‘You don’t like any of your old friends these days, Bernie. What’s happened to you? Why are you so caustic? Why so suspicious of everything and everyone?’
‘Am I? Well I’m not the only one afflicted with that,’ I said. ‘There is an epidemic of suspicion and distrust. It’s contagious. We are all in its grip: you, me, Fiona, Gloria and the whole Department…’ (p.183)
This is the tenth and final novel in Deighton’s series about 40-something SIS agent, Bernard Samson, his wife and family and the small group of friends and colleagues who have shared his trials and tribulations for the previous nine novels and the 10 or so years they cover (1977 to 1988).
As usual for the series, the story is told in a straightforward chronological way by Bernard himself in a first-person narrative, very much from his (limited) point of view, and in his own dry, sardonic voice. It’s divided into roughly three subject areas: straightforward espionage or spy episodes; family matters; office politics.
Spy stories
The novel opens dramatically with Bernard accompanying a very ill colleague, Jim Prettyman, back from Moscow on the Moscow-to-Paris train, along with a qualified nurse. Bernard notices the nurse fondling a pretty brooch and asks to have a look; she says Prettyman gave it to her and Bernard recognises it as having belonged to his dead sister-in-law, Tessa.
As the train trundles over the shabby, frozen border into Poland, Bernard is taken aside by Polish Security Police for questioning, and mournfully watches the train pull off without him. For the next week he is kept in an unheated cell in a fortress-cum-barracks and intensively questioned about his role in the abduction of George Kosinski and the related shooting of Polish security agents. These events had formed the dramatic climax of the previous book, Hope and Bernard is guilty as hell of everything they accuse him of, but sticks to his cover story that he is a German businessman. Although he is quite badly beaten up, he knows it is nothing compared to what they could do and sure enough, after a week, he is driven back to the station and placed on the next Moscow to Paris express. They know he knows they know he did it; but someone somewhere has ordered his release. Why was he arrested? Why was he released? It is never explained. It is an example of the puzzling randomness of the way things work in the Communist bloc…
Family matters
The Samson books are as much about families as about spying. The central event of the entire series was the revelation that Bernard’s wife, clever Oxford-educated Fiona, was a double agent working for the KGB and her hurried flight to the East, with Bernard close on her tail. This fills the first three books. In the second trilogy Bernard slowly realises Fiona has in fact been working for us all along and, after her absence of three years working as a double agent in the East, Bernard plays a big part in helping her escape back to the West.
But a) during the escape Fiona’s sister, Tessa, is shot dead b) during her long absence Bernard has fallen in love with an SIS colleague half his age, Gloria Kent. Although Fiona’s mission was part of long-term plans to undermine the East German government by supporting dissident civil society groups, it is also, on another level, a story about a man whose wife betrays and deserts him. Thus the domestic and emotional impact of Fiona’s desertion, not only on Samson but on his children, her sister and brother-in-law and on her father, are all described at length and repeatedly, in long conversations, at lunches, drinks or dinners.
In fact, the novels contain hundreds of pages which are devoted to the dinner parties and drinks parties and Sunday lunches at Fiona and Bernard’s house or George and Tessa Kosinski’s flat, or at Dicky Cruyer’s place or at Leith Hill in Fiona’s father’s luxury pile, or out in the Cotswolds at the rambling old farmhouse, Whitelands, belonging to the Department’s creepy eminence grise, Silas Gaunt.
A lot of narrative time is spent admiring the fixtures and fittings of various abodes, complimenting the wine and the cooking, being shown holiday snaps or latest additions to collections of swords or antique cars or oil paintings or vintage wine. A LOT of time is spent discussing how Bernard’s two children, Billy and Sally, are getting on at their prep school, with their private tutors in French and Maths, in the school soccer team, what presents they’re being bought for Christmas or their birthdays, and so on.
And this cosy, companionable family-ness, its domesticity, is one of the appeals of the series. It extends beyond England to Germany where so much of the action is set, to the run-down hotel in Berlin kept by old Tante Lisl, where Bernard grew up as a boy and where the shabby attic room is always kept for him; it includes his chats, sometimes about work, sometimes about family matters, with his oldest school-friend, shady businessman and sometime Department contractor Werner Volkmann, and his trouble with women (his two wives, Ingrid or Zena).
