I nodded and wondered where Posh Harry had got the idea that Bret was suspected of leaking to the Americans. Was that Lange’s misinterpretation or Harry’s? Or was it simply that no one could start to envisage him doing anything as dishonourable as spying for the Russians? And if that was it, was I wrong? And, if he was guilty of such ungentlemanly activities, who was going to believe it? (p.122)

The whole book – the entire trilogy – is like this. When he said X, did he really mean Y, or is he getting at Z, or am I misunderstanding and it’s all a plot to undermine A?

What [Bret] said about the radio made sense and I felt a bit better about it. But I noted the way he was going into bat for Stinnes. Was that because Bret was a KGB agent? Or simply because he saw in Stinnes a way of regaining a powerful position in London Central? Or both? (p.220)

A miasma of bluff and double bluff, of myriad interpretations of events and intentions, all rotating round the ideas of loyalty and betrayal. There is no particular military secret or big event going on (as, say, in a Frederick Forsyth thriller), there is just endless puzzling over whether this agent is telling the truth or is conspiring with that agent to create a deception in order to implicate a third agent and set the Department on a false trail. Unless the trail isn’t false and one or more of the agents is telling the truth… but then why did they say this? Or did he say that? Or she say the other? For 405 pages.

‘I’ve changed my mind about the whole business.’
‘The whole business? Her collecting that material from the car at the big party in Wannsee? Did she want to get arrested that night when we set it up so carefully and were so pleased with ourselves? Was that confession she gave you at some length – was it all set up?’
‘To implicate Bret? Yes, the Miller woman made a fool of me, Werner.’ (p.334)

Right up to the last few pages there are, as Samson understates it, ‘a lot of unanswered questions’ (p.389). It is not an action adventure novel, it is a puzzle. Or a series of puzzles which shift like a kaleidoscope as new events, and new snippets of information, continually realign the picture.

I poured myself a drink while I pulled my thoughts together. Was Bret admitting to me that he was a KGB mole? Had he come to me convinced that I was a KGB agent too? And how the hell was I going to find out? (p.346)

Sitcom

London Match is the third in Deighton’s trilogy of novels featuring sardonic, downbeat ‘spy’, Bernard Samson. Although the main theme is the bluff and double bluff which is the meat and drink of a counter-intelligence agency, in fact so much time is spent describing his personal life (children, nanny, sister-in-law, father-in-law, visits to the kids’ godfather out in the Cotswolds, and so on), and on office politicking among the small number of his colleagues in ‘the Department’ (Dicky, Bret, Frank), all of them having affairs or difficulties in their marriages, that the novels are settling down to feel like a soap opera or sitcom, with a small cast of characters we see over and over again, getting to know and enjoy their habits and tics and catchphrases – more The Archers than James Bond.

It was like that with all of us. We all knew each other very well; too damned well at times. (p.404)

Completely contrary to the blurbs on the back, I didn’t find this novel at all ‘bleak’ or ‘harsh’, I found it light and gossipy, immensely enjoyable and very more-ish. I can’t wait to read the next trilogy…

Timeframe

I was surprised to read that the escape of ‘Brahms Four’ – one of our top spies in East Germany, whose identification and flight is the subject of the first novel, Berlin Game – is here described as happening ‘a few short weeks ago’ (p.48). Does that mean the entire action of the middle novel, Mexico Set took place in a matter of weeks? On page 197 Samson says he’s been thinking about Bret and the possibility he had an affair with his wife ‘for the past few months’. So have all three novels taken place over the space of a few months at most? Months or weeks, the timeframe of all three novels is extremely compressed.

In a nutshell

Like the others in the trilogy, it can be summarised easily: having exposed his wife, Fiona, as a high ranking KGB mole in the Department (book 1), and organised the defection to our side of a KGB agent (book 2), Samson begins to suspect there is another mole at work, and the novel stacks up a lot of evidence to suggest it is his American superior, Bret Rensaeller.

