[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 innovative and convincing. His novels are well crafted and entertaining. He has been called "the Flaubert of contemporary thriller writers" (Michael Howard, Times Literary Supplement , 15 September 1978) because of his carefully detailed and complicated backgrounds, his intriguing digressions, and his layered levels of perception. His works are consistently popular, and yet critical response to them has been oddly mixed, ranging from high praise to deep contempt with little middle ground, perhaps because of his comic departures from the standard patterns of the genre and his unwillingness to opt for either the fully serious or the fully popular. Graham Greene, W. Somerset Maugham, and Dashiell Hammett have been named his mentors and Ian Fleming's...