Also there are endless repeats of the scene in the office of Frank Harrington, long-time Head of the Berlin Office of the SIS, who plays with his smelly old pipe or shuffles his collection of vintage jazz records, while Bernard tells him yet another far-fetched interpretation of the latest perplexing plot twists. Here’s Frank fiddling with his beloved Dunhill pipe, accompanied by a dash of Deightonian humour:
He was smoking happily now, poking at his pipe bowl with the blade of a penknife, and attending to every strand of burning tobacco with all the loving care of a locomotive engineer. Or a dedicated arsonist. (p.171)
Office politics
The third element is the endless jockeying for position, promotion and office which goes on inside ‘the Department’. On an almost continual basis the entire cast of characters can, at the drop of a hat, start speculating about who will replace the gaga old Director-General, who will get the Deputy DG job, is Fiona in with a chance? Will it be Bernard’s slick superficial boss, Dicky Cruyer? Or will he be blocked by the much smarter but older American, Bret Rensselaer? And so on.
Since both Fiona (once she’s returned) and even Samson, are qualified, in their different ways, for promotion, many of their conversations (once she’s returned to the West) move easily between discussion of family affairs, into details of various spy operations – especially as the central plot rotates about Bernard’s wife and then, after her escape, about the true fate of his sister-in-law, Tessa – and both bleed into the office politics, as the success or failure of various plans and operations boosts or hinders the key players’ various hopes for advancement and promotion.
Each of the novels contains a canny mix of these three threads which are each, in their different ways, equally absorbing though, for me, the distinctive feature of the entire series, is the time and attention paid to domestic arrangements. You don’t catch James Bond fussing about what’s for dinner tonight or who’s going to buy little Billy’s birthday present.
The plot
After being released by the Poles (why was he arrested and beaten, why was he released?) the scene cuts to Bernard (still rather bruised) and Fiona staying at her father’s luxury pile near Leith Hill, Surrey. It is just into the new year of 1988 (the previous novel, Hope ended on Christmas Eve 1987) so only a few weeks after Bernard had virtually kidnapped his brother-in-law (revealed as being a spy for the Polish secret police) out of Poland and smuggled him back to the UK to be interrogated and maybe charged with treason. At the end of the previous novel we had also seen Gloria and Bernard going to bed in what seemed to crystallise his choice of her over his wife, Fiona. Which makes this scene where he is docilely accompanying his wife to his father-in-law’s house a little puzzling. Bernard is seriously confused about which of these two beautiful women he really loves…
At Leith Hill the father-in-law, David Kimber-Hutchinson, holds a big dinner party where the guests discuss political developments of 1987-8 ie Chancellor Kohl inviting Honecker to the West, along with the political and economic situation in the East. Later, Fiona explains in some detail to Bernard the way money is being channeled into East Germany in numerous sophisticated attempts to undermine the regime. (These kind of geopolitical discussions are relatively rare in the books: when they occur it is pretty obviously to provide the rationale for the entire plot ie that Fiona ‘defected’ in order to establish contact with civil society groups in the East who could destabilise the regime, and that that plot is working. Ie they exist to justify all the time and effort spent on the Fiona Plot.)
To his astonishment, Fiona’s father broaches the ludicrous suggestion that George tried to kill him; he had a headache in Poland and George gave him some local headache tablets which David kept and then, back in England, fed to the family cat who promptly died. Bernard listens respectfully, thinking what a melodramatic old queen his father-in-law is. David goes on to explain his presence in a photo of George in Warsaw that so startled Bernard in the previous novel, when he was shown it, as simply being a result of having been invited out there to help George locate Tess, Fiona’s sister. (For a while this photo had been a loose thread, leaving us wondering whether the father-in-law was involved some scam, as almost everyone else in the family has been. But no. Shame, actually…)
Bernard is confirmed as deputy to Frank Harrington, Head of the Berlin Office. Frank knew Bernard’s dad and promised to look after young Bernie, so they’ve always had a close nephew-and-uncle relationship, with Bernard amused by Frank’s endless fussing with his pipe, his string of unsuitable affairs, and his canny way of avoiding trouble.
