[This entry was updated by Gina Macdonald (Loyola University) with her entry in the Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, volume 8, pp. 35-55.] Len Deighton is a celebrated spy-thriller writer and military historian whose fiction is innovativ...

Len Deighton is a celebrated spy-thriller writer and military historian whose fiction is innovative and convincing. His novels are well crafted and entertaining. He has been called "the Flaubert of contemporary thriller writers" (Michael Howard, Times Li...

With his early novels, especially The Ipcress File and Funeral in Berlin, Len Deighton established himself as one of the mainstays of modern espionage fiction. He is often ranked--along with Graham Greene, John le Carre, and Ian Fleming--among the foremo...

[Funeral in Berlin] certainly belies Mr Deighton's reputation. He has carried the legitimate devices of throw-away allusive conversation, and of action whose significance has to be puzzled out by the reader, to the point where I spent most of the book wondering what the devil was going on. The development of the story is haphazard, the dénouement thrilling but still more haphazard, as if Mr Deighton had decided he must burst out of his fog in a blaze of fireworks but was not sure how.