In Len Deighton’s third novel, Funeral in Berlin (1964), the anonymous protagonist doesn’t disclose his name but he does reveal a little about what he is like and how he operates. ‘One of my great advantages in this business is that I look a little simple-minded; but I don’t stop there; I act a little simple-minded,’ he says. ‘I’m crafty, nasty, suspicious and irritable. I look under beds and I rap lamp-posts for hollow compartments. The moment that you think that you know who your friends are is the moment to get another job.’

That current job is spy and ‘this business’ is espionage. Deighton’s character is right to be suspicious: after all, suspicion is his profession’s stock-in-trade. But it can be an occupational hazard. For as Deighton’s other great hero, Bernard Samson, tells us in the author’s other great Berlin book, Berlin Game: ‘Suspicion went with the job, the endemic disease of the spy. For friendships and for marriages it sometimes proved fatal.’

Deighton, now 96, is the last in a long line of key British authors who wrote so well about spies and the ‘endemic disease’ that plagues them. That line stretches back to Joseph Conrad, John Buchan and W. Somerset Maugham; it continues to include Eric Ambler, Graham Greene and Ian Fleming; it then takes in John le Carré and Deighton. Each of these authors, in their own unique way, brought something new to spy fiction. Buchan specialised in spirited tales of high adventure, great escapes and derring-do. Ambler – for le Carré ‘the source on which we all draw’ and for Deighton ‘that master craftsman’ – depicted ordinary men in foreign lands who become willing agents or unwitting victims after being duped, enticed or coerced to leave their comfort zones and enter murky worlds of risk and intrigue. Fleming, who described his James Bond books as ‘straight pillow fantasies of the bang-bang, kiss-kiss variety’, presented his vision of espionage as a potent cocktail of thrills, sex, sadism, exoticism and glamour. Le Carré eschewed Fleming’s escapist fare for a more realistic take on the spying game. Instead of a handsome hero engaged in outlandish exploits while on Her Majesty’s Secret Service, le Carré created portly, owlish George Smiley and other unassuming joes and involved them in clandestine assignments or cloak-and-dagger skulduggery with operatives who were treacherous and duplicitous, evasive and manipulative, deniable and expendable.

Deighton’s spyscape is similar to that of le Carré. It comprises tangled webs, shifting alliances, bluffs and double bluffs. Events unfold against geopolitical upheavals, in particular the Cold War. Characters are divided by ideologies, steered by personal agendas or corrupted by political expedience. Both authors had more in common. They were near contemporaries (Deighton was born in 1929, le Carré in 1931). They produced the finest spy novels of their generation. In their later years, each writer’s back catalogue was reissued in Penguin’s Modern Classics range – proof, if it were needed, that these books were not disposable low-brow thrillers but rather expertly crafted literary fiction: novels that were packed with excitement and suspense but also infused with wit, intelligence, moral complexity and psychological insight into humanity’s capacity for conflict, secrecy and subterfuge.

However, with Deighton the le Carré comparisons only go so far. Le Carré’s trajectory through Sherborne boarding school, Oxford and then both MI5 and MI6 puts him at a distinct remove from Deighton, whose own formative years and journey to publication were devoid of establishment institutions. Crucially, unlike le Carré and many of those other spy writers, Deighton was never actually a spy. As a consequence, his spy books don’t draw on any experience of serving queen and country in British intelligence. Instead, they were informed, and enriched, by his extensive research and prodigious imagination. The combination of both yielded superlative results. His characters’ exchanges are skilfully relayed, their tensions deftly evoked. His tortuous plots can be hard to follow, but not to believe. His heroes ring true because they are flawed and grounded individuals, common-or-garden everymen who obey orders but also assert their own authority. We understand their motivations, identify with their words and deeds, and feel their pain. We come away from each of Deighton’s novels thoroughly entertained and a little more aware of the ways of the world and the vagaries of human nature.

