Funeral in Berlin (27 page)

XPD—expedient demise

‘A stunning spy story…Deighton remains the incomparable entertainer’
Guardian

‘Exciting and well made’
Daily Telegraph

‘Deighton in top form…the best kind of action entertainment’
Publishers Weekly

‘Deliciously sharp and flawlessly accurate dialogue, breathtakingly clever plotting, confident character drawing…a splendidly strongly told story’

The Times

978 0 586 05447 5

Goodbye Mickey Mouse is Deighton’s fourteenth novel and a vivid evocation of wartime England, the story of a group of American fighter pilots flying escort missions over Germany in the winter of 1943-4.

At the centre of the novel are two young men: the deeply reserved Captain Jamie Farebrother, estranged son of a deskbound colonel, and the cocky Lieutenant Mickey Morse, well on his way to becoming America’s Number One Flying Ace. Alike only in their courage, they forge a bond of friendship in battle with far-reaching consequences for themselves, and for the future of those they love.

‘It is a novel of memory, satisfying on every imaginable level, but truly astonishing in its recreation of a time and place through minute detail. Deighton has written well of the air before, non-fictionally, and he informs us in an afterword that it took six years of research to do this novel. It shows. The only way you could know more about flying a P-51 Mustang, after reading this book, is to have flown one’
Washington Post

‘He writes, as usual, with authority and a superb sense of period’
Daily Telegraph

‘The sheer charge of the writing swept me into another world all the while I was reading, and now that piece of the past is a piece in my mind.’

HRF Keating,
The Times

978 0 586 05448 2

‘Len was a great cook, a smashing cook. I learned a lot about food from playing Harry Palmer’

Michael Caine

Before becoming famous as the thriller writer of his generation, Len Deighton trained as a pastry chef. If you look carefully at Harry Palmer’s kitchen in the classic film
The Ipcress File
you will notice a newspaper pinned on the wall. This is one of Deighton’s classic cookstrips, the series that ran for two years when he was the
Observer
food writer.

The
Action Cook Book
was once an instructional book for the bachelor male—a guide to sophisticated cooking for the would-be Harry Palmer, collecting together 50 of his best one-page illustrated recipes and numerous demystifying tips. It now has a great following as a fabulous piece of nostalgia as well as retaining real credibility as a genuinely useful cook book.

‘[Len Deighton’s cookbooks] have attracted a cult following for their brilliant design as much as for their comprehensive approach to cooking…’

Guardian

‘They showed the idiot novice male how to dice an onion without it falling apart; how to fine-cut parsley by rocking the blade rather than chopping it; how to sauté mushrooms without them yielding the water that would turn them into a gelatinous glop’

Simon Schama

978 0 00 730587 2

Len Deighton was born in 1929. He worked as a railway clerk before doing his National Service in the RAF as a photographer attached to the Special Investigation Branch.

After his discharge in 1949, he went to art school—first to the St Martin’s School of Art, and then to the Royal College of Art on a scholarship. His mother was a professional cook and he grew up with an interest in cookery—a subject he was later to make his own in an animated strip for the
Observer
and in two cookery books. He worked for a while as an illustrator in New York and as art director of an advertising agency in London.

Deciding it was time to settle down, Deighton moved to the Dordogne where he started work on his first book,
The Ipcress File.
Published in 1962, the book was an immediate success.

Since then his work has gone from strength to strength, varying from espionage novels to war, general fiction and non-fiction. The BBC made
Bomber
into a day-long radio drama in ‘real time’. Deighton’s history of World War Two,
Blood, Tears and Folly,
was published to wide acclaim—Jack Higgins called it ‘an absolute landmark’.

As Max Hastings observed, Deighton captured a time and a mood—‘To those of us who were in our twenties in the 1960s, his books seemed the coolest, funkiest, most sophisticated things we’d ever read’—and his books have now deservedly become classics.

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Len Deighton

FICTION

The Ipcress File

Horse Under Water

Funeral in Berlin

Billion-Dollar Brain

An Expensive Place to Die

Only When I Larf

Bomber

Declarations of War

Close-Up

Spy Story

Yesterday’s Spy

Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy

SS-GB

XPD

Goodbye Mickey Mouse

MAMista

City of Gold

Violent Ward

T
HE
S
AMSON
S
ERIES

Berlin Game

Mexico Set

London Match

Winter: A Berlin Family 1899-1945

Spy Hook

Spy Line

Spy Sinker

Faith

Hope

Charity

N
ON-FICTION

Action Cook Book

Fighter: The True Story of the Battle of Britain

Airshipwreck

Basic French Cooking

Blitzkrieg: From the Rise of Hitler to the Fall of Dunkirk

ABC of French Food

Blood, Tears and Folly