[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...

Len Deighton was born in London on February 18, 1929. "My father was a chauffeur in London, in Marylebone, and my mother was a cook--sort of upstairs-downstairs scene you know."1 "Even as a child I knew it was the last glimpse of a world that was about...