The plot

The book opens with Samson and his old Berlin friend Werner Volkmann staking out a high-class party in Berlin where they proceed to arrest a senior aide in the Bundestag, on the basis of information supplied by the KGB defector Samson helped defect in Mexico Set, Erich Stinnes.

Mrs Miller

As a bonus, they catch a middle-aged Englishwoman, Mrs Miller, taking a security file from the aide’s car; Samson interrogates her and she breaks down to confess she is a long-time member of the British Communist Party and has been silly and naive and got caught up in regularly passing messages from London to the East. Samson is riveted to learn that she handled messages from London which came under two codenames. Two. One must have been his wife, Fiona: could she have been using two separate codenames? Unlikely. Could it be, then, that there were two moles in London Central?

He’s barely arrived back in London when Samson hears that Miller has tried to commit suicide (pills), and then that the ambulance she was being taken to hospital in has crashed into a Berlin canal. Damn. And double damn, because his boss orders him back to Berlin at Christmas to supervise the recovery of the ambulance… In a scene straight from a movie, Samson stands in the snow with a police inspector watching the big cranes winch the wreck up out of the oily black water: it is empty. Was she spirited away by the KGB, who always look after their own? That’s the last we hear of her for 300 pages…

Kidnap

While in Berlin there is an unusually violent and jarring scene where Samson realises he is being followed and then is suddenly seized, bound, blindfolded and smuggled through the Wall into the East. He wakens handcuffed in a cell, and can see into a neighbouring room, where he is horrified to witness a boy wrapped up and in what appear to be his son’s clothes, being injected by a nurse supervised by a KGB doctor.

Rarely for Samson he loses self-control, starting to shout his son’s name, ‘Billy, Billy’, in blind panic before the door opens and the big strong goon who we met at the end of Mexico Set, Moskvin, beats Samson up a little. Once our man is sat, panting recovering from his injuries, Moskvin tells him the KGB know London Central are planning to fill two vacancies which have come up at the Washington Embassy. ‘Apply for one’, he says. ‘No,’ says Samson.

‘We can pick you up any time we want’, says Moskvin grinning. ‘You, your girlfriend, your children, Any time. Think about it.’ And leaves the cell laughing, calling for the driver who will take Samson back through a checkpoint to the West… Scarey, but quickly forgotten in the giddy round of social life and office politics which continues as usual. The Washington gambit is never mentioned again. In fact the entire scene leaves no trace on the plot, like a hallucination.

Samson’s personal life

There is a lot of personal stuff around his flirty friendship with his wife’s sister, Tessa, and her husband George, the used car salesman, who we see in a number of sympathetic scenes and who Samson spends some effort trying to reconcile. But the main thread in his personal life is that Gloria Kent, the stunning 20-year-old secretary he was flirting with in the last book, has definitely fallen in love with him and they are an item. Improbably. As is the way, she is soon nagging that he’s putting on weight (the same accusation was made against the Ipcress File narrator all those years ago) and nagging that she wants to move in completely and nagging that she wants to get married, which he refuses. There are tears before bedtime.

The defector Erich Stinnes

Samson and others in the Department are frustrated that Stinnes is being held out at the prison-like Berwick House where the clumsy Debriefing Team are getting little out of him. Eventually Samson overcomes various objectors to get Stinnes released to a cosy safe apartment in Notting Hill Gate (with a Special Branch minder), takes him out for a stylish dinner (well, a curry) and Stinnes responds by starting to talk.

The case against Bret

Meanwhile, there’s a continuous drip-drip throughout the book, in various scenes and conversations, interrogations and implications, which appear to throw up evidence incriminating Bret, reinforcing the suspicion planted in Samson’s mind by the Miller woman.

