‘If there’s one thing I pride myself on, it’s being able to sort out complicated technical material so it can be understood by the layman.’
‘Yes, you have a mechanical mind, Dicky, I said.
‘So why don’t you wind it up this week? Yes, I’ve heard that joke, Bernard. It’s time you got some new ones.’
Naughty Bernard: no coffee for you today! (p.275)
Recapping the Bernard Samson novels
Deighton is happier in his first-person narratives. This book’s predecessor, Violent Ward, also a first-person narrative, was warm and funny, unlike the two before that, MAMista and City of Gold, which felt hard-hearted, cold and cruel.
This is the first of the third and final trilogy of novels starring 40-something British intelligence officer Bernard Samson and it is, as most of its predecessors in the series, told in the warm, friendly, ironic tones of Bernard himself.
Bernard lives in London and works for MI6. In the first trilogy (Berlin Game, Mexico Set, London Match) his gorgeous, clever wife Fiona was exposed as a high-level ‘mole’ in the Department and forced to flee in a hurry to East Berlin. He is understandably upset she has lied to him for so long and finds himself falling for a new, rather gorgeous young Department employee, Gloria.
In the first two novels of the second set (Spy Hook, Spy Line) Bernard began to suspect – and then had it abundantly confirmed – that Fiona was in fact a triple agent and had been working for us all along. Her defection, and all her ‘spying’ against us before it, had been stage-managed solely to allow her to go East posing as a hero of Socialism, adopt a high-level KGB role in East Berlin, and then spy for us. Although this revelation explains lots of things which have been puzzling Bernard, it in some ways makes her deceit and betrayal even worse. In the second trilogy young Gloria moves in with him and becomes a new mother to his two young children, Billy and Sally.
Eventually, after several hard draining years in East Berlin, Fiona’s mission there is concluded and the Department arranges for her return. But the rainswept night of her final escape back from the East to our side turns into a bloodbath: Samson and Fiona manage to escape but the young agent accompanying Bernard – and Fiona’s sister, Tessa, who had drunkenly tagged along for the ride – are shot dead in a confused shootout, as are the East German agent Stinnes and another bystander, Harry Kennedy.
After Bernard and Fiona have fled the scene, the ex-CIA psychopath-cum-hitman Thurkettle who, unknown to both of them, has been masterminding this carnage, burns Tessa’s body in one of the cars left at the scene, and throws the bodies of British agent, Stinnes and Harry into a deep ditch – part of the roadworks where the whole shambles took place – where they will be covered with concrete and never found. He then motorcycles off to meet the middle-man who is due to give him his money – only to be himself assassinated and his body hidden. The whole sequence is shockingly brutal and cynical.
Still reeling from this bloodbath, the reader progresses to the third book of this second trilogy, Spy Sinker, which abruptly departs the storyline altogether and a) is told in the third person b) goes all the way back to 1977 to recap the events which led to Fiona’s ‘defection’. In line with my theory about Deighton’s points of view, this third-person narrative is much more detached and harder-hearted than the previous five, warm and chatty first-person narratives. It reveals that just about everyone in his life has lied to and betrayed Samson, who emerges as an unwitting pawn in numerous scams and stratagems, and paints a very unpleasant picture of human nature.
Among many other revelations is that it was the head of the Department himself, the D-G, and nice old Silas Gaunt, who cooked up the plan to smuggle Fiona back out of the East and conceived the idea of murdering her sister, Tessa, in order to sever her head and replace it with a model of Fiona’s head containing a set of teeth which perfectly match Fiona’s (!) The intention is to make the East German security police, the Stasi, think their defector boss, Fiona, really had died in a tragic car smash and burn-out. They will thus be lulled into a false sense of security and carry on using the same codes etc, while our chaps debrief Fiona in a safe house in California, and so we can go on tapping the Ossies for a bit longer.
For this end, apparently, Fiona’s own sister was deliberately murdered, decapitated and burned. Call me old-fashioned, but the horror, the cruelty, as well as the stupidity and callousness of such a plan burned out of me all sympathy for the MI6 depicted in these pages. And the charming, humorous banter of the earlier books, Bernard’s droll first-person commentary on his bosses and colleagues in ‘the Department’, was irreparably undermined.
