Horse Under Water (25 page)

Much of the trial dealt with the technical knowledge that Peterson put at the disposal of the German Navy, who came to the frogman and human torpedo scene very late in the war.

The German Navy had first seen a ‘frogman style’ demonstration at the Olympic swimming pool, Berlin, in the spring of 1943. Peterson was screened after his capture and went to a block of flats that the German Navy had in Berlin. There he met Loveless, John Amery, and Joyce (Haw-Haw), ‘but they considered themselves Germans’, while ‘we were loyal Englishmen anxious to convert our fellow-countrymen into allies of Germany’. Peterson was persuaded by Loveless to give his services to the Germans as a frogman-instructor. He said O.K. soon enough to be at Heiligenhafen, at the eastern end of Kiel Bay in the Baltic, when the first of K force (
Kleinkampfmittel-Verband:
Small Battle-Weapon Force) was formed in January 1944. Peterson translated the British Commando Regulations and other textbooks for them and taught them how to pronounce English swear-words with impeccable accuracy to throw sentries off their guard. By this time Peterson had a German naval officer’s uniform and, since K force had discarded rank badges to foster good relations, he was accepted by newcomers as a German naval officer.

The result was penal servitude and cashiering. I flipped through the accompanying documents; a certified true copy of the sentence signed by the President of the Court; and the confirming officer’s letter after agreeing the sentence.

I closed the file.

‘A stone cold, cold war classic’

Guardian

When a number of scientists mysteriously disappear in Berlin, what seems to be a straightforward case rapidly becomes a journey to the heart of a dark and deadly conspiracy. It is a conspiracy that takes Len Deighton’s working-class hero on a journey that will test him to the limits of his ingenuity and resolve, and call on him to prove himself as a spy at the very top of his game.

The Ipcress File
was not only Len Deighton’s first novel, it was his first bestseller and the book that broke the mould of thriller writing.

‘Deighton has written a spy thriller which out-bonds Bond’

Daily Express

‘Deighton in top form … the best kind of action entertainment’

Publishers Weekly

‘Deliciously sharp and flawlessly accurate dialogue, breathtakingly clever plotting, confident character drawing … a splendidly strongly told story’

The Times

978 0 586 02619 9

‘A ferociously cool fable’

New York Times

In Berlin, where neither side of the wall is safe, Colonel Stok of Red Army Security is prepared to sell an important Russian scientist to the West – for a price.

British intelligence are willing to pay, providing their own top secret agent is in Berlin to act as go-between. But it soon becomes apparent that behind the facade of an elaborate mock funeral lies a game of deadly manoeuvres and ruthless tactics. A game in which the blood-stained legacy of Nazi Germany is enmeshed in the intricate moves of cold war espionage …

‘
Funeral in Berlin
is splendid’

Daily Telegraph

‘A most impressive book, a chronicle of one sad aspect of our times, in which the tension, more like a chronic ache than a sharp stab of pain, never lets go’

Evening Standard

‘Deighton really is something special’

Julian Symons,
Sunday Times

978 0 586 04580 0

The classic thriller of lethal computer-age intrigue and a maniac’s private cold war

General Midwinter loves his country, and hates communism. In a bid to destabilise the Soviet power block he is running his own intelligence agency, whose ‘brain’ is the world’s biggest supercomputer.

With his past coming back to haunt him, the un-named agent of
The Ipcress File
is sent to Finland to penetrate Midwinter’s spy cell. But then a deadly virus is stolen, and our hero must stop it falling into the hands of both the Russians and the billionaire madman.

‘So far in front of other writers in the field that they are not even in sight’

Sunday Times

‘Such credibility, such accurate line-by-line beaming of a sheer sense of the actual … a glittering, wintry entertainment’

Guardian

‘Worthy of Raymond Chandler … intelligent, inventive, constantly entertaining’

Sunday Telegraph

978 0 586 04428 5

Bomber
is a novel war. There are no victors, no vanquished. There are simply those who remain alive, and those who die.

Bomber
follows the progress of an Allied air raid through a period of twenty-four hours in the summer of 1943. It portrays all the participants in a terrifying drama, both in the air and on the ground, in Britain and in Germany.

In its documentary style, it is unique. In its emotional power it is overwhelming.

Len Deighton has been equally acclaimed as a novelist and as an historian. In
Bomber
he has combined both talents to produce a masterpiece.

‘A massively different novel … the effect is – quite literally – devastating’

Sunday Times

‘A massive and superbly mobilised tragedy of the machines which men create to destroy themselves … masterly and by far Mr Deighton’s best’

Douglas Hurd,
The Spectator

‘A magnificent story … the characters lean out of the pages’

Daily Mirror

978 0 586 04544 2

The war is over. And we have lost.

In February 1941 British Command surrendered to the Nazis. Churchill has been executed, the King is in the Tower and the SS are in Whitehall. For nine months Britain has been occupied – a blitzed, depressed and dingy country. However, it’s ‘business as usual’ at Scotland Yard run by the SS when Detective Inspector Archer is assigned to a routine murder case. Life must go on.

