was the first he ever wrote, being written during an extended holiday in France before being published in 1962.
A critical and commercial success, it was adapted into a film starring Michael Caine three years later and in 2022 was turned into a TV series starring Peaky Blinders’ Joe Cole.
Across his career, which spanned almost half a century, he went on to write a further 38 books.
As well as writing spy novels, Deighton also wrote histories of the Second World War and was a food writer too.
His death was confirmed to the BBC today by his literary agent, but no cause of death has been given.
Born Leonard Cyril Deighton was born in Marylebone, London, in 1929, he was the son of a chauffeur to the keeper of prints and drawings at the British Museum, and a part-time cook.
Deighton was educated at St Marylebone Grammar and William Ellis schools but was moved to an emergency school for part of the Second World War.
In 1940, when he was 11, Deighton saw one of his mother’s employers arrested for spying, with it later emerging that she was a Nazi spy who was charged with stealing correspondence between Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Years later Deighton said that seeing her arrest was a ‘major factor in my decision to write a spy story at my first attempt at fiction’.
After graduating, he initially worked as a railway clerk before being conscripted to the Royal Air Force, where he was trained as a photographer.
Two years later he left the RAF and went on to study at Saint Martin’s School of Art where he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art. While studying he worked as a pastry chef at the Royal Festival Hall and went on to work as a flight attendant before becoming a professional illustrator – with much of his work being in advertising.
During this time, he illustrated magazines and over 200 book covers, including for the first UK edition of Jack Kerouac’s 1957 novel On the Road.
Eventually, when The IPCRESS File was published, it became a best-seller in the UK, France and the US, selling more than 2.5 million copies in three years. On the day it had been released, the book sold out its first print-run of 4,000 copies.
The book tells the story of an unnamed protagonist, who is an intelligence agent for a small civilian agency reporting directly to the British Cabinet.
Trying to uncover who is behind the high-profile kidnappings, the protagonist embarks on a dangerous mission that takes him around the world, as the Cold War intensifies.
The character appeared in four further books – Horse Under Water, Funeral in Berlin, Billion Dollar Brain and An Expensive Place to Die.
Funeral in Berlin and Billion Dollar Brain were also turned into movies starring Caine.
Not bad after Deighton once admitted he only began writing the original book ‘for a lark’.
Deighton then continued to produce what his biographer John Reilly once called ‘stylish, witty, well-crafted novels’ in spy fiction.
In the 1980s, he published the novel Berlin Game, which featured a new character, Bernard Samson.
The novel was the first of three Samson trilogies that he wrote between 1983 and 1996, with the first trilogy then turned into a 12-part adaptation titled Game, Set and Match in 1988.
He also wrote two television scripts, the first being Long Past Glory in 1963 and the other being the film script for Oh! What a Lovely War, released in 1969.
After developing the idea of the cookstrip – a full recipe within a cartoon style illustration, he was commissioned to run a weekly series in The Observer, which was published from 1962 until 1966.
During the mid-1960s he also wrote for Playboy as a travel correspondent.
Deighton was married to the illustrator Shirley Thompson from 1960 until 1976. Four years later he married Ysabele née de Ranitz, the daughter of a Dutch diplomat. The couple had two sons.
Throughout his life Deighton rarely gave interviews and also avoided appearing at literary festivals.
He once admitted he didn’t enjoy being a writer and that ‘the best thing about writing books is being at a party and telling some pretty girl you write books, the worst thing is sitting at a typewriter and actually writing the book’.
After completing Faith, Hope and Charity in 1996, he took a year off but never resumed his writing. He later confirmed his retirement a decade ago.
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