Len Deighton a personal appreciation by Mike Ripley

 

Have Pencil, Will Write.

They say you should never meet your heroes. Well, they are wrong.

One of the proudest moments of my life was when, as a student, I had an essay, on the economic policies of fascist states in Europe in the 1930s, returned from the tutor who had marked it with the added comment: Stop trying to write like Len Deighton! (Despite, or perhaps because of this, I got a good mark.)

Even earlier in my academic career, I had reason to be grateful to Len Deighton. As a teenage schoolboy I treated myself to the first hardback novel I ever bought, Billion Dollar Brain in 1966 (it cost 21 shillings). During a lesson with a notoriously sarcastic English master, we were asked to name the novel we had read most recently and I was immediately accused of lying as I could not have read Billion Dollar Brain because ‘it’s not out in paperback yet’. When I claimed I had the hardback first edition, and could bring it to school, the master said: ‘Can I borrow it?’ He did, and I got excellent marks for the rest of the term.

I have written extensively on the impact Len’s debut novel, The Ipcress File (1962), had on me and the whole spy-fiction genre and it is certainly the novel I have read more times than any other and for me, the anonymous hero of Ipcress, Horse Under Water, Funeral In Berlin and Billion Dollar Brain (‘Harry Palmer’ in the films) is an icon of the Sixties. With advancing age, I have come to realise that I belong to the early generation of Deighton fans, as there is a younger generation which believe his massive contribution to spy fiction began in the Eighties with his triple trilogy featuring the world-weary spy Bernard Samson. I’m sticking to my guns. Much as I enjoyed the Samson saga (and its background novel Winter) I think those first four books were Deighton’s greater achievement.

But they were not his only achievement. He had already established himself as a graphic artist (and noted designer of book covers) and combined this skill with a natural talent for cooking in his famous ‘cookstrips’ which even the most culinary illiterate male could follow. He also found time to be a film producer. At the end of the Sixties he broke new ground writing his WWII novel Bomber with the aid of a word-processor, gaining a reputation as a keen adopter of new technology, especially when it was reported that he had a personal telex machine and one of the first radio car telephones. I did once ask Len if it was true about the car phone and he replied with a cheeky grin: ‘And the first call I took on it was Bertrand Russell asking if I knew how to contact The Beatles…’ 

He put his interest in WWII to good use, establishing himself as a military historian of the conflict who had clearly considered and research the German side, in which he was assisted by his wife Ysabele and her fluency in numerous languages. The war was to feature in his fiction in novels such asiXPD, City of Gold and Goodbye Mickey Mouse, which he once told me was his favourite book, and spectacularly in his ‘alternate history’ SS-GB.

I first met Len in The Travellers’ Club in London, where he researched the background to the opening of his novel Winter – specifically New Year’s Eve 1899 in Vienna. Although we had corresponded via email through our mutual friend Harry Keating we had never actually met and Len must have sensed my nervousness, for he quickly set me at my ease and offered me his basic rules when attending any sort of business meeting: ‘Have a clean shirt, wear a tie and always be polite.’ I think he appreciated my reply: ‘Well two out of three ain’t bad’.

From then on we would meet for lunch whenever he was in London, and damn fine lunches they were even without alcohol. (I only ever saw Len drink once, a single glass of champagne at a lunch he hosted in Knightsbridge.) He introduced me to the cuisine of Anton Mosimann (and Anton himself) while I introduced him to the cooking of Marcus Waring, and though the food was good, it was the table talk which always made the occasion. 

At one lunch in a Japanese restaurant a discussion about the economy of Renaissance Florence somehow turned into an explanation (by Len) of how stolen money could be 'laundered' into US dollars in Vichy France. A month or so later, I asked him if I could use his idea as the basis of a plot. He agreed and it became the backbone of my novel Mr Campion's War.

On another occasion, I told him of a recent poll on Radio 5 to find the ‘best Bond villain’ and whilst Blofeld, Goldfinger, Oddjob, etc. all scored highly, one person voted for film producer Kevin McClory. I knew Len had known McClory, and worked with him on various Bond projects, and would be amused by the poll. He was, and immediately penned an eBook, James Bond: My Long and Eventful Search for his Father.

His stories about the film world and publishing in the Sixties were always entertaining, often self-depreciating and (almost) never rancorous. Although when published, Ipcress File was touted as the ‘anti-Bond’ and the media of the time would have loved a Fleming/Deighton confrontation. But Ian Fleming chose Ipcress as his book of the year for The Sunday Times and Deighton has credited the boom in spy stories in the 1960s to the success of the Bond films. He has always maintained that there were two strands: he wrote spy fiction, Ian Fleming (with many others aping him) wrote spy fantasy.