Damaged mood
So when we open this novel, the first in the third and final trilogy, to find Bernard’s narration picking up the story in late 1987 – cheerfully telling us he and Fiona have more or less recovered after a long period of recuperation and debriefing in California – and are now back in London, and back at work together – the reader cannot read his breezy tones in the same way as before. We now know his point of view is limited and plain wrong about numerous key issues. We know he is the victim of a terrible conspiracy. Moreover:
a) Even a reasonably gullible reader like me cannot really believe that a woman can see her own sister shot dead in front of her (some of Tessa’s blood spattered onto Fiona’s coat and face), know it’s partly her fault, and then soon be completely back in the swing of the old job, fussing about the furniture and the trivia of office politics. It doesn’t hang properly. She would be devastated.
b) We, the readers, are nervously aware that, sooner or later, the secret of what happened to Fiona’s sister will come out – and the consequences will be terrible for everyone, including us.
The Bernard Samson universe
It’s a longish book, 360 pages, but it flies by. For some reason Deighton seems at home in this story and his prose is warm and relaxed. It’s tempting to say that the cocky young narrator of the Ipcress novels has grown up, has a wife and kids, but still has the same dry sardonic attitude towards his bosses or his pompous old father-in-law, here showing off about his expensive new artist’s ‘studio’:
‘It’s a place I come when I have to think,’ said David
‘Do you spend much time here?’ I asked.
Fiona glared at me but it went right over David’s head. (p.170)
Bernard and Fiona have been left a swish, Mayfair apartment in Tessa’s will, her husband – George Kosinski, Bernard’s brother-in-law – having moved to Switzerland for tax reasons. They are reunited with their children who, during their sojourn in California, have been looked after by Fiona’s pompous but wealthy father down in Leith Hill, Surrey. And they immediately go back to work full-time, getting reinvolved in Departmental politics, notably lots of fussing about whether their boss, Dicky Cruyer, will get promoted from Head of Ops to Deputy DG of the ‘Department’, and fretting about which office the newly-promoted Fiona will get, and so on. When I was off work with stress, I was only allowed back in stages, initially working part-time, given careful increments of work to re-adapt, monitored and subject to weekly meetings with HR to make sure I could cope. None of that here. Everything is back to ‘normal’ in one leap.
For example, Dicky hosts an excruciatingly embarrassing dinner party where his wife, fed up of all his affairs, is drunk and sarcastic in front of the usual characters – Bernard, Fiona, Gloria, Bret. There is a similarly fraught social Sunday at the father-in-law’s, attended by old Silas Gaunt, the shaggy, overweight, retired but still very influential eminence grise of the Service who we know, but Bernard doesn’t, conceived and carried out the entire Operation Sinker to send Fiona to the East and the blood-curdling plan to bring her back.
Early on Bernard flies back to Berlin where he stays with old Tante Lisl who we last saw wheelchair-bound but who’s had hip replacements and is noticeably more mobile and sprightly. He visits the elderly Frank Harrington, head of the Berlin Field Unit, friend of Bernard’s dad, still hankering after a move back to London and a ‘gong’. Then he hitchhikes down to Zurich to visit his best friend from his Berlin childhood, Werner Volkmann, who has left Lisl’s niece, Ingrid, to take up again with his youthful, go-getting but deeply untrustworthy girlfriend, Zena.
In other words, the old gang’s all here. The plot feels mostly concerned with taking Bernard to all his familiar places and touching base with all the faces we’ve gotten to know so well from the previous six novels, so that we can sink back into the warm comfort zone of the Bernard Samson soap opera.
There is a plot about spies and stuff but really, rather than a spy story which shows us some of the agents’ private lives, these novels feel more like a soap opera about a circle of middle-class people, with homes in Mayfair and the Home Counties, who have Sunday lunches, dinner parties, evenings in cooking and moaning about the office – and ever so occasionally, go off and do some dodgy dealing behind the Iron Curtain. All swathed in, delivered with, Samson (and Deighton)’s trademark dry humour.
As I said it, a movement in the next row of machines revealed the inquisitive and unfriendly eyes of a man named Morgan peeping over the top of the bull-pen. Morgan was a malevolent denizen of the top floor who was working on a PhD in gossip. (p.134)
Gloria
And threaded throughout the book is the domestic difficulty Samson has with the fact that, not only did he shack up with the gorgeous Gloria after Fiona ‘betrayed’ and ‘abandoned’ him, and end up falling seriously in love with her; but that, now Fiona is back, both women are working for the same Department, in the same building, on the same floor. Samson has painful conversations with Fiona, who can’t forgive him for ‘betraying’ her with another woman (er, hang on); and even more painful conversations with Gloria, who can’t bear it that she’s suddenly been shut out of his life.
The Gloria-Fiona thread is another way in which the novels feel more like a soap opera, with lots of tearful accusations and bitter recriminations etc, than a straight spy thriller.