Bernard drives out to Whitelands, Silas Gaunt’s rambling farmhouse in the Cotswolds. Here he discovers Gaunt is packing up and moving into sheltered accommodation as he has recently been diagnosed as too ill to keep up the house. Bernard makes sympathetic noises but extracts from Silas a reluctant confession that he knew about the cock-up over Tessa’s shooting; but Silas insists he had out-sourced the whole thing to the Americans, it was their decision to hire Thurkettle, nothing to do with us, old chap etc. He provides the familiar rationalisation that we had to make the opposition think Fiona was dead, at whatever cost, otherwise they would immediately have changed all their codes and procedures and ‘Fiona’s years of courage and jeopardy would have been in vain.’ (p.82)
Bernard meets ‘the Swede’ downstairs in a second-hand bookshop in Charing Cross Road. The Swede is in fact a former Luftwaffe pilot (his back story is given with typical Deightonian thoroughness and historical detail on pages 90 and 91). We met him in the previous novel when he flew in to Poland and picked up Bernard and his brother-in-law George at the book’s exciting climax.
a) The Swede reveals he was on standby to fly Jim Prettyman out of Germany on the night of the famous Tessa shooting. He had been commissioned to bring in a secret box file, though Prettyman never turned up to collect it. b) Bernard asks him if he can do a mission for him, Bernard. The Swede guesses what it is. Bernard wants to kidnap his two children from the care of his smothering, smug father-in-law, collect dishy young Gloria and have the Swede fly them to Ireland, where Bernard will arrange flights on to South America, somewhere with no extradition treaty. The Swede says it is a bonkers idea but he’ll do it. The whole mad scheme shows us that, despite performing his spousal duties with Fiona, his heart is still with Gloria…
Bernard is panicked to receive a phone call from his son’s school saying his son’s school bus has overturned and there are some injuries. (In the previous novel a character had pointed out that the KGB always take revenge on those who betrayed them, giving the example of a double agent who was given a new identity in the States, but whose family the KGB tracked down and assassinated one by one. What if the same happens to Fiona, because of her super betrayal? Once this worry has been planted, it allows Deighton to scare us with of happenings like this, which make us think maybe the novel will be ‘about’ the KGB’s revenge.)
In the event his son Billy hadn’t even been on the bus. Bernard had driven down there with Gloria, who’d given him the message at work, and this gives her an opportunity to tell him a few home truths: that he doesn’t know his children any more, they’ve grown away from him; for her to pour scorn on his ludicrous proposal to run off with the kids; and they end the journey back to London with a blazing row. Hmm. His plan of starting a new life with her and the kids not going so well, then. As he gets out of her car he leans down to apologise but Gloria, very angry, drives off…
Next day Bernard drives to Berwick House where George Kosinski – Bernard’s brother-in-law who he had revealed to be a spy in the previous novel – is being kept and interrogated. The interrogation is getting nowhere and Bernard has been ordered down there to have a go himself. But a) he finds George feeling cocky enough to turn the tables and threaten Bernard, saying he has enough evidence to prove that Bernard wanted Tessa killed, which b) makes Bernard so angry he grabs George and shouts in his face. It also makes him realise, on the journey home, that George is small fry; he may have reported tittle-tattle back to the Polish security services but he wasn’t a planner or a doer. MI5, who are holding him, will probably release him on condition he scuttles back to Zurich and keeps stumm.
On the way back Bernard and his Special Branch driver stop at a pub for a drink. In the loos Bernard is attacked by two heavies and, because he happens to have a gun on him, first uses it to hit them hard in the face and arm, then steps back, brandishing it, to stop the fight. They say it wasn’t him, it’s the Swede they’re after. Bernard sends them packing and gives his Special Branch bodyguard, still sitting happily at the bar, a flea in the ear for completely failing to help him.
Later that night, at home with Fiona after discussing George’s likely fate, there’s a call and Bernard is summoned to jump into a waiting car and taken to a derelict house in south London. Here, in the garage, he finds the body of the Swede, dead, with his skull crudely staved in by a hammer. There is some colourful description of the Special Branch and MI5 officers attending, namely one ‘Squeaky’ King and the fractious relationship between ‘Five’ and the Department. No indication who murdered the Swede, and Bernard doesn’t know why anyone should. There goes his scheme of flying to Ireland. Gloria is angry with him and the Swede is dead…
Bernard is then summoned to a meeting with Bret Rensselaer (now acting Deputy Director-General), Dicky Cruyer, Head of Ops, and the D-G himself, fussing over his ancient Labrador and, in a running gag, never able to remember Bernard’s name, this time calling him Simson. But beyond the jokes they reveal they knew the Swede was going to be killed. It was done by a hitman from Dresden. They had to let it go ahead otherwise it would have blown the agent who informed them. Bernard is appalled. The reader is appalled.
