![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Spy novelist Jeremy Duns, a fan of both Bond and Palmer, says Deighton's espionage novels are "some of the greatest spy literature ever penned". The complicated plot of Ipcress involves the brainwashing of British scientists by foreign powers but it was the tone, characterisation and sardonic style that impressed readers. Wolkoff was subsequently imprisoned for spying activities: the incident stayed with Deighton, and made him aware that there was a secret world of espionage in which people might not be what they seemed. In 1940, the 11-year-old Len witnessed her arrest by a group of nondescript Special Branch officers who arrived in unmarked cars. His mother sometimes cooked for Anna Wolkoff, a White Russian emigre and Nazi sympathiser who lived near to the Deighton family. He would later acknowledge another key influence on his work. Everyone educated in England has been assigned rank badges for the class war." "I would do everything I can to prevent my children being educated in England," he told an interviewer on Thames TV’s Afternoon Plus in 1983 (his children were at a small village school in France), "because the moment you step across the threshold of any school in England, you've put on a uniform for the class war. Nevertheless Deighton, who is now 93 years old and retired from writing, has strong views on class and education. He had actually enjoyed it, especially the barbed banter, and it informed his depiction of the intelligence service offices. He had also seen a fair bit of the world, having completed two and a half years of national service with the RAF, and worked as a flight attendant with British Overseas Airways.įor The Ipcress File, he also reveals in the afterword, Deighton drew on his experiences at a smart ad agency where he had mixed with "highly educated, witty young men who had been at Eton together". He had worked for ad agencies and publishers, and knew Soho like the back of his hand. He was a commercial artist, trained at St Martin's School of Art and the Royal College of Art. It was, he writes in an afterword in the Penguin Modern Classics edition, a "holiday diversion". He's so much more relatable than the dinosaur Bond."ĭeighton, the London-born son of a chauffeur and a cook, wrote The Ipcress File, his first novel, on vacation in the Dordogne, France. Blackmailed into working for the establishment, insolent Harry is a constant thorn in their side. Trying to make his way in a world that is stacked against him. He went to Eton. He uses his fists and his weapons more than his brain gadgets, rather than real life. "He kills without thinking or caring. He is establishment. James Watkins, director of the six-part adaptation, explains the differences between Ian Fleming's creation and Deighton's agent. "Bond is a superhero," he tells BBC Culture. Deighton's hero – unnamed in the novel but christened Harry Palmer for the screen – was quickly identified by critics and fans as being the anti-Bond. Like the film before it, the ITV series is based on the 1962 bestseller by the great spy novelist Len Deighton, which was published shortly after the cinema release of Dr No, the first instalment in the James Bond film franchise. This time, Joe Cole (perhaps best known for his role in Peaky Blinders) plays the chippy working-class spy who loves culture, cooking and women but who doesn't have a lot of time for the posh public school boys who run British intelligence. In a nod to the movie, the very first shot of the new television adaptation of The Ipcress File shows Palmer's thick-rimmed spectacles.
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