This is the second novel in the second trilogy about 40-something British intelligence agent, Bernard Samson. At the end of its predecessor he was on the run in Berlin, an arrest warrant issued by his own side for treason, presumably because he had been investigating (and publicising) a top secret slush fund which his wife – Fiona, who we saw defecting to the Russians in the first trilogy – helped set up and administer.
Summary
To cut a long story short, in this novel we find out that his wife is what he had come to suspect, a triple agent – working for British Intelligence for ten years, while all along pretending to be a KGB spy and sending the Russkies important information, then (at the climax of the first novel) pretending to be forced to flee after her own husband ‘outed’ her as the senior ‘mole’ in the Department – but secretly continuing to work for us from the senior position she is given in the KGB’s East Berlin office.
The Plot
Deighton is much more attracted to cosy domesticity than life on the edge. It’s a little disappointing that his ‘life on the run’ amounts to simply holing up in a dirty squat in a rundown part of Berlin for a week or two. There’s a colourfully seedy scene of Samson sitting drinking with Rudolf Kleindorf, ageing owner of a dance and strip club where old lags come to exchange gossip and information. And we accompany him back to his dirty, noisy squat. But we and Bernie have barely experienced the lowlife for more than a few pages before the head of Berlin Office, Frank Harrington, sends a man to fetch him to witness an interrogation. Oh. They knew where he is all along.
Rather puzzlingly, Samson goes along to watch this interrogation, the questioning of an East German operative. The only bit of interest being when he indicates a photo of Erich Stinnes (a KGB agent who featured largely in the first trilogy) and makes a throwaway reference to seeing him using a ‘white powder’. Drugs? More to the point, security is so lax that Samson overhears a remark which makes it clear this isn’t a defector but an ongoing agent who is about to be sent back to the East. Why did Frank invite him to watch this? Were a few snippets of information mentioned in the session somehow important? Who to?
Teacher
The Department employee who took him there – Teacher – drives him back to his own apartment to meet his wife and have lunch. Much more energy goes into describing the Teachers’ apartment and his wife, Clemmie’s, unhappiness at the coldness of Berlin and the rudeness of Berliners, than did painting Samson’s life in hiding. Domesticity and marital relations, soft furnishings and food are more persuasively described than jeopardy. (Later, we learn from one of the countless gossipy conversations Samson spends the book having, that Clemmie has run off with an American record producer who was passing through Berlin.)
His old mate Werner says, ‘This is silly, why don’t you come back and stay at Tante Lisl’s boarding house?’ and so Bernie moves back into his old room at the top of the building and sees for himself the ‘improvements’ Werner is making to the old place. And realises that Werner has fallen in love with Lisl’s rather stern niece, Ingrid, daughter of her sister Inge. (We learned a lot about the backstories of these two ladies in Deighton’s epic novel about Germany 1900 to 1945, Winter). Zena, Werner’s tough, young, self-centred wife, appears to have flown the coop.
Rehabilitation
Soon enough Head of Berlin Office Frank Harrington drops by and says London Central have made Samson an offer: sign all the official secrets stuff and resign: he can work out his notice in a menial job but retire on a full pension. They’ve never trusted you, Frank explains, since your wife was exposed as a KGB spy.
But Bernard refuses; resigning would admit some degree of guilt and collusion. ‘Well, go back anyway, the charges have been dropped,’ Frank says. Just like that. On the run, hiding out — oh you can go back now. It’s all very anti-climactic. No chases, no shootouts, no tension. Samson flies back to London, is reunited with his girlfriend, Gloria, and his kids, Sally and Billy, then goes back to the office where everyone treats him as if nothing had happened at all. Bit puzzling.
He’s called into the office of a previously unmentioned character, the Deputy Controller of Europe who turns out to be a tough, balding Australian, Gus Stowe. In the usual roundabout, tortuous way these conversations take place, Bernard realises he’s being sent on a hush-hush mission to Vienna, code name Fledermaus.