• Samson visits Lange, a disgruntled American who was recruited by Samson’s father and was successfully running a number of networks after the war, when along came Rensaeller from London with instructions to ‘de-Nazify’ and break them all up: or was it at the behest of Moscow? Bret later gives his version – that Lange was a black market mobster, and he was specifically tasked with decriminalising or dismantling his criminal networks… or so he says…
• Then, another American, Posh Harry, CIA, shows Samson a photocopy of a Cabinet Office briefing about a security exercise carried out on West German military bases, which has ended up in Moscow. ‘You have a mole’, says Posh Harry. And Samson engineers an interview with a redoubtable senior secretary at Number Ten who confirms that this particular copy must have come from Rensaeller’s office…
• Later on, tricky Dicky Cruyer adds his two-pennyworth by recalling to Samson an occasion decades earlier, in Kiel, when a defector they were swapping for a captured agent of ours, appeared to recognise Bret but, at a signal, switched to blank non-recognition. Aha. It all makes sense to Dicky now…
• Two-thirds through the novel a new front opens up, when Stinnes gives his interrogators detailed information about a spy network working around a Cambridge research institution. Uncharacteristically, Bret, the smooth-talking desk jockey, says he will handle the field operation this entails, personally. He chooses Ted Riley, an aged security man who (like so many of the characters) knew and worked for Samson’s father, to go with Samson.
  • The first step is to break into the safe in a solicitor’s office in Cambridge in order to take a load of papers relating to the institution. This goes disastrously (and rather puzzlingly) wrong when the safe turns out to be booby-trapped and Riley and the safe-cracker Bret had imported to carry out this ‘routine job’ are blown to smithereens. The small group we always see meeting and conspiring – Bret, Dicky, Frank and Samson – are shaken.
  • But Bret insists on taking part in a further operation (which, again, wasn’t quite explained, or I didn’t quite follow). They arrange to meet some of Stinnes’ contacts in a laundrette in Hampstead – Bret and Samson waiting in the dingy interior with a laundry bag at the bottom of which is a bundle of cash, Stinnes hidden outside in a car with a minder. This, also, goes disastrously wrong, when the ‘contacts’ turn out to be two thugs in balaclava masks carrying sawn-off shotguns: they’re in the middle of demanding the money and Bret has frozen with fear, when there is a loud explosion – the car Stinnes and his minder were in has exploded, giving Samson the chance to pull his gun, shooting one goon, then chasing the other up a darkened stairwell and shooting him as well. Samson drags the stunned Bret outside where they are amazed and relieved to find Stinnes still alive – the minder pulled him out of the car at the first sign of trouble. Into the spare car they bundle and race off.

What the hell is going on? Is there a Cambridge circle of spies? Is Stinnes’ information genuine? Or are these deliberate traps he’s inventing? Did he somehow tip off Moscow about the break-in to the solicitors’ office so they could booby-trap it? But how, Stinnes is under 24 hour surveillance, surely he couldn’t communicate with anyone? And who were the goons who turned up in the laundrette? More KGB thugs? Or is Bret the mole? Did Bret take personal charge of these (disastrous) operations in order to scupper them? But why risk himself, and put himself in the firing line to take the blame?

These and other questions, and all possible permutations of them, are what Samson discusses at length with his boss Dicky, with Werner, with his lover Gloria, with Frank, with Silas Gaunt at his country mansion, each of them confusing the picture with additional information or conflicting interpretations.

Superficial incidents aside, it is the same basic plot as the first novel: not a ‘whodunnit’, a ‘whoisit‘.

