Biography1

A comprehensive online resource about writer Len Deighton

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From sketchpad to typewriter

Len Deighton was born in Marylebone in London on 18 February 1929, in a workhouse. In Anthony Master's book Literary Agents he writes that Deighton's interest in spy stories may have been partially inspired by the arrest of Anna Wolkoff, which he witnessed as an 11-year-old boy. Wolkoff was a British citizen of Russian descent who was a Nazi spy. She was detained on 20 May 1940, and charged with violating the Official Secrets Act for attempting to pass secret documents to the Nazis. Deighton's family lived close by and his mother did cleaning jobs for Ms Wolkoff.

At the age of 17, he was attached to the RAF Special Investigations Branch as a photographer, an early entrée to the world of secrets and investigations. In 1949 Deighton attended St Martin's Schools of Art in London, having completed his national service. Three years later he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art, graduating in 1955. While he was at the RCA he became a lifelong friend of fellow designer Raymond Hawkey, who later designed the covers for many of his books. These include his famous original black and white covers for the ‘spy with no name novels’.

Len Deighton then worked as an airline steward with BOAC (later incorporated into British Airways), wrote for magazines and illustrated over two hundred book covers. He also worked as an illustrator in New York and in 1960 as an art director in a London advertising agency. An avid gastronome, he wrote and illustrated in 1961 a number of popular diagrammatic cookery strips for the Daily Express, which developed into a series in The Observer newspaper in 1962. It’s about this time that Deighton makes the shift from the picture to the written word as his chosen medium, with his first novel being written when he moved to France.

The writing takes off

His first four novels, including the best sellers The IPCRESS File and Funeral in Berlin, featured an anonymous anti-hero. This character came to be known as 'Harry Palmer' in the films, and was portrayed by Michael Caine. These books proved instant hits and set a new tone for the spy novel, with a working class hero - both womaniser and cook - contrasting strongly with Ian Fleming’s navy-officer Bond and the more traditional perspective of the English ‘gentleman spy’.

In the rest of the decade, he also wrote the screenplay and was an uncredited producer for the 1969 film of the play Oh! What a Lovely War. This was also the period when he made a turn towards cookery and, with his London Dossier, travel writing; he subsequently - and fortuitously - then got the glamorous job as travel editor of Playboy for a while. The sixties is a fascinating period in Deighton’s life and career, and the cast list of famous names who passed through his kitchen - Bertrand Russell, Paul McCartney, David Frost - testifies to a novelist who was already a ‘name’ in London literary circles. He was also for a while the Observer's cookery writer. 1969 was also the year Deighton left England permanently to live overseas in southern California and thereafter a number of other locations.

Len Deighton in the 'sixties (c) Getty Images