Stamps in Salzberg
He flies to Vienna and then on to Salzburg where, amid all the Mozart kitsch, he meets his contact, Otto Hoffmann, who turns out to be a stamp collector attending a big five-day philatelic auction. There is a lot – an awful lot – of detail about stamp collecting. (There is a lot of detail about stamps sent from Zeppelins before the war, which may or may not be a reference to the involvement of the Winter family with zeppelins, as described in Winter.) Bernard is given money and told to bid for one particular lot, an envelope with rare stamps on it.
In the actual auction, Samson is surprised when someone else bids getting on for double the price he was instructed to offer and wins the envelope. Samson tracks down the American collector who made the successful bid, Bart Johnson, and they both go to the cashier where you pay and collect your item, only to find someone else claims to have paid more and made off with it. Johnson is furious. Samson tags along with him out of curiosity (what’s going on?) and they go back to the hotel where they’re both staying and make a date to meet for drinks and dinner. Bernard is back in his room freshening up when he hears a (small) explosion, runs along the hall and finds Johnson has been the victim of a particularly nasty type of bomb, planted in the hotel electric shaver. It has blown his hand and face off. As other guests come pouring in, Samson makes good his escape wondering (like the reader) what the hell is going on.
The man who had given him the instructions about bidding for the envelope had also given him instructions about who to take it to in Vienna, one Baron Staiger. Bernard flies to Vienna, takes a cab the scheduled apartment and walks up to meet Baron Staiger who turns out to be – no other than Otto Hoffmann.
In another of the surreal scenes which litter these novels, Staiger is holding a super-refined party for Vienna’s upper crust in which Bernard feels very out of place, and which climaxes with the arrival of the triumphant soprano from the nearby opera house. Only when the party is quite over does Staiger talk to Bernard and declares himself pretty relaxed about the loss of the envelope – because he has it right here in his pocket! He had heard the Americans were going to bid for it so he was the other, mystery, bidder on the phone who drove the price way beyond Bernard’s limit, and ducked in to claim it before Johnson made it to the claims desk.
Staiger opens the envelope and it contains Czech security passes for himself and Bernard. Why, the reader asks, was this ridiculous charade necessary, except to pad the novel out with colourful scenes in Salzburg, a surreal stamp collecting convention, and the utterly unnecessary murder of an American?
Into Czechoslovakia
Next day Staiger drives Bernard across the border into Czecholsovakia (lots of local description, lots of Deighton-esque history of the Sudetenland under the Nazis and then under Stalin) accompanied by a Czech security car and then up to a mountain cabin which is crawling with security men, guns and ferocious guard dogs, before depositing Bernard outside a farmhouse.
Bernard goes in to find his wife Fiona who proceeds to confirm all his suspicions: she is a triple agent, she is so sorry for all the deceit and worry but they couldn’t tell him, her life depended on him acting genuinely outraged (the KGB have been tailing and watching his reactions to her desertion), and now she is coming back, in just a few weeks she’ll be back in the UK: ‘Oh I do love you darling,’ ‘and I love you, darling’.
This is even more surreal than the stamp collecting convention. If she’s such a professional, if this is the climax of 10 years of planning, why oh why is she risking it all for a rushed sentimental meeting with her husband? In full sight of about twenty Czech security police who will report every centimetre to their KGB bosses? Isn’t the room bugged? Won’t they guess what she’s doing? Did this clandestine meeting really require all the rigmarole of the stamp collecting convention and bidding? Why doesn’t she simply complete her mission and arrive back in London safe and sound, without the exploding stamp collectors and high risk tryst?
Gratifying though it is to have Bernard’s (and our) suspicions confirmed, this whole scene blows an enormous hole in the novel’s credibility. The one thing she asks him to do is get back from her sister, Tessa, the expensive fur coat her father bought her. The reader immediately thinks it must contain some microfilm or equally precious artifact.
Part two
Staiger drives Bernie safely back to Vienna and he flies back to London, to the embrace off his girlfriend Gloria, and the children, but inside is in complete turmoil. He tells no one about seeing his wife.
Instead the next 30 pages or so describe Bernard and Gloria attending a carefully choreographed dinner party at his boss, Dicky Cruyer’s house, complete with detailed description of every course of the meal and Dicky’s difficulties ‘carving’ the enormous poached salmon which is the opening course. It’s in this chatty, gossipy, homely surrounding that, as so often, a number of the guests (who are all ‘in the business’) discuss recent events and broach new ventures. Thus Samson finds himself asked to help the CIA in the form of Posh Harry, the Hawaiian fixer we met in the first trilogy and who played a central role in the odd Californian excursion in Spy Hook.