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Dramatis personae

Personal life

• Bernard Samson – 40-something intelligence agent, sardonic, clever, tough and, I’m beginning to realise, immensely talkative. In this book’s 400 pages there’s no-one he doesn’t discuss his theories with – Tessa, Gloria, Silas, von Munte, Werner, Zena – about the only person who doesn’t get dragged into his constant theorising about what’s ‘going on’ is the plump nanny from Devon.
• Fiona – his wife who also worked in the Service and was revealed, in Berlin Game, to be a KGB agent, and so fled behind the Curtain.
• Billy and Sally (8) – Bernard and Fiona’s children, living with Samson in his central London house, looked after by the plump nanny from Devon, Doris.
• Tessa – Fiona’s younger sister, posh, feisty, her marriage to George is on the rocks, she fancies Bernard like mad, but is having an ill-judged affair with Dicky Cruyer.
• David Kimber-Hutchinson – very well-off father of Fiona and Tessa, determined to take custody of his grand-children.
• George Kosinski – Tessa’s husband, a Polish immigrant and very successful used car salesman who Tessa is serially unfaithful to.
• Gloria Kent – luscious young secretary who falls in love with Samson at the end of the previous novel and is now seriously infatuated with him, wanting to move in and completely redesign his life.

The Department

• Richard ‘Dicky’ Cruyer – Oxford man, Controller of German Stations, Samson’s immediate boss, fussy, self-interested. Samson hates these smug, self-satisfied, patronising Oxbridge-educated desk men.

‘Let me tell you something, Bernard,’ said Dicky, leaning well back in the soft leather seat and adopting the manner of an Oxford don explaining the law of gravity to a delivery boy… (p.28)

• Frank Harrington – pipe smoking, 60-year-old head of the Berlin Field Unit (the job Bernard’s father had way back), fanatical Duke Ellington fan. Proves loyal in the book’s closing section.
• Tarrant – Frank’s inscrutable valet at his big country house out at Grunewald.
• Bret Rensselaer – mid-fifties, confident American (an American high up in MI6?), head of the Economics Intelligence Committee of SIS, sleek, suspicious. His plans took a knock with the defection of the agent called Brahms Four in Berlin Game, upon whose steady flow of economic intelligence about the Russkies Bret had built a little empire within SIS. In this book evidence mounts up which appears to incriminate him of also being a mole…
• Morgan – creepy assistant to the ailing Director-General and therefore powerful.
• Silas Gaunt – retired legend in the Department, living in a massive ramshackle house – Whitelands – in the Cotswolds, who Samson visits in each novel for a symbolic Communing with the Elders, in this novel bumping into the agent, Brahms Four, who Samson smuggled out of East Berlin in Berlin Game.
• Henry Tiptree – contemporary of Dicky’s at Balliol college, Oxford, and now SIS’s man in Mexico, crops up here in some meetings and committees.
• Ted Riley – old-timer who (like so many) worked for Samson’s father, but after getting caught doing a bit of black marketeering, was pushed sideways to become security at the safe house at Berwick House. As such he accompanies Stinnes to the London apartment to guard him and then is tasked with helping Samson in the raid on a Cambridge office, in which he is blown to smithereens.
• Sir Henry Clevemore – Director-General of the Department, who Samson thinks is more or less gaga. It is a little bizarre to portray the head of Britain’s intelligence service as a senile fool.

Other characters

• Werner Volkmann – Samson’s oldest friend from his Berlin childhood, big, bearlike, Jewish, he runs a successful if unofficial import-export agency into East Berlin but is keen to work for (and be paid by) the Department. In the later parts of the novel he and Samson have several really long sessions drinking and reminiscing about their childhood escapades in post-war Berlin, interspersed with the usual thorough review of what’s ‘going on’.
• Zena, Werner’s wife, young tough, ambitious. Show me the money. Improbably, in the first novel she had a brief affair with ageing Frank Harrington. In the second novel she fell passionately in love with the defector Stinnes (well, the money he stood to gain).
• Lisl Hennig – old lady in Berlin whose house Samson remembers growing up in when his dad moved the family there after the war but which has become a rather run-down boarding house and is where Samson always stays in Berlin, rather than the ritzy hotels he has the expenses for.
• Lothar Koch – 80-year-old friend of Frau Hennig.
• John Koby aka Lange or ‘Lofty’ – 70 year old Yank, recruited by Samson’s dad but then dropped for alienating American intelligence. Still bitter, but as the novel progresses we learn he was in fact using his position to become a big player in the Berlin underworld.
• Posh Harry – flash American ‘businessman’, knows everyone, can fix anything.
• Erich Stinnes – thin professional KGB man who Samson first met when he was being held by him in Stasi headquarters at the end of Berlin Game, and who Samson persuades to defect in Mexico Set, and who is now the centre of London Match, as he leaks information to his interrogators. But is it the real thing – or is he supplying deliberate disinformation to help discredit the totally innocent Bret Rensselaer?

