Len Deighton RIP

The novelist Len Deighton, author of spy novels like "The Ipcress File," the dystopian alternative history novels "SS-GB" and a couple of superlatively detailed and accurate war novels, "Fighter" and "Bomber," has died at the age of 97.

Born in 1929, he was a boy in London during the blitz, and once discovered an air-raid shelter which had been hit and contained 20 bodies. Another memory from the war which influenced his writing came when Special Branch raided the house next door and arresting his neighbour, a 38-year-old Russian emigre named Anna Wolkoff. She had fled to England in 1917 after the Revolution, with her parents. Secretly, she was a Nazi spy. Among her targets was the US ambassador, Joseph Kennedy. Wolkoff was sentenced to ten years for relaying secrets to Berlin.

After the war, he served in the RAF before studying art at St Martin's College in London and the Royal College of Art. He spent a year as a cabin steward with the airline BOAC before starting work as a graphic designer and an illustrator at an advertising agency.

He is credited with considerable influence on the development of the British spy novel.

He will be missed.

Rest in Peace.

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