Parties
No sooner is this dinner, complete with cigars and port for the men, more or less over than Gloria begs Samson to be allowed to go on to a party his brother-in-law George Kosinski (the used car salesman) and wife Tessa, are going to. Very swanky place in Pimlico and a swanky party hosted by a German prince, known to all and sundry as Joppi.
Later, driving Bernard home, his brother-in-law confides that he thinks Tessa is on drugs: did he notice the slightly hysterical atmosphere at the party? People were taking drugs upstairs. And did he notice the sinister guy with a beard fringing his chin? Tessa’s been getting friendly with him; George thinks he’s a dealer and is selling her the stuff.
Rolf Mauser
The next day Samson meets Rolf Mauser, yet another ageing survivor of the war, who tells him Kleindorf, the nightclub owner we met in the first chapter, is dead. He was smuggling drugs. The official cause of death is suicide by overdose but Mauser has information one of his dancers injected him with raw heroin. Mauser explains the raw heroin arrives in East Berlin, then is smuggled West to be refined, before being smuggled back again for sale.
So is the novel about drug smuggling between East and West Berlin?
Thurkettle
Samson goes for the boozy lunch with Posh Harry that was arranged at Dicky Cruyer’s party but, on returning, begins to be questioned and then interrogated by Harry’s boss, John Brody. Turns out Johnson, the American stamp enthusiast in Salzberg, was a CIA man tasked with bringing in another ex-Company man, one Thurkettle, a hardened murderer and hit man who has gone rogue. Almost certainly it was Thurkettle who murdered Johnson. The Americans are suspicious of Samson’s involvement. He realises the description of Thurkettle fits the man George thinks is peddling drugs to Tessa.
Silas Gaunt
Next Samson motors out to the Cotswolds, to the country house of long-retired old Silas Gaunt, who, like so many of the characters, knew his father. In a refreshing bit of plain speaking the ailing Gaunt – warned by his doctor he is at death’s door – confirms all Samson’s suspicions: Fiona is a triple agent; she was recruited at Oxford; only old Gaunt, the doddery DG and Samson know the truth. If they all died, Fiona would be trapped. Gaunt makes Samson witness him signing a long document which he says is a detailed account of Fiona’s case which will exonerate her.
Over the next few days Samson has to process this devastating information. So his wife is a heroic agent, good. But she hid it all from him for ten years, and deserted him and his children without a qualm. Did he ever really know her? Could he ever trust her again? What are his feelings for her and how does effect his feelings for young Gloria, who is making such an effort to be a good lover and surrogate mother to his two children?
A few days later his boss, Dicky Cruyer, orders Samson to accompany him on a trip to Berlin. Dicky is actually hoping to make it a dirty weekend with Tessa, and Samson is cross at being pulled in as some kind of accomplice, but the jaunt is justified by meetings with Frank. After the usual lengthy chat, reminiscence, drinks and cigars, Frank eventually comes out and tells Samson he is being instructed to drive a van which is going to pick up an agent from the other side, accompanied by the young desk officer Teacher who we met early in the novel. If there is a problem, Teacher has instructions to kill the agent rather than let him fall into the hands of the opposition.
The reader begins to have a bad feeling the agent will be Fiona and that something will go wrong and he will have to shoot her…
Finale
The novel does climax in a bloody mess. Werner, his old friend, organises a big fancy dress party for the opening of the new, repainted Tante Lisl guesthouse. 150 guests are fired up and dancing as a fierce thunderstorm breaks outside. In the middle of the noise, Teacher comes looking for Samson: he’s received the signal – they must go to the rendezvous. The only catch is Teacher has come to the party in a joke gorilla costume and no-one has a suit for him to change into; in fact, he almost comes to blows with Werner trying to nick one of the latter’s suits, and is eventually forced, very unhappily, to drive on this important mission wearing his gorilla costume. And, at the last minute, Tessa, in a flighty yellow dress and stoned out of her mind, insists on climbing into the back of the van and no-one can persuade her out.
