I see with immense sadness that writer Len Deighton has died. Granted, the man had a long and fruitful life and career, but that doesn’t stop it from sucking.
While Deighton was best known for his espionage novels like The Ipcress Files and Funeral In Berlin (both made into memorable movies starring Michael Caine), my personal favorite was actually a WWII novel, Bomber, which if you haven’t read before, you should. Be warned: it is an absolutely heartrending story.
R.I.P.
William C. Dietz, an excellent Science Fiction author passed Sunday. He was 80.
At age 97, he had a good run. I hope his passing was painless. May he be remembered.
I loved the first 5 Bernard Samson books, and the Ian Holm British TV series of the first three books (one of the last series on Mystery introduced by Vincent Price…). But I wasn’t fond of how the characters reacted to the end of book 5, and I thought book 6 was “I can’t figure out how to finish this story, but i promised a trilogy, so I’ll just retell the story from other points of view.” Never could overcome that disappointment.
After seeing this note, I scurried over to IMDB to find out more about the series. It’s called Game, Set, Match and I was immediately disappointed to find this trivia entry …
“Len Deighton was so unhappy with the adaptation that he bought the TV rights to prevent it from airing again.”
Apparently, there was some kind of pirate DVD that came out of Oz, but otherwise it doesn’t seem to be available. Deighton gets props for being a crusty bastard.
I’d not heard of his passing and am sad to do so. I think I have a copy of nearly every novel he published.
The man was an absolute master wordsmith and storyteller. I couldn’t begin to tell you how many white nights I spent reading him; once you got past the second page, you could not put him down. The Triple Trilogy (Game-Set-Match, Hook-Line-Sinker and Faith-Hope-Charity) along with their prequel, “Winter”, are masterpieces of plot, storyline and character development. If you know them, you completely understand how he could get you so invested in Bernard Samson’s character and his world.
Deighton brought those same gifts to his non-corpus stand-alone novels; “The IPCRESS File” got him started, and there were of course so many more (“SS-GB”, “Funeral In Berlin”, “An Expensive Place To Die”, and the dark comedy “Only When I Larf” off the top of my head). He could always hook you into his characters and you just did not want to let them go.
He also wrote several very-well received World War II history analyses and those are fine reads as well.
I read “Bomber” many years ago. On hearing of his death it’s the only title of his I could recall. It was a good one. I went looking thru the stacks here and couldn’t find my copy, but I remember the cover – a doll’s head on a pile of cinders.