It was that definition which I used as a basic thesis in my history of British thrillers, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which I dedicated to Len Deighton. For that I remain eternal grateful, as well as for the many books he urged me to read (which I did) and the authors I should champion – Ted Allbeury being a case in point. And, of course, for the casual advice about writing and being an author which passed across those many tables.

I especially remember him going suddenly serious and asking if I ever suffered from ‘writers’ block’. When I said ‘no’, he seemed relieved and dismissed the idea as ‘the blank wall we secretly know is incompetence’. He scoffed at associating writers’ block with technology, from electric typewriters to word processors to laptops. ‘The only implements needed to write book are pencil and paper, everything else is luxury.’

Len Deighton wrote a lot over thirty non-stop years and I thought, as a long-time fan, I had read it all, but I discover one piece which I have missed, his editing of Drinkmanship in 1964, which sounds right up my street.

What a hero!

Remembering Joe Hartlaub [Sept 11 1951 - May 29 2025]

 

Shots Magazine’s editors Mike Stotter and I were devastated to hear the sad news of the passing of Joe Hartlaub, as were so many of us in the crime, mystery and thriller genre.

Apart from one of our Greatest Book Reviewers, specialising in Thriller Fiction, and a writer in his own right - he was a renowned attorney specialising in the Music Industry.

I was first aware of Joe’s reputation in the world of Thriller Fiction from Carol Fitzgerald’s Book Reporter. I enjoyed her weekly emails each and every Saturday Morning in my inbox; always seeking out Joe Hartlaub’s Thriller Picks and his reviews of newly published work.

Click Here, for Bookreporter.com  

I finally got to meet Carol and Joe in the summer of 2006, at International Thrillers’ [ITW] first convention, held at the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix in 2006. We were jurors at an event entitled “The Jack Reacher Trial” which featured two attorneys on opposite sides of the mock courtroom, one for the prosecution, and one for the defence of Lee Child’s character [played by the author himself]. The attorneys were played by legal thriller writers who were actually lawyers in their day jobs. I recall one being Paul Levine but sadly my memory fails to recall the second legal thriller writer.  

From that time onwards a friendship blossomed based on our love of all things bibliophilic.

Both Mike Stotter and I would enjoy meeting up with Carol and Joe on our annual excursions across the Atlantic at future Thrillerfests and Bouchercon conventions.

One of the most memorable times being Hat Shopping with Kelli Stanley and Joe in Cleveland Ohio, during Bouchercon 2012, as well as bumping into each other  several times during Bouchercon Indianapolis in 2009.

And the impromptu meeting on Bourbon Street in New Orleans in 2016  

Joe would send me a text message audio recording of himself singing me Happy Birthday. Shortly after learning of his passing, I learned he was sending these little audio clips to many of his friends and colleagues.

They always raised a smile.

Both Mike and I had been in touch with Joe just last month, discussing meeting up during the 2025 Bouchercon in New Orleans this coming September. This city on the Louisiana Bayou was one of Joe’s favourite cities in North America – probably due to its rich music heritage, especially of the Blues. Joe had explained that though excited at the prospect – especially as we’d not seen each other since 2016 – however he said he was a tad ‘under the weather’, but hoped to get better in time for September’s Bouchercon.

Sadly, we heard via Carol Fitzgerald that Joe passed away last week.

Joe’s Obituary is HERE fittingly hosted at The Times-Picayune of New Orleans.

“Joe graduated from the University of Akron in 1973 with a Bachelor of Science (Accounting) and obtained a Juris Doctorate from the University of Akron [School of Law] in 1977, when he began a legal career spanning five decades. The majority of his 48 years in practice were devoted to entertainment law, thanks in no small part to Joe's lifelong love of music and the written word. He took great pleasure in helping his clients and worked tirelessly on their behalf. “

Signing off, the obituary closed with Chuck Berry line >

"'C'est la vie,' say the old folks, 'It goes to show you never can tell.'"

The Complete Obituary is HERE

Apart from the memories Joe leaves behind, his blogposts at Kill Zone remain archived and can be accessed HERE and when Joe retired from book reviewing at Bookreporter, in the summer of 2021, Carol Fitzgerald organised a special feature entitled “Hats Off to Joe Hartlaub” in which she asked many writers and colleagues of Joe to write a little about what Joe Hartlaub’s work meant to them – and it’s a fitting tribute to this dear friend and colleague of the world of Thriller Fiction.