Shootout
Teacher, Samson and Tessa drive slowly in the transit van in the thundering rain along the West-heading Autobahn looking out for a parked car. Eventually they see lights and a darkened car parked by a load of giant earth-moving machines in an area roped off for repairs. It is pitch black and pouring down with rain. Teacher gets out and is moving towards the car when lights go on, there are shots, Teacher hits the car a few times before being himself shot down. Tessa comes floating out the back of the van and waltzes towards the German car when she is shot twice with a shotgun which tears her apart, blood pouring over her dress. Another woman’s voice shrieks, it is Fiona. In the drenching rain and darkness and confusion Samson has made it up onto the tracks of a giant digger and uses its raised shovel to steady his aim as he shoots and kills the two East German men. One of them is Erich Stinnes; Samson shoots him in the neck and watches a great spurt of blood shoot up against the motorway lights.
But there was a third man, now hidden, who had used a silencer. Samson stands stock still in the pouring rain waiting for something to happen. The man shouts over to Samson in an American voice. It is Thurkettle the assassin. Samson shouts to Fiona to move from the East German car to the van and start the engine. When she’s done so, he makes a run for the other van door. There are no shots. They’re being allowed to escape. They pull away from the scene of the shootout and Fiona drives through the rain and into West Germany in silence, her knuckles white against the wheel. In the rear view mirror they see a great gout of flame and hear an explosion: the East German car has been blown up along with all the evidence. Thurkettle has stage managed the whole thing…
Soldiers greet them at the checkpoint. Fiona is sedated, and they are loaded aboard a plane headed for America.
Aftermath
The novel ends with Samson and Fiona holed up in the luxury safe house-cum-prison on the California coast which we first saw in the previous novel. It is owned by millionairess Mrs O’Raffety, and the base where Bret Rensselaer is undergoing his long, painful rehabilitation after being shot at the climax of London Match. Turns out the whole thing – the Fiona defection – was his scheme and now it falls to him, as her case officer, to debriefing her. Days, weeks, and months go by. They are both trapped. Samson gloomily realises they might be there for years.
Samson learns the story being put about is that he has run off with Tessa. This explains their joint disappearance. Fiona slowly thaws out and talks to him. He tells her he thinks Tessa’s drug addiction was fostered as part of the plan. Tessa was lured to Berlin by a combination of Dicky and Thurkettle (who Samson is now certain he saw at Joppi’s party and who George warned him about), and encouraged to get into the van. Then she was deliberately murdered, so that her body would be found in the burnt-out car, and the enemy think it was Fiona.
Can the Department have done that? Murdered one sister to save the other? Bernard and Fiona huddle under blankets one cold Californian night looking out past the security fence into the darkness of the ocean with no hope.
This is a decisive shift in the tone of these novels. Whatever happens now, the murder of her sister will cast a long shadow over Fiona’s mental health, their marriage and numerous other characters. Will they ever be able to get back to England, their children and a normal married life? It seems impossible.
Atmosphere of old
I was too old for rough stuff: too old, too involved, too married, too soft. (p.37)
I was too old to get angry twice in one day. (p.219)
So many of the characters are old old old:
- Tante Lisl and her sister Inge, into their 80s
- Frank Harrington past retirement age in his middle 60s. ‘Frank was too old to be involved with Operations. Too old, too squeamish, too weary, too good-hearted.’ (p.271) ‘Frank was past retirement, soon he would be gone.’ (p.272)
- John ‘Lange’ Koby in his seventies (p.44)
- local fixer Kleindorf in his 70s
- harsh old Wehrmacht officer Rolf Mauser in his 70s
- Bart Johnson looks in his 60s
- London CIA man John Brody, ‘He was old, a bald man with circular gold-rimmed glasses…’ (p.209)
- Silas Gaunt, long since retired colleague of his father’s, ‘… was old and becoming more exasperating every time I saw him…’ (p.221) ‘… now he was old and he’d withdrawn into his own concerns with ageing, sickness and death.’ (p.224)
- ‘Some people – including me – had said that Bret Rensselaer was too old ever to become a full-time Departmental employee again.’ (p.301)
- ‘Mrs O’Raffety, the artistic old lady who owned the place…’ (p.303)
It is the central aspect of Samson’s character, indeed the main premise of the whole series, that Samson is the son of a man who was at the heart of British Intelligence in Berlin immediately after the war, and grew up among his father’s friends and colleagues, who provide the novel with its sense of breadth and historical depth.
