35 Facts About Len Deighton

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

Len Deighton 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.

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 radio.

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

Len Deighton's birth was in the infirmary of a workhouse as the local hospital was full.

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, during the Second World War, the eleven-year-old 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 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 1957 before becoming a professional illustrator.

Len Deighton developed the idea into the concept of the "cookstrip", a full recipe within a cartoon-style illustration.

Len Deighton did not want to invent a name for the character and later explained "Some people felt that a contrivance, but I kept putting off inventing a name for him until I got to the end of the book and realised I could finish the book without giving him a name".

In 2017 Len Deighton described how he did not consider the character an anti-hero, but "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 advertising agency, when he was the only member of the company's board not to have been educated at Eton.

Len Deighton published two cookbooks in 1965, Len Deighton's Action Cook Book and, a collection of French recipes.

Len Deighton wrote that the raid "suffered a lack of security" because David Stirling, the leader of the raid, "had insisted upon talking about the raid during two social gatherings at the British Embassy in Cairo although warned not to do so".

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.

Len Deighton was interviewed on Desert Island Discs in June 1976 by Roy Plomley.

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 US and Portugal.

Len Deighton lived for a while in Blackrock, County Louth, where he married Ysabele in February 1980, the daughter of a Dutch diplomat.

Len Deighton provides an "energetic style" and his fictional work is marked by a complex narrative structure, according to Gale.

Len Deighton extensively researched the background and technical aspects of his storylines, and enjoyed this side of producing work; in 1976 he said "I like the research better than I like writing books".

Len Deighton was elected to the Detection Club in 1969 and their work Howdunit, published in 2020, was dedicated to him.

Len Deighton has expressed his admiration for the police procedural, which he considers has an authentic feel, and approaches his fiction writing as a "spy procedural".

The IPCRESS File appeared in bookshops at the same time as the James Bond film Dr No Len Deighton acknowledged that his career had benefited from the enormous popularity of Bond, although he denied any similarity between his and Ian Fleming's books except being about spies.

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

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 hands were used in The Ipcress File in place of Caine's for a scene in which Palmer breaks eggs into a bowl and whisks them.

In March 2022 The Ipcress File, a television adaptation of Len Deighton's novel, was broadcast on UK television.

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.