(And there is a Gloria sub-sub-plotline: She refers now and then to her father, who was an émigré from Hungary, came to London as a trained dentist and ended up as a contractor to the Department, for example doing dental work on deep undercover field agents so their teeth looked like they’d had bad Eastern Bloc dental work. She mentions here and there that, while Samson was recuperating in the States, her father’s contract with the Department was terminated, very aggressively; officers came and removed all of his dental equipment. Thus rendered unemployed he has taken up the offer of a job back in Hungary, even though it is still communist and he might be running some risks for ever having left. –Now we know something neither Bernard or Gloria know, which is that the key to the whole swap-Tessa’s-body-for-Fiona’s plan was to supply Tessa’s corpse with a young woman’s head (burned beyond recognition) which contained teeth identical to Fiona’s – and, I don’t think it was 100% confirmed, but the strong presumption in the earlier novels is that it was Gloria’s father who supplied the head with the fake dental work ie he was a crucial element in the conspiracy and this explains, to the alert reader, why he has been shut down and shuffled off abroad. Where, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if something bad does happen to him as Gloria frets to Bernard in their one or two conversations on the subject.)
The plot
Collecting VERDI
Samson is asked to go over the Wall to visit a senior KGB man who might want to defect, code name VERDI. So he goes across the Wall and is driven to the rendezvous by a callow new agent, Robin. When they arrive at the spooky silent house in an East German village the guy they’re due to meet is dead in an armchair, his head blown off. As they leave, they are tailed by a car, so Samson stops on a deserted country road, gets out in an initially friendly way but then shoots at the car, hitting one of ‘their’ men, before jumping back into his own and screeching off.
The Delius network
Samson and Robin drive to a friendly church, the base of one of the many ‘networks’ we ran over in the East (this one code-named Delius). They are welcomed and sheltered by the pastor and this enables Deighton to expand on, or refresh our memories about, the Fiona-defecting plotline. To recap: Bret Rensselaer had identified a decade earlier that the East German churches might form a perfect channel of resistance to the communist regime. So Fiona was chosen to volunteer to spy for the KGB to build up a cover here in the West, before ‘defecting’ to the East, where she could take up her double agent role. There, from her senior position in East German intelligence, she began her real work for us, networking with German churches and encouraging them to speak out against the regime.
Fiona’s mission
You can see what Deighton is doing here, tying his heroine to actual developments in the real world, for the East German churches genuinely were among the focal points for growing resistance to the régime in the late 1980s. But, also in the real world, all the unrest – from churches to other civic groups, intellectuals and opposition parties – was only allowable because of the example of perestroika set by Gorbachev in Russia. It was Gorbachev lifting the lid which led to the collapse of the Eastern bloc, not the subversive activities of nice, public-school-educated English ladies. Deighton’s sleight of hand works… up to a point.
On a practical point: wouldn’t Fiona’s KGB bosses have noticed her anti-KGB activities? Just a little? Wouldn’t she have been very closely monitored indeed, followed every hour of the day, by her touchy new employers? She probably couldn’t go to the loo without them knowing: how, then, could she possibly have arranged meetings with all the leading subversive forces in the country and given them support, money, advice, without the KGB knowing a thing about it, in fact all about it? — Best to put the implausibility of the whole plotline to one side, and enjoy the show.
Rendezvous with Werner
After getting safely back to the West, Samson hitchhikes down to Zurich to see his old mate, Werner Volkmann. For some reason, on the way he has a punishing fight with the trucker who picks him up, leaving him uncertain whether it was an assassination attempt or just a psycho trucker. And the lift after that is with a police inspector who menacingly warns Samson that he better not cause any trouble or get arrested, or else he will have a hard time in the cells. Maybe these two encounters are to establish the tough, manly world of the thriller, the ‘real’ world of crime and law enforcement, of beatings-up on dark rainy nights, which we are meant to be in…
In Zurich there’s some business about safe houses, and having to contact Werner via secretive émigrés and the like, all enjoyable spy hokum, which gives way quickly to the two old buddies meeting up and having long chats about women and life. Werner has been sidelined by London, again (even though we know Werner was Fiona’s case officer, or official liaison channel with London, through her years in the East and so was, at one point, central to the biggest operation in MI6’s history). It feels like that has been quietly forgotten in order to restore the buddies-against-authority vibe Samson and Werner had in the earlier books. Much of the plot has a strong sense of déjà vu, not in the details, just in the feel and recurring situations. In fact more than once Samson himself comments on it, saying he feels like he’s been at this dinner party, or had this conversation with Frank, before. And he has. But the reader doesn’t mind because it’s all done with good humour and intelligence. We like these dinner parties. We like these clever conversations.