But it inevitably means that, by the later 1980s, a lot of these characters are due to die off and with them will go the emotional background, the memories of his Berlin childhood and everything which makes Bernard Samson such a unique character.
Soon – very soon – Silas and Whitelands and all they meant would have vanished from my life. My mother was old and sick. Soon Lisl would be gone, and the hotel would be unrecognisable. When that happened I would no longer have any connections with the times that meant so much to me. (p.239)
Insofar as he is the nexus of all these relationships, a product of this history, Samson’s character – and the worldview of the novels which relies so heavily on the long shadow of world war two – has a limited shelf-life.
Related links
Grafton paperback cover of Spy Line
Len Deighton’s novels
1962 The IPCRESS File Through the thickets of bureaucracy and confusing misinformation which surround him, an unnamed British intelligence agent discovers that his boss, Dalby, is in cahoots with a racketeer who kidnaps and brainwashes British scientists.
1963 Horse Under Water Perplexing plot which is initially about diving into a wrecked U-boat off the Portuguese coast for Nazi counterfeit money, then changes into the exposure of an illegal heroin manufacturing operation, then touches on a top secret technology which can change ice to water instantly (ie useful for firing missiles from submarines under Arctic ice) and finally turns out to be about a list – the Weiss List – of powerful British people who offered to help run a Nazi government when the Germans invaded, and who are now being blackmailed. After numerous adventures, the Unnamed Narrator retrieves the list and consigns it to the Intelligence archive.
1964 Funeral in Berlin The Unnamed Narrator is in charge of smuggling a Russian scientist through the Berlin Wall, all managed by a Berlin middle-man Johnnie Vulkan who turns out to be a crook only interested in getting fake identity papers to claim the fortune of a long-dead concentration camp victim. The Russians double-cross the British by not smuggling the scientist; Vulkan double-crosses the British by selling the (non-existent) scientist on to Israeli Intelligence; the Narrator double-crosses the Israelis by giving them the corpse of Vulkan (who he has killed) instead of the scientist; and is himself almost double-crossed by a Home Office official who tries to assassinate him in the closing scenes, in order to retrieve the valuable documents. But our Teflon hero survives and laughs it all off with his boss.
1966 Billion-Dollar Brain The Unnamed Narrator is recruited into a potty organisation funded by an American billionaire, General Midwinter, and dedicated to overthrowing the Soviet Union. A character from Funeral In Berlin, Harvey Newbegin, inducts him into the organisation and shows him the Brain, the vast computer which is running everything, before absconding with loot and information, and then meeting a sticky end in Leningrad.
1967 An Expensive Place to Die A new departure, abandoning all the characters and much of the style of the first four novels for a more straightforward account of a secret agent in Paris who gets involved with a Monsieur Datt and his clinic-cum-brothel. After many diversions, including an induced LSD trip, he is ordered to hand over US nuclear secrets to a Chinese scientist, with a view to emphasising to the Chinese just how destructive a nuclear war would be and therefore discouraging them from even contemplating one.
1968 Only When I Larf Another departure, this is a comedy following the adventures of three con artists, Silas, Bob and Liz and their shifting, larky relationships as they manage (or fail) to pull off large-scale stings in New York, London and the Middle East.
1970 Bomber A drastic change of direction for Deighton, dropping spies and comedy to focus on 24 hours in the lives of British and German airmen, soldiers and civilians involved in a massive bombing raid on the Ruhr valley. 550 pages, enormous cast, documentary prose, terrifying death and destruction – a really devastating indictment of the horrors of war.
1971 Declarations of War Thirteen short stories, all about wars, mainly the first and second world wars, with a few detours to Vietnam, the American Civil war and Hannibal crossing the Alps. Three or four genuinely powerful ones.
1972 Close-Up Odd departure into Jackie Collins territory describing the trials and tribulations of fictional movie star Marshall Stone as he betrays his wife and early lovers to ‘make it’ in tinseltown, and the plight he currently finds himself in: embroiled in a loss-making production and under pressure from the scheming studio head to sign a lucrative but career-threatening TV deal.