It can be accessed HERE

And finally let’s conclude with a song 

P D James (1920-2014) – A personal reminiscence by Mike Ripley and Obituary

Within two minutes of hearing the news on the BBC’s 2 p.m. bulletin yesterday, I was telephoned by the East Anglian Daily Times for a reaction to the death of Phyllis James.  This interest by a regional newspaper was no random act of news-gathering as Phyllis is revered in East Anglia partly as a former resident of Southwold and partly because several of her famous crime novels had atmospheric Suffolk settings, not the least of them being the coastal village of ‘Monksmere’ in her 1967 Unnatural Causes which begins with the famously gruesome opening: The corpse without hands lay in the bottom of a small sailing dinghy drifting just within sight of the Suffolk coast.

As she often said when asked the perennial question ‘How do you write your books?’ it was, for her, a question of place.  Only when she had fixed on a setting – and not before – did plot, characters, suspense, and solution begin to coalesce.  This was often, though not always, a distinctive physical, geographical place like the East Anglian coastline, which she caught so beautifully in Death in Holy Orders (2001) or other dramatic seascapes such as the Dorset coast of The Black Tower (1975) or ‘Combe Island’ off Cornwall in The Lighthouse (2005).  She proved to be just as comfortable describing (or more accurately, letting her characters observe) urban settings, notably Cambridge in high summer in An Unsuitable Job For a Woman (1972) and London – and in Original Sin (1994) specifically the River Thames.

Sometimes the setting was a specific place, and as Phyllis James wrote crime novels, it could be a specific place where something very nasty has taken place, as in the bloodstained vestry of St Matthew’s church Paddington in A Taste For Death (1986) with its two almost decapitated bodies.  I remember there was something of a furore when that book – with that opening chapter - came out for it gave lie to the suggestion that P. D. James was a writer of “cosy” mysteries.  True, she wrote traditional English detective stories and did so with a skill, which did – and will forever – rank with the best of Allingham, Marsh, Sayers and Christie but she was far from a cosy writer.  Murder, in her books, was never bloodless or provided simply as an artifice to the plot.

From Agatha Christie she learned the lesson not to make her series detective an eccentric, if not bizarre, character and from Dorothy Sayers she learned the danger of falling in love with her central protagonist.  And so her hero Adam Dalgliesh was, from the outset, created as a professional policeman with an established (albeit tragic) family history whose career loyal readers would follow as he ascended the giddy heights of Scotland Yard over the years.  His creator imbued him with the qualities she admired (in both sexes): intelligence, courage, sensitivity, and reticence.

When writing about this process and her own career in Talking About Detective Fiction (2009), she said, interestingly: If I started today it is likely that I would choose a woman, but this was not an option at the time when women were not active in the detective force.

Nor were they particularly dominant in crime fiction.  It is easy to forget that when P.D. James’ first Adam Dalgliesh novel, Cover Her Face, was published in 1962; the best-seller charts were dominated (and internationally dominated) by male thriller writers. Alistair Maclean, Hammond Innes, and Ian Fleming were well into their stride and the careers of Len Deighton and John Le Carré were just taking off.  True, Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh were still active, but there seemed to be a trend towards spies rather than detectives and exotic thriller locations, from the Arctic to the Amazon, rather than small English villages like St Mary Mead.  Also, most notable innovations in crime writing appeared to be taking place in America rather than Britain, spearheaded by Ed McBain and Ross Macdonald.

A woman writing traditional English detective stories with a strong sense of Christian morality seemed to be swimming against the tide, but that is exactly what Phyllis James did, although she once admitted to me that the real incentive to sell that first novel was to pay for a new carpet in the living room!

Although her skill as a writer was recognised by the critics, commercial success did not come overnight but by the time Anglia Television began to serialise her novels in the 1980s, she was well on her way to becoming a household name.  She won three Silver Daggers from the Crime Writers’ Association, though amazingly never a Gold Dagger – and equally surprisingly was never elected CWA Chairman, something I had to look up, as it seemed so unlikely.  She was, however, the 1987 recipient of the Cartier Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement though at that time, her writing career was probably only just approaching the halfway mark.

In a writing career spanning 52 years, she was not a prolific author – certainly not by crime-writing standards – producing 20 novels, 14 of which featured Adam Dalgliesh.

The first P.D. James book I read, though, was not a Dalgliesh but her stand-alone 1980 novel about adoption and ‘lost’ children, Innocent Blood.  To this day I think it remains my favourite and I was rather proud to hear Ruth Rendell, in a radio tribute to Phyllis yesterday, say that it was also her favourite.

