27 Facts About Len Deighton

Len Deighton's publications have included cookery books, history and military history, but he is best known for his spy novels.

Len Deighton worked for a period in an advertising agency.

Len Deighton wrote several spy novels featuring the same central character, an unnamed working-class intelligence officer, cynical and tough.

Several of Len Deighton's works have been adapted for film and other media.

Len Deighton was born in Marylebone, London, on 18 February 1929.

Len Deighton's 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.

In 1940, at the age of eleven, Deighton witnessed the arrest of Anna Wolkoff, a British subject of Russian descent for whom his mother cooked; Wolkoff was detained as a Nazi spy and charged with stealing correspondence between Winston Churchill and Franklin D Roosevelt.

Len Deighton later said that observing her arrest was "a major factor in my decision to write a spy story at my first attempt at fiction".

Len Deighton worked as a flight attendant for British Overseas Airways Corporation between 1956 and 1962 before becoming a professional illustrator.

Len Deighton had come up with the concept while he was at art school and working as a porter in the restaurant of the Royal Festival Hall, where he had occasionally assisted the chefs in preparing dishes.

Len Deighton made sketches to remember some of the steps he undertook.

In 1962 Len Deighton's first novel, The IPCRESS File, was published; it had been written in 1960 while he was staying in the Dordogne; the book was a commercial success.

Len Deighton sees the character not as an anti-hero, but as "a romantic, incorruptible figure in the mould of Philip Marlowe".

Len Deighton described the inspiration of using a working-class spy among the Oxbridge-educated members of the Establishment as coming from his time at the London advertising agency, when he was the only member of the company's board not to have been educated at Eton.

In 1968, Len Deighton was the producer of the film Only When I Larf, which was based on his novel of the same name.

In 1970 Len Deighton wrote Bomber, a fictional account of an RAF Bomber Command raid that goes wrong.

From 1983 Len Deighton wrote three trilogies: Berlin Game, Mexico Set and London Match ; Spy Hook, Spy Line and Spy Sinker ; and Faith, Hope and Charity.

Len Deighton married the illustrator Shirley Thompson in 1960; the couple were divorced in 1976, having not lived together for over five years.

Len Deighton left Britain in 1969, and has lived abroad since, including in Ireland, Austria, France, the United States and Portugal.

Len Deighton lived for a while in Blackrock, County Louth, where he married Ysabele, the daughter of a Dutch diplomat.

Oliver Buckton, the professor of literature, considers Len Deighton to be in the forefront of post-war spy writers.

Len Deighton wrote five cookery books, and wrote and drew the cookstrips in The Observer for four years.

In January 2015 Len Deighton created 12 new cookstrips which were printed monthly in the Observer Food Magazine.

Several of Len Deighton's novels have been adapted as films, which include The Ipcress File, Funeral in Berlin, Billion Dollar Brain and Spy Story.

Len Deighton's work has been acknowledged by the thriller writer Jeremy Duns as being an influence on his own work.

Len Deighton demonstrated to me that Indian art could really be approachable.

Maggs because of Len Deighton pushing me onto [them] as being a very fair dealer, saying that they do not charge you much more than they should.