Back in Berlin, Bernard is visited by Cindy Prettyman, Jim’s first wife. In an earlier novel she had been fairly innocent and inoffensive. Here she has been transformed into a harridan who swears at Bernard a lot and wants him to get rid of the security box her ex-husband dumped in her office and asked her to look after last year, at the time of the Tessa Fiasco. Bernard is left wondering: was Cindy involved in the murder? What is the significance of this security box? Has it got money in it, the payoff for Thurkettle, something valuable to Prettyman?
Once again in Frank’s office Bernard watches the old man tap the window and look out at the snow while Bernard tells him what he’s been doing for Dicky. There’s a fuss about some old uranium mines over in the East. It’s coming in a bit late in the story, but could this be what the novel’s ‘about’? Could there be a surprise twist where it all turns out to be about getting our hands on commie uranium or preventing them using it to make nuclear weapons?
Bernard meets Werner at the derelict Tegel airport on the edge of West Berlin to review the story so far. To his surprise he finds Werner going back over the night of the shooting and asking Bernard how he’s so certain of his memories: maybe, in all the confusion, he shot Tessa? What? It feels like every possible logical combination is being wrung from this one tragic event, which happened four whole books ago. The reader is becoming a bit impatient.
Bernard motors out to meet Jim Prettyman. Years ago Jim, his wife Cindy, Fiona and Bernard were friends, playing pool in a bar near the office. But Jim was into statistics and his skills got him a job in the States where he changed his name to Jay and got married to a new wife, Tabby, with useful State Department connections (divorcing the now-embittered Cindy). Now he’s terminally ill and Tabby’s looking after him in a house near Heathrow.
In his sick room there is a big confrontation scene where Bernard and Jim exchange conflicting versions of what happened the night Tessa died. Prettyman agrees that Thurkettle, the ex-CIA man, was hired by Silas Gaunt to do the hit. He even claims he arranged a meeting between Silas – who he describes as completely crazy – and Thurkettle in London the preceding week. That night it was Thurkettle who shot Tessa, cut off her head and switched it for the head containing dental work replicating Fiona’s, in order to fool the KGB, and then set fire to the car – this was all Gaunt’s plan, but Jim (like the reader) thinks it was pretty stupid – a car fire wouldn’t burn a body sufficiently to hide its essential features; they might just notice her head had been mysteriously cut off.
But Jim denies killing Thurkettle, saying he arrived at the meeting spot primed to pay him to find him already dead. The plan had been to take Thurkettle on to a plane and fly him back to England but when he found a corpse, he rifled its pockets, found the brooch (the brooch he later gave the nurse in chapter one) among other things, and left. Bernard goes off wondering how much of this is true.
— For the reader the point is that Bernard now more or less knows the truth of what happened. He doesn’t seem particularly upset about it and, because we readers learned all this three books ago, it doesn’t come as much surprise to us either. As we enter the last 75 pages of the entire series, I wondered whether there was going to be some final Twist and Surprise that would make us sit up and gasp.
Chapter 10 An Autobahn exit. The German Democratic Republic Bernard and Werner drive along the Autobahn to the exit where Prettyman told him he rendevoused with Thurkettle on the Fateful Night. They find two East German farmers working in a field and who, with a little Western money, remember the camper van being parked there for a few days on the night. When they’re shown to the exact spot, Bernard and Werner find the remains of a motorbike concealed in a ditch and then, a bit further along, Thurkettle’s corpse, rotted and eaten away. Bernard locates the bullet holes in Thurkettle’s coat and then the gun Thurkettle was shot with. Beneath the corpse is a bag of dollars, Thurkettle’s payment for the hit. Yes: all the evidence is here confirming the story he’s pieced together.
Werner hurries him along and back into the car – it is strictly illegal to drive off the Autobahn in the East, and being found in possession of a gun and corpse! They’d be locked away forever. As they drive back into the West in a sleet storm Bernard puts his last question to Werner: Was it him who supplied Prettyman with the gun he used to shoot Thurkettle? Werner refuses to answer in such a way that Bernard knows he’s correct.