1974 Spy Story The Unnamed Narrator of the Ipcress spy novels returns, in much tamer prose, to describe how, after escaping from the ‘Service’ to a steady job in a MoD war games unit, he is dragged back into ‘active service’ via a conspiracy of rogue right-wingers to help a Soviet Admiral defect. Our man nearly gets shot by the right-wingers and killed by Russians in the Arctic, before realising the whole thing was an elaborate scam by his old boss, Dawlish, and his new boss, the American marine General Schlegel, to scupper German reunification talks.
1975 Yesterday’s Spy Another first-person spy story wherein a different agent – though also working for the American Colonel Schlegel, introduced in Spy Story – is persuaded to spy on Steve Champion, the man who ran a successful spy ring in Nazi-occupied France, who recruited him to the agency and who saved his life back during the war. Via old contacts the narrator realises Champion is active again, but working for Arabs who are planning some kind of attack on Israel and which the narrator must foil.
1976 Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy (aka Catch a Falling Spy) The narrator and his CIA partner manage the defection of a Soviet scientist, only for a string of murder attempts and investigations to reveal that a senior US official they know is in fact a KGB agent, leading to a messy shootout at Washington airport, and then to an unlikely showdown in the Algerian desert.
1977 Fighter: The True Story of the Battle of Britain Abandoning fiction altogether, Deighton published this comprehensive, in-depth and compelling history, lavishly illustrated with photos and technical diagrams of the famous planes involved.
1978 SS-GB A storming return to fiction with a gripping alternative history thriller in which the Germans succeeded in invading and conquering England in 1941. We follow a senior detective at Scotland Yard, Douglas Archer, living in defeated dingy London, coping with his new Nazi superiors, and solving a murder mystery which unravels to reveal not one but several enormous conspiracies.
1979 Blitzkrieg: From the Rise of Hitler to the Fall of Dunkirk Another factual history of WWII: Deighton moves quickly over Hitler’s rise to power and the diplomatic bullying of the 1930s, to arrive at the core of the book: an analysis of the precise meaning of ‘Blitzkrieg’, complete with detailed notes on all the weapons, tanks, artillery and hardware involved, as well as the evolution of German strategic thinking; and then its application in the crucial battle for the river Meuse which determined the May 1940 Battle for France.
1980 Battle of Britain
1981 XPD SIS agent Boyd Stuart is one of about 20 characters caught up in the quest for the ‘Hitler Minutes’, records of a top secret meeting between Hitler and Churchill in May 1940 in which the latter was (shockingly) on the verge of capitulating, and which were ‘liberated’ by US soldiers, along with a load of Nazi gold, at the very end of the war. Convoluted, intermittently fascinating and sometimes moving, but not very gripping.
1982 Goodbye, Mickey Mouse Six months in the life of the 220th Fighter Group, an American Air Force group flying Mustangs in support of heavy bombers, based in East Anglia, from winter 1943 through spring 1944, as we get to know 20 or so officers and men, as well as the two women at the centre of the two ill-fated love affairs which dominate the story.
1983 Berlin Game First of the Bernard Samson spy novels in which this forty-something British Intelligence agent uses his detailed knowledge of Berlin and its spy networks to ascertain who is the high-level mole within his Department. With devastating consequences.
1984 Mexico Set Second of the first Bernard Samson trilogy (there are three trilogies ie 9 Samson books), in which our hero manages the defection of KGB agent Erich Stinnes from Mexico City, despite KGB attempts to frame him for the murder of one of his own operatives and a German businessman. All that is designed to make Bernard defect East and were probably masterminded by his traitor wife, Fiona.
1985 London Match Third of the first Bernard Samson spy trilogy in which a series of clues – not least information from the defector Erich Stinnes who was the central figure of the previous novel – suggest to Samson that there is another KGB mole in the Department – and all the evidence points towards smooth-talking American, Bret Rensselaer.