Finale

Things move swiftly to a climax. The interrogation of Stinnes is handed over to a joint committee from the Department and MI5 and Stinnes makes more admissions implicating Bret, who is promptly placed under house arrest. He manages to escape, cadging a flight with a friend with his own plane, out of England and turns up looking worse for wear in Berlin, at Frau Lisl’s where Samson is staying.

Samson had just reluctantly seen Werner off on a trip to the East, because Werner had spotted the Mrs Miller from the start of the novel not at all drowned and dead but happily working in the east Berlin Town Hall. He is going back over to find out more.

Next day we discover Werner has been seized by the Stasi. Bret’s panic fear about being arrested has made Samson decide which one of the two possible theories about Stinnes he believes: Bret is not a mole, the evidence from Mrs Miller (staged), from Lange (personally biased) and Posh Harry’s document (a set up) is all a put-up job, and Stinnes is no defector but sent to discredit Bret and undermine the Department.

But now his old friend Werner is being held, and so Samson, in Berlin, contacts Frank and recruits him for a desperate gamble. He persuades Frank to pull rank and get Stinnes transferred out to Berlin, while he sends messages to the other side that he’s ready to do a swap.

At a ritzy West Berlin hotel Fiona and an entourage of KGB heavies meet him. During the negotiations for the exchange of Werner and Stinnes, Samson gets Fiona alone in a hotel room for an intense couple of pages in which the entire freight of personal and professional betrayal intensify into a multi-leveled moment of tension, stress, anguish, old love and determined hard-headedness.

Her readiness to make the exchange confirms that Stinnes is a stooge and effectively exonerates Bret, thus making all his colleagues back in London look like fools for believing the defector. But then, driving on the way to the exchange point, there is an accident which the KGB heavy, Moskvin, who’d accompanied Fiona on the trip, takes to be an attempt on his life. He leaps out of the car, runs off into the busy Berlin streets, shooting at his pursuers – Samson, Bret, Frank and numerous Berlin Office staff. In fact from nowhere it turns into a cinematic chase through crowded streets with shots going off in all directions. Some innocent bystanders as well as some of our boys are shot – including Bret, who is seriously injured – before Moskvin is himself shot dead.

The exchange goes ahead anyway, Werner for Stinnes, Werner confirming that Stinnes is greeted like a conquering hero on the East side. In the hotel room Fiona had said her condition for exchanging Werner wasn’t Stinnes – it was that Moskvin be bumped off. Now, whether by intention or lucky accident, that has happened. Could it possibly be that the entire sequence of events starting with Stinnes’ defection was designed solely to get Moskvin off Fiona’s back and give her unrestrained control of the East German setup? What an elaborate plan?

On the last few pages Samson and his cynical old mate Werner sum up what has happened. Was it, as Werner claims, game, set and match to the KGB? Did they get their high-ranking spy – Fiona – back to them with no loss, while using Stinnes to sow confusion and distrust (not least between the Department and MI5 who have seen our chaps’ incompetence at close quarters)? Or is it, as Samson insists, game, set and match to us, because we exposed Fiona – forcing her to leave in a rush without taking incriminating documents – OK, we were taken in by Stinnes but in the end exposed him, and have emerged stronger?

Even at the end it hasn’t ended: even when it’s all over the questions, and the maze of multiple interpretations, continues. As it does in life…

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Expertise

Man of the world As pointed out in my review of the previous Samson novels, the thriller writer (or his protagonist) need to show us he is a man of the world, an expert in many forms of knowledge, and Deighton is a very knowledgeable writer. Thus the text is dotted with offhand insights and knowing asides, especially about his specialist subject, Germany, German history, culture and language.