I first met Phyllis through the Dorothy L. Sayers Society, of which she was the Patron for many years.  She gave the first annual Sayers Memorial Lecture at Witham in Essex (where Sayers had lived) and I gave the second.  We both returned to Witham in 2007 to launch the Essex Book Festival and, after the formalities were done and dusted, she joined me in an impromptu question-and-answer session with visitors to Witham public library.

When one would-be novelist asked, rather plaintively: “What do you have to do to write a book?”  Phyllis and I answered loudly and in perfect unison: “Read!” though we had not, honestly, rehearsed.

At the funeral of her friend and fellow Detection Club member Harry Keating in 2011, she gave a heartfelt oration of which I know Harry would have approved.  At the wake after the service she was naturally sombre, but as charming and polite as ever.  We talked about her forthcoming novel Death Comes to Pemberley and she hinted that not only did she have an idea for the ‘next Dalgliesh’ but also for the one after that.

I have no idea how far she got with the next Dalgliesh, but she always said in public that her detective hero “would die with her” and it seems, sadly as if he has.

I cannot say I knew Phyllis well.  We were of very different generations and traditions when it came to crime writing, but British crime writing in particular is a broad church and Phyllis was a charming, wise, and supremely talented pillar of that church.  I doubt we will see her like again.

-----

Pictures courtesy of Mike Ripley and the Shots Collective.

------

Phyllis Dorothy James, Baroness James of Holland Park, OBE, rose to fame for her series of detective novels starring policeman and poet Adam Dalgliesh.  James began writing in the mid-1950s.  Her first novel, Cover Her Face, featuring the investigator and poet Adam Dalgliesh of New Scotland Yard, named after a teacher at Cambridge High School, was published in 1962.  Many of James's mystery novels take place against the backdrop of the UK's bureaucracies, such as the criminal justice system and the National Health Service, in which James worked.  In 1991, she was created a life peer as Baroness James of Holland Park and sat in the House of Lords as a Conservative.

She revealed in 2011 that The Private Patient was the final Dalgliesh novel.  As guest editor of BBC Radio 4's Today programme in December 2009, James conducted an interview of BBC Director General Mark Thompson, in which she seemed critical of some of his decisions.  Regular Today presenter Evan Davis commented that "She shouldn't be guest editing; she should be permanently presenting the programme". During the 1980s, many of James's mystery novels were adapted for television by Anglia Television for the ITV network in the UK.  The BBC has adapted Death in Holy Orders in 2003, and The Murder Room in 2004, both as one-off dramas starring Martin Shaw as Dalgliesh.

Her novel The Children of Men (1992) was the basis for the feature film Children of Men (2006), directed by Alfonso Cuarón and starring Clive Owen, Julianne Moore and Michael Caine.  She wrote 14 novels featuring Adam Dalgliesh, 2 novels featuring Cordelia Gray and a number of non-fiction books.

P D James was the President of the Society of Authors between 1997 and 2013.  She was a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Arts.  She also held Honorary Fellowships of both St Hilda’s College Oxford and Girton College Cambridge to name a few.

Her books won a number of awards and were shortlisted numerous times as well –

1971 Best Novel Award, Mystery Writers of America (runner-up): Shroud for a Nightingale

1972 Crime Writers' Association (CWA) Macallan Silver Dagger for Fiction: Shroud for a Nightingale

1973 Best Novel Award, Mystery Writers of America (runner-up): An Unsuitable Job for a Woman

1976 CWA Macallan Silver Dagger for Fiction: The Black Tower

1986 Mystery Writers of America Best Novel Award (runner-up): A Taste for Death

1987 CWA Macallan Silver Dagger for Fiction: A Taste for Death

1987 CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger (lifetime achievement award)

1992 Deo Gloria Award: The Children of Men

1992 The Best Translated Crime Fiction of the Year in Japan, Kono Mystery ga Sugoi! 1992: Devices and Desires

1999 Grandmaster Award, Mystery Writers of America

2010 Best Critical Nonfiction Anthony Award for Talking About Detective Fiction

2010 Nick Clarke Award for interview with Director-General of the BBC Mark Thompson whilst guest editor of Today radio programme.

In 2008, she was inducted into the International Crime Writing Hall of Fame at the inaugural ITV3 Crime Thriller Awards.

The Guardian obituary can be found here and here.  From the Independent and the Telegraph.  The BBC also have a video interview with Nick Higham who talks about her work.