Born in London, Deighton was an inquisitive child and an avid reader. His education was interrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War and at 17 he was conscripted into the RAF. Following his discharge, he studied at St Martin’s School of Art on an ex-service grant. In 1952 he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art. After graduating he ‘impulsively’ applied for a job as a flight attendant with British Overseas Airways and enjoyed exotic overseas travel. He later returned to his first love and primary talent, and pursued a short yet successful career as a commercial artist in both London and New York. His creative contributions in the fields of advertising and publicity were considerable: he produced designs and drawings for magazines such as Esquire, and illustrated over 200 book jackets for various British publishers, among them Penguin Books.

Some people set out to become authors. Deighton claimed he ‘stumbled into writing’. During a holiday on the French island of Porquerolles, he found himself with little to do. ‘So I whiled away the sunny days writing a story.’ Then in 1960 Deighton relocated to France, working as a freelance illustrator in an isolated cottage in the Dordogne. When the commissions dried up (‘art directors of advertising agencies and magazines all preferred to deal with artists they could shout at in person’) Deighton picked up where he left off with his uncompleted story. When the funds ran out, he left his rural retreat and returned to London where his story became a book.

Deighton called his novel The IPCRESS File. It was published in November 1962, one month after the release of the first James Bond film, Dr No. Here were two vastly different depictions of espionage. The Fleming adaptation was a glossy, splashy Technicolor adventure that took Sean Connery’s debonair yet deadly 007 from the baccarat tables in London to sun-drenched Jamaica, where he teamed up with a beautiful woman in a bikini on a beach and went up against a criminal mastermind with metal hands in an underground lair. In stark contrast, Deighton’s debut introduced an overweight and bespectacled working-class spy who was so ordinary he didn’t even have a name let alone a code number. Deighton plunged him into a twisting, turning plot that centred around a neutron bomb and the disappearance of biochemists. ‘It’s a confusing business’, the anonymous spook tells us at the outset. ‘I’m in a very confusing business.’

Deighton’s book became a bestseller. It also proved to be a game-changer, offering a new kind of spy novel, one that was grittier and more grounded than those that had gone before. Along with le Carré’s third novel, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, published one year later in 1963, The IPCRESS File set the template for modern spy fiction. The 1965 film version, made by Dr No’s co-producer Harry Saltzman, cemented the book’s reputation, elevated Deighton’s renown and reinforced just how far apart this spy world was to that of James Bond. The film retained the book’s darker tones and raw edges but also made some judicious modifications – including one regarding the hero’s identity. Michael Caine’s character was given the name Harry Palmer (‘my name isn’t Harry’, says the protagonist in the book, ‘but in this business it’s hard to remember whether it ever had been’). Caine’s casting also changed the hero from a northerner to a cockney. So well did Caine embody the character that it is hard not to visualise him as the central figure of the three spy novels that Deighton wrote after his debut. As we read the character’s lines, we hear Caine uttering them loud and clear – especially the more sardonic remarks, like this one from Funeral in Berlin: ‘I know everything about you from the cubic capacity of your Westinghouse refrigerator to the size your mistress takes in diaphragms.’

Deighton’s narrator’s voice, with its dry and droll delivery, powers those first four books. There are descriptive commentaries that seem straightforward but often come with a crafty payoff, such as here in The IPCRESS File:

The other three photos were also passport style – full face, profile and three-quarter positions of a dark-haired, round-faced character; deep sunk eyes with bags under horn-rimmed glasses, chin jutting and cleft. On the back of the photos was written ‘5ft 11in; muscular inclined to overweight. No visible scar tissue; hair dark brown, eyes blue’. I looked at the familiar face again. I knew the eyes were blue, even though the photo was in black and white. I’d seen the face before; most mornings I shaved it.

An actual commentary on shaving in Billion-Dollar Brain (1966) shows how the character’s self-deprecation and comic exaggeration make him personable:

It was the morning of my hundredth birthday. I shaved the final mirror-disc of old tired face under the merciless glare of the bathroom lighting. It was all very well telling oneself that Humphrey Bogart had that sort of face; but he also had a hairpiece, half a million dollars a year and a stand-in for the rough bits. I dabbed a soda-stick at the razor nicks. In the magnifying mirror it looked like a white rocket landing on the uncharted side of the moon.