[von Munte] nodded sadly. ‘Yes, Saupreiss,’ he said, using the Bavarian dialect word for Prussian swine. (p.54)

[Frau Koby] was a small thin woman, her face pale like the faces of most Berliners when winter comes. (p.83)

The Handschlag, the hands slapped together in that noisy handshake with which German farmers conclude a sale of pigs. (p.84)

She had the flat features, narrowed eyes, and pale colouring that are typical of people from Russia’s eastern Arctic. (p.101)

Berliners give themselves wholeheartedly to everything they do: Berlin opera and concert audiences cheer, boo, jeer or applaud with a mad tenacity unknown elsewhere. (p.109)

I’ve never been to Berlin so I’ve no idea whether any of this is true, but it sounds good and makes our man sound like a native and an expert.

Foodie We know Deighton has special knowledge and expertise when it comes to cookery and cuisine because of his successful cook books. No surprise, then, that his narrator has needle-sharp, accurate knowledge of all things gastronomic.

‘Brötchen,‘ she said. Zena was born and brought up in Berlin, but she didn’t call the bread rolls Schrippe the way the rest of the population did. (p.19)

Some Kipfel on a silver platter. Klara knew that the little crescent shaped shortcakes were Werner’s favourites. (p.340)

Old and tired Probably the cliché of the thriller/spy genre is the way the hero always feels old, old and tired – indicating to us safe, boring readers what an action-packed life he’s led, what terrible things he’s seen, what a battering his body and soul have taken.

When he thought I wasn’t observing him, I could see the signs of that energy flagging. Stinnes was growing tired. Or old. Or frightened. Or maybe all three. I knew the feeling. (p.186)

I looked at the dangers now and shuddered. I looked at many such previously encountered dangers now and shuddered; that’s why I was no longer suitable for employment as a field agent… I should have noticed the car at the start. I was becoming too old and too careless… (p.97) [The KGB man said] ‘No gun, Samson? This is not the expert we’ve heard so much about. You’re getting old and careless.’ (p.99)

We get the picture. He has lived more than we ever will. (As an aside, is the repetition of ‘old and careless’ within two pages deliberate or an indication that these long (402 pages) novels were written and published at speed?)

Men and woman Part of this old-hand-ish, seen-it-all-before, jaded attitude is the easy generalisations about men and women which stud the text. In fact, in line with the way at least half the text is about the private life of Samson, Gloria, his kids and nanny, his father-in-law, his sister-in-law Tessa and her lover Dicky and her husband George the car salesman, etc etc, there are as many or more sentences and paragraphs about relationships, about men and women, as there are about spies, the CIA, SIS or KGB.

Women are always attracted by purposeful masculine strength, organising ability, and the sort of self-confidence that leaves everything unsaid. (p.132)

It was only a matter of time. The urge to reform the male is something no woman can resist. (p.163)

‘[Posh Harry] is a slippery bastard,’ I said. But I wouldn’t deliver him to Morgan.
‘It might be him or you,’ she said with that ruthless simplicity that women call feminine logic. (p.181)

Why did women always feel the need to write letters when ending an affair? (p.283)

Did all wives fear and resent the friendships that came before marriage? (p.384)

Like all women she was tyrannised by her biology. (p.385)

These doubtful generalisations, generally about women, are just the most prominent parts, the tips of the great icebergs of text dealing with personal relationships, with love and fidelity and betrayal etc, especially now Samson is sleeping with a 20-year-old secretary and feeling guilty about it.