Dicky Cruyer’s plan
It transpires that Dicky Cruyer wants to make his name and secure promotion by smuggling VERDI out of the East. VERDI is something to do with the KGB’s vast new computer database and so would be able to tell us all their secrets. However, he was also involved in the investigation into Fiona / Tessa’s death. Samson keeps telling people, especially Werner, that deep down Fiona is traumatised and will never be the same. (That’s what Deighton has to have him say to give the novel some kind of psychological plausibility, but it doesn’t actually show it much. In all the conversations at home, in the office, dinners at home, meeting the kids, dinner parties out and Sunday lunches at her father’s, Fiona comes over as an absolutely normal, pukkah, upper-middle-class gel without a shadow of trauma. Deighton tells but doesn’t show her alleged unravelling.)
Meanwhile, we learn that Fiona hired an American ex-agent and freelance snoop, Timmerman, to go looking for Tessa out East. And late on in the novel we discover it was his body that Samson found at the rendezvous, not VERDI’s. Was Timmerman murdered because he had discovered too much? What does ‘too much’ actually mean? Remember, Samson himself doesn’t know anything about the conspiracy to murder Tessa and try and con the other side that her body was Fiona’s. (Most of this novel seems to be about the way various different characters either know this murderous truth and are probably hiding it (Rennsaeler? Frank Hutchinson? The DG?) or are blissfully ignorant of it and groping to find out (Fiona, Tessa’s husband George, and Samson himself)).
VERDI’s version
Eventually VERDI ie Andrey Fedosov is successfully smuggled out of the East and Samson and Werner are charged with looking after him, though Samson is very unhappy that it has to be in a Departmental flat in Marylebone instead of the big country estate surrounded by CCTV and security guards which they usually employ for the purpose. The latter, Dicky tells him, is being refurbished due to ‘asbestos in the roof’.
In one of his first presentations to our boys, Fedosov tells Werner and Samson that Tessa was never killed! At the confused shootout by the Autobahn in the rain, it was the KGB woman officer charged with getting Fiona back and despatched to intercept her as soon as the KGB knew she’d done a bunk, it was this KGB woman who was shot! What? And that the drunk Tessa we saw climbing into Samson’s transit van as he left a hotel party to collect Fiona, and who we saw shot in the confused handover, was not shot at all but seized by the opposition in all the confusion and taken to a Stasi interrogation centre. What? This is completely against all the versions of events we’d previously read. Can it possibly be true?
Either Deighton is giving himself an ‘out’, a way of providing the happy end to the Tessa affair that we softer-hearted readers would like to see pulled out of a hat. Or, more true to thriller conventions, Fedosov has been allowed to defect and to tell this story in order to put Samson off the grisly reality which Spy Sinker seemed to describe: that Tessa was deliberately murdered on the orders of people in his own Department. This way it looks like the woman killed was a baddy and Tessa is alive: this gets the Department higher-ups off the hook and, hopefully, will ease Fiona’s guilt. Then if Tessa proves irrecoverable or her body turns up, it can conveniently be blamed on the evil KGB instead of our own bad guys.
A family affair
And so, despite cursory nods in the direction of glasnost and the vast social and political changes affecting the world in 1987, the plot has turned into an entirely family affair. Again. Maybe the whole trilogy will circle round the question: Who killed Tessa? Was she actually killed at all? Will Fiona’s investigations uncover the truth? Will the bad guys in the Department manage to keep the real events a secret? Will Samson get to the bottom of things or will he continue to be the patsy for much larger, much cleverer forces, that he was revealed to be in Spy Sinker?
Having told his version of the Tessa affair with a big smile on his face, Fedosov settles back into an armchair in the safe house, and is promptly shot through the heart by a long range sniper bullet. Werner and Samson throw themselves to the floor and crawl across to check but… yep, he was killed instantly. It’s almost as if someone wanted him to come West, tell his fiction about Tessa and then… bang!
The novel ends with Werner and Samson awaiting being called into the official enquiry into why and how they let Fedosov be assassinated. There’s another strong sense of déjà vu as, once again, Samson and his pal are in the doghouse – but also a familiar feeling that the entire trilogy will be about unravelling just one ‘secret’, as the previous trilogies – despite all the local colour – boiled down to one question: Is Fiona really a Russian spy?
Will Deighton manage to pull it off, to supply enough twists and turns to keep us reading, and yet deliver an outcome which is both unexpected and emotionally satisfying? The only way to find out is to read on, which is what makes this, like all the novels in the series, so fiendishly complex, entertaining and compelling.
Credit
Faith by Len Deighton was published by Harper Collins 1994. All quotes and page references from the 1995 HarperCollins paperback edition.
Related links
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 