The narrator also impresses by waxing enthusiastically on topics of interest to his creator, from technology to military history to cookery. (Deighton’s mother had been a professional cook and instilled in him a love of cooking – a subject he later explored with customary zeal in cookery books and his animated ‘cookstrips’ for the Observer.) But for all his know-how and warts-and-all candour, Deighton’s hero is an unreliable narrator whose commentaries should be sifted, not readily accepted. It isn’t that he deliberately sets out to hoodwink or misdirect us, rather that his outlook is hampered by blind spots. His entirely subjective account prevents him from presenting the whole picture or conveying the exact truth. Anomalies and distortions arise. As Deighton once explained: ‘What happens in The IPCRESS File (and in all my other first-person stories) is found somewhere in the uncertainty of contradiction.’ This makes for stimulating reading.

In 1967, with his fifth novel, An Expensive Place to Die, Deighton may or may not have created a new unnamed British intelligence officer. If the character is not the same hero from the previous four novels then it is safe to say he is a close cousin. He also appeared in three more novels, each time hiding behind a dubious alias; he, too, got caught up in complex games of double-cross. What was perhaps different with these books was the more pronounced series of echoes of the Second World War, many of them unsettling. ‘His hand trembled’, Deighton writes of a character in Yesterday’s Spy (1975): ‘he had to steady it with the one on which he always wore a glove – to hide the absence of the fingertips he’d left behind in an interview room of St Roch prison in wartime Nice.’ And in Twinkle Twinkle Little Spy (1976): ‘Dean was cutting a large truffle into slices as thin as a razorblade. He was using a wooden-handled folding knife, of the type the Wehrmacht issued to special units that had to cut sentries’ throats.’

Deighton used such flashbacks to good effect in his spy novels. However, he wrote about the war at length and with supreme authority in other books. There was a trio of non-fiction works that saw Deighton confidently assume the role of historian: in Fighter (1977) he told the unvarnished story of the Battle of Britain, revealing for the first time unwelcome truths about weak tactics and poor leadership; in Blitzkrieg (1979) he chronicled Germany’s military might and Hitler’s strategic errors; while in the magisterial Blood, Tears and Folly (1993) he provided a sweeping, searing overview of the conflict.

Some of Deighton’s fiction plays out during the war. For his seventh novel, Bomber (1970), he depicted a fateful day in the life of British airmen and German civilians in 1943. Deighton rotated the perspectives of a diverse range of characters throughout a devastating RAF bombing raid: ‘I wanted to emphasise the dehumanising effect of mechanical warfare’, he said. ‘I like machines but in wars all humans are their victims.’ Deighton imparted this mercilessly, articulating characters’ fears and anguish, and cataloguing cruel, arbitrary deaths, both on the ground and in the air. Some crew members meet graphic ends: ‘The leather-jacketed torso and masked head was staring over the gunsights as though ready to fire, but the lower part of him was not there. There was just a boggy puddle of bone splinters, blood and liquidized viscera dumped on the floor and dripping from the flare stowage.’ Others are dispatched coolly and calmly: ‘In the mysterious manner of explosions, it sucked the navigator downwards, while blowing the astrodome, and the wireless operator standing under it, out into the night unharmed. Although without his parachute.’

Not every spy novelist succeeds when venturing out into different thematic territory. Le Carré’s two spook-free titles consisted of a pallid mystery, A Murder of Quality, and a tedious tale of a love triangle, The Naive and Sentimental Lover. Deighton fared better. Bomber is one of his masterpieces. A markedly different but just as compelling 1940s-set novel appeared eight years later. Like Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle before it and Robert Harris’ Fatherland after it, SS-GB is a counter-factual work which imagines a world in which Britain surrendered and the Nazis won. Deighton opens with the new lie of the land: Churchill has been killed by firing squad, the King is imprisoned in the Tower of London, and despite the end of hostilities, curfews and rationing are still in place and a concentration camp has been set up. We follow Scotland Yard detective Douglas Archer as he traverses ruined streets, grapples with crooks, collaborators, resistance groups and his new SS superiors, all while hunting a murderer. The question is whether he can solve the crime, make sense of its political ramifications and avoid being ground up by ‘the repressive, death-dealing machinery of the Nazi administration’.