Pretty much the whole secret is out now. Tessa is dead; she was killed by an ex-CIA hitman on orders from SIS high-ups, notably creepy Silas Gaunt; Prettyman was the middle man who organised logistics then shot Thurkettle to assure his silence (why? Thurkettle was a pro; he’d have kept stumm anyway); Werner played a small part in supplying the gun. ‘Well done, Bernard,’ says Werner. ‘You’ve pieced it all together with superhuman skill; now let it lie.’ But he can’t, of course.
Chapter 11 The SIS offices, Berlin Bret and Dicky and Gloria have flown into Berlin for a security conference. First of all Bernard accepts a report from a local officer, Larry Bowers, that proves the East German uranium mine we heard about earlier has only a minimum staff and is barely being kept open: so the novel is not going to turn out to be about that, after all. Shame, really.
— Most of this chapter is devoted to a big party Werner hosts at his new grand house out by the Wannsee. It is a really massive fancy-dress party with the theme of ‘gold’, featuring lots of diplomats, local businessmen and politicians, movers and shakers, with a live band playing 1930s dance tunes and a massive buffet feast. Bret and Dicky and Frank and Gloria and Werner and Zena are all there.
In the middle of the festivities Cindy Prettyman (who we’d learned earlier was staying with Werner) comes down the stairs, wearing only a slip, her hair dishevelled, distraught and brandishing a pistol. Bernard and Werner go slowly up the stairs towards her as she threatens first one then the other. She accuses them both of stealing the security box from her office, the security box she’d mentioned earlier to Bernard and was trying to either get rid of or possibly use as some kind of blackmail threat. Either way, it’s gone now and she is very cross about it.
Werner makes a move towards her and she shoots, winging him in the head. Bernard flings a glass at her but is beaten to it by an Army redcap who rugby tackles her, all of them falling to the bottom of the grand stairs in a big pile. Frank Harrington steps forward from the band podium to thank the Volkmanns for a novel and imaginative charade, ha ha ha, trying to present it all as a weird party entertainment, and while the spotlight is on him speaking soothing words, the bodies are swiftly cleared away.
A lot later that night Bernard is allowed into his hospital room to see Werner, who was more injured by the fall down the stairs than the shot. He admits Cindy was right to be cross; he, Werner, broke into her office earlier that day and stole the damn security box. Cindy had come to think it was valuable and the Department would either a) pay for it or b) it would be some kind of lever to help her get back into contact with her estranged husband. Now she’ll be charged with attempted murder.
Arriving back at Tante Lisl’s hotel, Bernard is handed a telegram from Prettyman’s second wife, Tabby. Jim has passed away, but before he did so he asked her to send him the message that Bernard had guessed everything correctly, that Prettyman did everything Bernard accused him of. Bernard is still not sure whether he is doing a last piece of lying to cover someone else…
Chapter 12 The SIS Residence, Berlin Bret Rensselaer chairs a meeting of Bernard, Frank and Dicky. With little preamble they go into discussing the events of the Fateful Night and integrating Bernard’s findings into what they already knew. The only new thing is that Bret is determined to blame Silas for everything; Silas became unhinged; Silas thought the Service should go beyond its traditional intelligence-gathering role into positive action, violent action if necessary. It was Silas who wanted to protect Fiona’s work by making the KGB think Fiona was dead. It was Silas who cooked up the whole cockamamie plan to make sure Thurkettle murdered Tessa, cut off her head etc, burned the car with her body in it, then motored off to meet his contact, Prettyman, who proceeded to execute him. Blame Silas. — Is that it? Is that the pay-off to the last three novels, and to the entire series?
And the security box which Werner stole from Cindy’s office? Bret says Frank’s handyman is even at this moment sawing it open in the workshop. What! No! shouts Bernard and hares off down the backstairs of Frank’s rambling house (banging into the Director-General himself who is in a secret passage listening to the meeting with headphones) running down the stairs, out into the garden, along to the workshop, seizing the handyman just as he begins drilling to the box, and pushing them both out, away and down onto the frozen ground as the workshop explodes. It was a bomb.
Bernard had suspected for some time this was the significance of the mysterious box file which had been one of the numerous threads in the novel: it was the way the Swede had confirmed it was on his plane, the one which was meant to carry Prettyman away from the Tessa Murder, which gave Bernard the clue. Thus Tessa would have been killed by Thurkettle. Thurkettle killed by Prettyman. Then Prettyman and the Swede blown up in mid-air as soon as they opened the box.