1987 Winter An epic (ie very long and dense) fictionalised account of German history from 1900 to 1945, focusing on the two Winter brothers, Peter and Paul, along with a large supporting cast of wives, friends, colleagues and enemies, following their fortunes through the Great War, the Weimar years, the rise of Hitler and on into the ruinous Second World War. It provides vital background information about nearly all of the characters who appear in the Bernard Samson novels, so is really part of that series.
1988 Spy Hook First of the second trilogy of Bernard Samson spy novels in which Bernie slowly uncovers what he thinks is a secret slush fund of millions run by his defector wife with Bret Rensaeller (thought to be dead, but who turns up recuperating in a California ranch). The plot involves reacquaintance with familiar characters like Werner Volkmann, Frau Lisl (and her sister), old Frank Harrington, tricky Dicky Cruyer, Bernie’s 23-year-old girlfriend Gloria Kent, and so on.
1989 Spy Line Through a typically tangled web of incidents and conversations Samson’s suspicions are confirmed: his wife is a double agent, she has been working for us all along, she only pretended to defect to the East. After numerous encounters with various old friends of his father and retired agents, Samson finds himself swept up in the brutal, bloody plan to secure Fiona’s escape from the East.
1990 Spy Sinker In the third of the second trilogy of Samson novels, Deighton switches from a first-person narrative by Samson himself, to an objective third-person narrator and systematically retells the entire sequence of events portrayed in the previous five Samson novels from an external point of view, shedding new and sometimes devastating light on almost everything we’ve read. The final impression is of a harrowing world where everyone is deceiving everyone else, on multiple levels.
1991 MAMista A complete departure from the Cold War and even from Europe. Australian doctor and ex-Vietnam War veteran Ralph Lucas finds himself caught up with Marxist guerrillas fighting the ruling government in the (fictional) South American country of Spanish Guiana and, after various violent escapades, inveigled into joining the long, gruelling and futile trek through the nightmareish jungle which dominates the second half of the novel.
1992 City of Gold A complex web of storylines set in wartime Cairo, as the city is threatened by Rommel’s advancing Afrika Korps forces in 1942. We meet crooks, gangsters, spies, émigrés, soldiers, detectives, nurses, deserters and heroes as they get caught up in gun smuggling, black marketeering and much more, in trying to track down the elusive ‘Rommel spy’ and, oh yes, fighting the Germans.
1993 Violent Ward Very entertaining, boisterous first-person narrative by Los Angeles shyster lawyer Mickey Murphy who gets bought out by his biggest client, menacing billionaire Zach Petrovitch, only to find himself caught up in Big Pete’s complex criminal activities and turbulent personal life. The novel comes to a climax against the violent backdrop of the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles in April 1992.
1993 Blood, Tears and Folly: An Objective Look at World War II
1994 Faith Return to Bernard Samson, the 40-something SIS agent, and the world of his friends and family, familiar to us from the previous six Samson novels. Most of the characters (and readers) are still reeling from the bloody shootout when his wife returned from her undercover mission to East Germany at the climax of the previous novel. This book re-acquaints us with all the well-loved characters from the previous stories, in a plot ostensibly about smuggling a KGB colonel out from the East, but is really about who knows the truth – and who is trying to cover up – the real cause of the Fiona-escape debacle.
1995 Hope 40-something SIS agent Bernard Samson continues trying to get to the bottom of the death of his sister-in-law, Tessa Kosinski and is soon on the trail of her husband, George, who has gone missing back in his native Poland.
1996 Charity Ninth and final Bernard Samson novel in which it takes Bernard 300 pages to piece together the mystery which we readers learned all about in the sixth novel of the series, ie that the plot to murder Fiona’s sister, Tessa, was concocted by Silas Gaunt. Silas commissioned Jim Prettyman to be the middle-man and instructed him to murder the actual assassin, Thurkettle. Now that is is openly acknowledged by the Department’s senior staff, the most striking thing about the whole event – its sheer amateurish cack-handedness – is dismissed by one and all as being due to Gaunt’s (conveniently sudden) mental illness. As for family affairs: It is Bret who ends up marrying Bernard’s one-time lover, the glamorous Gloria; Bernard is finally promised the job of running the Berlin Office, which everyone has always said he should have: and the novel ends with a promise of reconciliation with his beautiful, high-flying and loving wife, Fiona.
Books & Boots 