Several books found Deighton taking inspiration from past chapters in his life – Close-Up (1972), his sharp exposé of the movie industry, from his stint as a film producer and scriptwriter; Violent Ward (1993), his crime romp featuring street-smart, hard-headed LA lawyer turned sleuth Mickey Murphy, from his time based in California. The most memorable of these books was Deighton’s first departure from spies, his comic caper from 1967 about a trio of confidence tricksters on the make. Only When I Larf took shape from memories of the fraudsters he rubbed shoulders with when he was an art student living in Soho in the early 1950s. Silas, Bob and Liz slough off their real identities and slip on new guises as they go from hatching small-scale scams to more elaborate swindles. Deighton tempers the fun with moments of soul-searching. When Liz airs regrets at pulling con tricks, Silas is quick to put her at her ease. ‘I’ve been around a long, long time, and one thing I’ll tell you is true; there isn’t a man, woman or child in this world who can say they have never conned someone out of something. Babies smile for a hug, girls for a mink, men for an empire.’

But it is for his spy novels that Deighton will be remembered. His finest sequence began in 1983 with the superlative Berlin Game. After his run of books fronted by an anonymous agent, Deighton finally gave readers a first-person narrator that was more than a cipher. MI6 operative Bernard Samson had an identity, a personality and a backstory. He also had a daring assignment and a huge responsibility: to go to Berlin, where he grew up, and bring Brahms Four, a significant but possibly compromised intelligence asset, over the Wall and through the Iron Curtain to safety in the West. But there was further trouble on the home front, for suspicions were festering about a Russian mole that had burrowed deep into London Central. Not only was that agent siphoning off secrets, they also had the potential to jeopardise Bernard’s mission and wreck his life.

After Berlin Game, Bernard returned a year later in Mexico Set and then in London Match (1985). In the former, Bernard is tasked with persuading enemy agent Erich Stinnes to defect; in the latter, he must ascertain whether Stinnes is a KGB plant playing an ingenious double game and feeding British intelligence misinformation. Deighton followed these three books up with two further trilogies – Spy Hook, Spy Line and Spy Sinker, and Faith, Hope and Charity. This roman-fleuve also took in one of his career highs. Winter (1987), a prelude to the Samson series, was an epic story that charted the fortunes of a Berlin family from 1899 to 1945 through the divergent trajectories of two brothers – one who embraces the rise of the Third Reich, the other who fights for its downfall. ‘Writing ten books about the same small group of people is a strange and demanding task,’ Deighton declared. To his credit, the strain didn’t show. With each instalment there was never any tapering quality and diminishing returns, just more enthralling drama featuring an increasingly jaded hero wrestling with machinations, manoeuvrings, rivalries and betrayals.

Collectively, the Samson novels constitute a gripping, high-stakes spy saga with a colourful cast of characters. Bernard’s fellow Cold Warriors in MI6 include his boss, the oleaginous arriviste Dicky Cruyer, and slick, wealthy American Anglophile Bret Rensselaer, ‘a “department head” looking for a department, and there was no more dangerous animal than that stalking through the corridors of Whitehall’. Also popping up again and again were Bernard’s childhood friend and fiercely loyal wingman Werner Volkmann, whose import-export racket frequently takes him back and forth through Checkpoint Charlie; the aged but indomitable Lisl Hennig, whose Berlin hotel offers Bernard sanctuary; the Falstaffian ‘benevolent old ruffian’ Silas Gaunt; and Fiona, Bernard’s wife, who takes unfaithfulness to a whole new level.

Everyone and everything in these books was seen through the eyes of Bernard. Deighton wrote that his protagonist’s ‘sceptical bite is the essence of the whole series.’ He elaborated on what he set out to achieve:

I believe a first-person story should have an admirable and heroic hero who is also fallible and imperfect. The central character must be created so that the reader sees through the explanations and excuses to recognize all the hero’s faults and frailties but loves him nevertheless. This is how I designed Bernard Samson, and in nine books had him develop and change under the relentless scrutiny of the reader.