For this reader there are still a few loose ends, loose ends which could only be tied up by going back and reading the relevant section of Spy Sinker again which, to be honest, I can’t be bothered to do. Tessa’s dead. It was a dodgy plot. Palming it off on Silas just about explains it away. After a certain point – this point – I’ve stopped caring about the details.
With all the main strands of the spy plot finally resolved, there’s family life and office politics to tie up: Bret tells Bernard he has proposed to Gloria and she said Yes. (This is, to be honest, completely unbelievable. Bret, as Bernard points out, is old enough to be Gloria’s grandfather.)
Bret reminds Bernard of the personal debt Bret owes him; in one of the earlier novels Bret was suspected of himself being a mole and made his way to Berlin to the only man he knew he could trust, Bernard. Now he’ll repay the debt. Bernard will finally get a full-time contract with a pension and all the perks; Bret will do what he can to see Bernard is eventually made Head of the Berlin Office when Frank Harrington retires (which will be soon), a post which everyone has always felt he should have.
And Bret (like the fairy godmother in a nursery story) gives Bernard a third piece of news/wish come true: he gives him a long letter Fiona wrote during her recuperation which eloquently states how much she loves Bernard, that he is kinder and more sensitive than everyone realises etc. Bret explains that Fiona is only burying herself in her work because she feels rejected by Bernard. ‘Go tell her how you really feel, you schmuck.’ And so the novel ends with a decisive closing of the entire Gloria love affair and the promise of reconciliation with his beautiful, high-flying and loving wife, Fiona.
Thus the three strands – espionage, family matters and office politics – are all neatly wound up and dovetailed, with the espionage – nominally the subject of the whole series – here, as everywhere else, feeling like it’s actually the least important of the three.
Anti-climax
It is hard to resist a sense of anti-climax: endings are always difficult; it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive. Unlikely though it sounds, basing the three books of the first trilogy around the notion of a married spy discovering that his spouse is a double agent, does work and is gripping and interesting. Similarly, the first two novels of the second trilogy successfully plant the seed and then craftily reveal the fact that Fiona is a triple agent, pretending to work for ‘them’ but really working for ‘us’. Very clever.
But the murder of Tessa in the rainswept Autobahn roadworks on that fateful night is not, I think, an interesting enough subject to sustain this last trilogy. The second instalment, Hope, is the best of the three because it takes us to an entirely new location, Poland, which Deighton describes with trademark historical, cultural, linguistic and geographical thoroughness. And because for most of it the subject is not ‘Who killed Tessa?’ but ‘Where is George?’, which was a welcome new theme.
But this final novel is solely about ‘Who killed Tessa?’ and the crucial flaw is that in novel six – Spy Sinker – Deighton told us. We know who killed her and why. It wasn’t very convincing then and it has become even less convincing as we’ve read on. Spy Sinker is a powerful novel and works in an interesting way because it sheds wholly new light on the five books that preceded it, undermining all the previous narratives, recasting everything we and the narrator thought had happened, and that was a bold and really effective stroke.
But, unless something stunningly new was to be revealed, it also meant the succeeding trilogy couldn’t show us anything new. And, despite a few red herrings and false trails, Charity indeed adds almost nothing to what we knew before, throwing in a few new characters (the Swede, Prettyman’s involvement) but leaving the outline of the story exactly as we already knew it.
Weakest of all is the way Deighton ends up pinning the blame on Silas Gaunt, presented as a Machiavellian super-brain in the previous novels, who is now suddenly described as unbalanced, bonkers, who crossed the line, who went too far, and who we now see being packed off to sheltered accommodation for the mentally ill. It was all Silas’s fault. Oh. OK. So there are no twists, turns or surprises at all. It is hard to avoid a sense of anti-climax.
Charity
The religious connotations of the titles – faith, hope and charity – are almost completely ignored. Deighton is not, thank God, Graham Greene, with his reams of doggerel theology. The word faith is mentioned a few times in Faith – Bret gives Bernard a Bible to use as a code book for a handful of ‘secret’ messages he sends him. I don’t think hope is mentioned at all in Hope; if it was George Kosinski’s hope of finding his wife Tessa, alive, it is cruelly dashed.
And, in the kind of dry joke which takes us right back to the start of the Deighton’s career, reminding us of the sly jokiness of the Ipcress novels – it turns out that Charity has no profound symbolic or moral meaning at all. Charity is the name of the half-senile Director-General’s raddled black Labrador.
Charity is a knackered old beast which slobbers and drools and is on its last legs.
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 