[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...

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...

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...

SPY SINKER By Len Deighton Harper Collins, 374 pages, $21.95 The thing of it is, at some point in all of these Len Deighton books you want to go to Tante Lisl's little hotel for dinner. That's how real the characters have...

Though most authors would give their eyeteeth for publicity, Len Deighton, best known for his British espionage thrillers beginning with The Ipcress File, hasn't granted an interview in at least 10 years. The publicist at HarperCollins, who is trying to promote Deighton's new...

Capitalizing on [the continuing interest of the fortieth anniversary of Hitler's invasion of France], Len Deighton—author of "The Ipcress File," "Fighter," and "SS-GB"—has produced ["Blitzkrieg,"] a concise, interesting account of the blitzkrieg. Much, of course, has already been written about the events of the spring of 1940. Little, if any, new documentary evidence is now bound to come to light. But Mr. Deighton, like a musical c...

Len Deighton is the Flaubert of contemporary thriller writers. He takes enormous, almost obsessional care to get the background to his books exactly right, and he chooses increasingly complicated backgrounds; with the result that, as with Flaubert, our attention is constantly distracted from the story and the principal participants by our admiration for, or perhaps our doubts about, the incidental details. When the background is a Britain which has been under Nazi occupation for a year, a very strong story ...

Mr. Deighton's first novel, "The Ipcress File," caused quite a stir among both critics and customers in England, if rather less here. It was a sharply written, ironic and realistic tale of modern spy activities, but somewhat scant in plot and unity. "Funeral in Berlin" has the virtues of its predecessor plus a plot very nearly as complex and nicely calculated as that of "The Spy Who Came in From the Cold." The double and triple crosses involved in smuggling a...