At one juncture, Bret sums Bernard up as resourceful, determined, direct and single-minded – but then forces him to take the rough with the smooth. ‘On the other hand, you put yourself and your personal problems before the Department. You’re damned rude and I don’t find your sarcastic remarks as amusing as some of the others do. You’re insubordinate to the point of arrogance. You’re selfish, reckless, and you never stop complaining.’

Deighton ensured these novels were unified by a place as well as a person. ‘Berlin is like an ever-present character in all my Bernard Samson books’, he explained. ‘It hovers over the action like a storm cloud even when the action moves to a different locale.’ In Berlin Game, Berlin Station Chief Frank Harrington has this to say about his bailiwick:

I’ve spent most of my life reading about, looking at and talking to Berliners. I get my information from a million different sources and I study it. That’s what I do all day long, Bernard. I know Berlin like a librarian knows his shelves of books, like a dentist knows a patient’s mouth, like a ship’s engineer knows the bits and pieces of his engine. I know every square inch of that stinking town, from palace to sewer.

In Funeral in Berlin, we encounter a similar expert: ‘He knew every cellar, bandstand, bank account, brothel and abortionist from Potsdam to Pankow.’ Deighton’s knowledge of Berlin was just as impressive. This was a city he once lived in, a city he claimed to have an obsession with. As such, the Berlin of his books feels like a place he not only navigated but excavated. The Samson novels contain descriptive passages on the city’s topography but they are also infused with nuggets about, and meditations on, its architecture, language, politics, people, food, culture, crime, socio-economic problems and, above all, its history, particularly that of World War and Cold War. ‘Perhaps this was the only city in the world where you were safer in the dark’, says one character. Deighton brings Berlin brilliantly into the light.

Elsewhere, Deighton turned other locations into vividly rendered backdrops, from the jungles of South America in MAMista (1991), to the seething hotbed of spies, journalists, prostitutes, adventurers and Egyptian nationalists that makes up wartime Cairo in City of Gold (1991), to the microcosm of America in the form of a US Army Air Force base in East Anglia in Goodbye Mickey Mouse (1982). Deighton’s original details heighten moods and actions. In An Expensive Place to Die, the narrator takes in the sights, sounds and smells of Paris one evening: ‘The Arc was astraddle the Étoile and the traffic was desperate to get there. Thousands of red lights twinkled like bloodshot stars in the warm mist of the exhaust fumes.’ In Horse Under Water (1963), we are told that Marrakech in summer ‘was buzzing with flies and conversation; cafés, restaurants and brothels had standing room only; the pickpockets were working to rota’. Meanwhile, in Billion-Dollar Brain, London in March ‘looked like the bed of a drained aquarium. Continuous rain and frost had attached last summer’s hastily applied paint. The white bones of the city were showing through its soft flesh, and lines of parked, dirty vehicles looked abandoned. At Charlotte Street the staff were rubbing their hands together to keep them warm and wearing that martyred expression that other nations keep for sieges’.

For Deighton, places could be sources of a narrator’s dry wit. ‘September is the time many visitors choose to visit Poland,’ we learn in Hope. ‘It was during September half a century ago that German visitors, with Stukas, Panzers and artillery, came.’ A woman asks the protagonist of Twinkle Twinkle Little Spy where he lives in London and gets the response: ‘The part of Fulham where people write Chelsea on their notepaper.’

When not showing characters getting their bearings and mapping their surroundings at home or abroad, Deighton artfully portrays them taking the measure of the people they interact with – finding out how they tick (‘You don’t live, you tick’, a woman says to the hero of Yesterday’s Spy: ‘you can tick-tock your life away…without any problems of conscience, or morals, or thought of tomorrow’) and whether they can trust them. Trust is hard won when someone has a different affiliation but also a different class.

