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...

Frankly, I'm not quite sure what to make of … Len Deighton, an experienced frogman who has worked for the Special Investigation Branch of the R.A.F. I'll agree with Symons that he "has a sharp realism about motives that is very much to my own taste." He also has a wry, dry and highly individual manner—as well as a highly individual approach to punctuation and grammar. But I find his storytelling episodic, even desultory. It takes him almost half of this long book [&...

The Hitler Minutes were a transcription of [the clandestine meeting between Churchill and Hitler], and Deighton's latest espionage thriller [XPD] focuses on the worldwide hunt conducted by a variety of modern-day intelligence agencies as they try to locate them before they are made public. Deighton's attention to detail and his appreciation of the delicacies of international politics give his book a plausibility too often lacking in spy novels. This is not to say XPD doesn't have its fl...