If you’d told me that these aspects of my love affair with her were only what could be expected when a man of forty falls in love with a woman young enough to be his daughter, I’d have agreed with you. I worried about it constantly and yet I always ended up asking myself whether such elements of paternalism weren’t to be found everywhere. Maybe not in every happy marriage, but certainly in every blissful affair. (p.165)

If you blank out all the spying content (OK, quite a task), there’s the makings of a cracking Jackie Collins novel about a small circle of middle-aged couples having dinner parties and affairs, bonking, splitting up, getting back together, and worrying about children and nannies, trying to get out of this book.

Bureaucracy There are countless references to the labyrinthine bureaucracy of Whitehall, to the endless delays of Civil Service administration – there is a complex passage about the various colours of chit you need to get access to Cabinet Office documents – references to characters being worried about their pensions, and so on – the same humorous, long-suffering, institutional attitude of the Ipcress narrator – only maybe a bit less jolly, more real.

Public school Then there is the permanent thread of resentment Samson has against the way most jobs in his Department – and indeed Whitehall – are taken by public school men and the Oxbridge mafia, with their all-important codes of dress and speech designed to put everyone else in their place.

Unlike Bret, who was wearing the same sort of Savile Row suit he wore to the office, Frank had come correctly attired for the upper-class weekend: old Bedford cord trousers and a khaki sweater with a silk scarf in the open neck of his faded shirt. (p.50)

The public-school senior staff at London Central spent just as much money on their Savile Row suits and handmade shirts and Jermyn Street shoes, but they wore them with a careless scruffiness that was a vital part of their snobbery. A real English gentleman never tries; that was the article of faith. (p.134)

Winning one little argument with the public-school mafia at London Central was like landing a blow on a heavy leather punching sack – the visible effect was slight, and two minutes later the pendulum swung the whole contraption back again and knocked you for six. (p.144)

The choice of casual words, and the softness of his voice, did nothing to hide the authority behind what he said; on the contrary, it was the manner in which certain classes of Englishmen give orders to their subordinates. (p.59)

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Communism

In this, as in so many spy novels, there are few if any references to actual politics – no mention of Mrs Thatcher and President Reagan who dominated the 1980s with their abrasive anti-communist rhetoric, no mention of the high profile nuclear disarmament talks which dominated the headlines, no mention of the protests at Greenham Common about the siting of US missiles there, which began in 1981.

Characters routinely explain their fear of the KGB, describe its all-powerful rule of terror, explain why they hate ‘traitors’ – but in words which could have been spoken at any time between 1962 (when Deighton and Le Carré published their first novels) and 1985 when this novel was published. It is as if the backdrop of the Cold War is fixed, inflexible, unchanging, like the static ahistorical setting of Hollywood Westerns, where there is never any change or development, never any external events to upset the mythical backdrop, where there are just good guys, bad guys, Injuns and countless shootouts; or, in the spy world, our agents, their agents, double agents and endless plotting.

In the whole book there is only really one passage about contemporary politics, about the actual economic and political issues which divide the West from the East, have pitted them against each other for forty years since the end of World War Two, and which were moving, changing, evolving in the 1980s.

It is a page-long disquisition where Samson deliberately bates Stinnes by describing in detail why the Russian communist economy is collapsing (mentioning, in passing, the rise of the Solidarity trades union in Poland – founded 1980). Samson explains how the populations of the USSR made a sullen pact with the communist party to be quiescent and not cause trouble in return for steady jobs, accommodation, pensions. But as the economy fails, jobs, goods, food, accommodation are no longer guaranteed, the people are restless, the party doesn’t know what to do next.

This is all very prescient: London Match was published in 1985 and it was in May 1985 that new Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev made the speech in which he admitted ‘the slowing down of the economic development and inadequate living standards’ and introduced the new ideas of ‘restructuring’ and ‘openness’, perestroika and glasnost, which he said were required to get the USSR back on track. (Wikipedia article – Perestroika)

These are the first stirrings of the political and social revolution which led to the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, the end of the Cold War, and the evaporation of the worldview which had underpinned spy thrillers for two generations.

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Related links

• London Match on Amazon
• London Match Wikipedia article
• London Match article on the Deighton Dossier website

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.