But when SS Standartenfuhrer Huth arrives from Berlin with orders from the great Himmler himself to supervise the investigation, the resourceful Archer finds himself caught up in a high level, all action, espionage battle.

This is a spy story quite different from any other. Only Deighton, with his flair for historical research and his narrative genius, could have written it.

‘A brilliant picture of Britain under German rule’

Sunday Telegraph

‘One of Deighton’s best. Apart from his virtues as a storyteller, his passion for researching his backgrounds gives his work a remarkable factual authority. With Bomber and Fighter he established himself as an expert on a period … the authority of these books seem absolute.’

Observer

‘Len Deighton is the Flaubert of the contemporary thriller writers … there can be little doubt that this is much the way things would have turned out if the Germans had won the war.’

Michael Howard,
Times Literary Supplement

978 0 586 05002 6

A private aircraft takes off from a small town in central France, while Adolf Hitler, the would-be conqueror of Europe, prepares for a clandestine meeting near the Belgian border.

For more than forty years the events of this day have been Britain’s most closely guarded secret. Anyone who learns of them must die – with their file stamped:

XPD – expedient demise

‘A stunning spy story … Deighton remains the incomparable entertainer’

Guardian

‘Exciting and well made’

Daily Telegraph

‘Deighton in top form … the best kind of action entertainment’

Publishers Weekly

‘Deliciously sharp and flawlessly accurate dialogue, breathtakingly clever plotting, confident character drawing … a splendidly strongly told story’

The Times

978 0 586 05447 5

Goodbye Mickey Mouse is Deighton’s fourteenth novel and a vivid evocation of wartime England, the story of a group of American fighter pilots flying escort missions over Germany in the winter of 1943–4.

At the centre of the novel are two young men: the deeply reserved Captain Jamie Farebrother, estranged son of a deskbound colonel, and the cocky Lieutenant Mickey Morse, well on his way to becoming America’s Number One Flying Ace. Alike only in their courage, they forge a bond of friendship in battle with far-reaching consequences for themselves, and for the future of those they love.

‘It is a novel of memory, satisfying on every imaginable level, but truly astonishing in its recreation of a time and place through minute detail. Deighton has written well of the air before, non-fictionally, and he informs us in an afterword that it took six years of research to do this novel. It shows. The only way you could know more about flying a P-51 Mustang, after reading this book, is to have flown one’

Washington Post

‘He writes, as usual, with authority and a superb sense of period’

Daily Telegraph

‘The sheer charge of the writing swept me into another world all the while I was reading, and now that piece of the past is a piece in my mind.’

HRF Keating,
The Times

978 0 586 05448 2

‘Len was a great cook, a smashing cook. I learned a lot about food from playing Harry Palmer’

Michael Caine

Before becoming famous as the thriller writer of his generation, Len Deighton trained as a pastry chef. If you look carefully at Harry Palmer’s kitchen in the classic film
The Ipcress File
you will notice a newspaper pinned on the wall. This is one of Deighton’s classic cookstrips, the series that ran for two years when he was the
Observer
food writer.

The
Action Cook Book
was once an instructional book for the bachelor male – a guide to sophisticated cooking for the would-be Harry Palmer, collecting together 50 of his best one-page illustrated recipes and numerous demystifying tips. It now has a great following as a fabulous piece of nostalgia as well as retaining real credibility as a genuinely useful cook book.

‘[Len Deighton’s cookbooks] have attracted a cult following for their brilliant design as much as for their comprehensive approach to cooking …’

Guardian

‘They showed the idiot novice male how to dice an onion without it falling apart; how to fine-cut parsley by rocking the blade rather than chopping it; how to sauté mushrooms without them yielding the water that would turn them into a gelatinous glop’

Simon Schama

978 0 00 730587 2

Len Deighton was born in 1929. He worked as a railway clerk before doing his National Service in the RAF as a photographer attached to the Special Investigation Branch.

After his discharge in 1949, he went to art school – first to the St Martin’s School of Art, and then to the Royal College of Art on a scholarship. His mother was a professional cook and he grew up with an interest in cookery – a subject he was later to make his own in an animated strip for the
Observer
and in two cookery books. He worked for a while as an illustrator in New York and as art director of an advertising agency in London.

Deciding it was time to settle down, Deighton moved to the Dordogne where he started work on his first book,
The Ipcress File
. Published in 1962, the book was an immediate success.

Since then his work has gone from strength to strength, varying from espionage novels to war, general fiction and non-fiction. The BBC made
Bomber
into a day-long radio drama in ‘real time’. Deighton’s history of World War Two,
Blood
,
Tears and Folly
, was published to wide acclaim – Jack Higgins called it ‘an absolute landmark’.

As Max Hastings observed, Deighton captured a time and a mood – ‘To those of us who were in our twenties in the 1960s, his books seemed the coolest, funkiest, most sophisticated things we’d ever read’ – and his books have now deservedly become classics.