It is Deighton’s shrewd treatment of class that sets him apart from his peers. Class was a bugbear for him and a thorny topic in his books. Like him, his heroes come from humble origins and are largely self-taught. They are frustrated by societal prejudices and unbridgeable class divides, and they don’t hide their resentments. ‘He had the advantage of both a good brain and a family rich enough to save him using it’, quips The IPCRESS File protagonist. ‘You’re bright as hell’, Bret tells Bernard, ‘despite your lack of proper schooling and the chip you have on your shoulder about it.’ When Bernard is passed over for promotion for not being an Oxbridge man, a colleague attempts to lessen the blow. ‘The Department has always been like that. Historically it was sound. Graduates from good universities were unlikely to be regicides, agrarian reformers or Luddites. One day it will all change, but change comes slowly in England.’

Change seems light years away for Bob, one of the confidence tricksters in Only When I Larf. The former jailbird is the polar opposite of fellow conman Silas, whose background comprises ‘Harrow, Oxford, Royal Armoured Corps, Alamein, D Day, the lot.’ Silas tries to remonstrate with his partner in crime by insisting that everyone has equal opportunities nowadays. ‘Sure’, scoffs Bob. ‘If they want to learn the history of the British Empire, simple addition and a few words of French, and become a foreman or a salesman. But the fellows who run things are still sitting in the Athenaeum and putting their sons’ names down for Eton. They are still taking the cream and running the country, but proles like me are supposed to be grateful for a chance to learn elementary algebra.’ When Silas argues that there has been a social revolution in the country, Bob refuses to be swayed. ‘A few cockney photographers and a Lancashire pop group make a lot of cash and get their pictures in the paper, and that’s the revolution, but it doesn’t fool me. It’s all a big, big con trick, bigger and more ruthless than we could ever dream of. Things haven’t changed a bit and there’s no sign that they ever will.’

Bob is just one of Deighton’s many characters whose fate matters to the reader. ‘I’m interested in what happens to people’, says a pilot in Bomber:  ‘I come from a long line of humans myself.’ We are interested in what happens to Deighton’s people because they emerge as well-drawn creations. They captivate us in various ways, getting their hands dirty in grubby, tawdry and perilous situations. They also deliver wry commentaries which, at their best, put us in mind of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe: ‘The stewardess brought the champagne. Her uniform was one size too small, and the hair-do three sizes too big’; ‘He was a big-boned man, his hair was cropped to the skull and his complexion was like something the dog had been playing with’. And they sing the praises of good food and drink and bewail second-rate slop (one spy grimaces at his ‘Nescafé-flavoured hot water’, another at ‘cold cheeseburgers in warm Cellophane’).

Deighton’s characters feel all the more real as they react to pressure. In his tale ‘Twelve Good Men and True’, Deighton writes about the effect of war on soldiers in India: ‘It made some men into maniacs and some into monks.’ In his 1974 novel, Spy Story, he puts his protagonist in a nuclear submarine in the treacherous dark depths of the Arctic Ocean and serves up one unnerving incident after another to destabilise him. ‘The Captain clamped his hand over his face as if he’d been hit, but I knew he was listening to the scrape of ice along the hull. It came scratching along the metal like predatory fingernails.’

Deighton hung up his pen decades ago, leaving readers with a richly diverse body of work, albeit one that is top-heavy with spy novels. Not that he ever defined them in that way. He called the Samson books comedy thrillers. One reader who told him that those novels were a social chronicle of the final years of the communist empires as seen from London, Berlin and Warsaw may be closer to the mark. Deighton has also said that every fiction book he wrote was, ‘to some extent a love story’.

Producing those books could be a long and painstaking process. ‘Writing books is like a spell on the battlefield’, Deighton once said. ‘For the first two or three books you survive largely by luck. After that the odds are against you, and you have to learn quickly and learn by narrow escapes.’ Deighton learned quickly but wrote slowly, in part because he was a meticulous planner who gathered, then worked from, copious notes, charts, diagrams, file indexes and even his own drawings.

In the end, it doesn’t matter how Deighton crafted them or how we categorise them; we have the books and that is enough. The Samson series remains a towering achievement. There is a moment in it when Bernard talks shop with his lover, Gloria, because ‘she couldn’t resist the temptation to play spies. Who can resist it? I can’t’. Fortunately for us, Len Deighton couldn’t resist it either.