Yesterday's Spy
'Deighton at his best' Evening Standard
Steve Champion - flamboyant businessman, former leader of an anti-Nazi network in the Second World War - is a man surrounded by mysteries. There are rumours he is still in the spying business. And suspicions that his fortune may be built on something nefarious; something he'd rather stayed secret. The Department are nervous, so Champion's oldest wartime ally is sent to the South of France to investigate. It's time to re-open the file on yesterday's spy, whatever the consequences.
'Tough, well-written and extremely readable' Daily Mail
A PATRICK ARMSTRONG NOVEL
Len Deighton was born in 1929 in London. He did his national service in the RAF, went to the Royal College of Art and designed many book jackets, including the original UK edition of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. The enormous success of his first spy novel, The IPCRESS File (1962), was repeated in a remarkable sequence of books over the following decades. These varied from historical fiction (Bomber, perhaps his greatest novel) to dystopian alternative fiction (SS-GB) and a number of brilliant non-fiction books on the Second World War (Fighter, Blitzkrieg and Blood, Tears and Folly).
His spy novels chart the twists and turns of Britain and the Cold War in ways which now give them a unique flavour. They preserve a world in which Europe contains many dictatorships, in which the personal can be ruined by the ideological and where the horrors of the Second World War are buried under only a very thin layer of soil. Deighton's fascination with technology, his sense of humour and his brilliant evocation of time and place make him one of the key British espionage writers, alongside John Buchan, Eric Ambler, Ian Fleming and John Le Carré.