Spy Line. Len Deighton
to the fact that travel plays a significant role in the story, though to what ends only the following pages will reveal.
At the heart of every one of the nine books in this triple trilogy is Bernard Samson, so I wanted to come up with a neat way of visually linking them all. When the reader has collected all nine books and displays them together in sequential order, the books’ spines will spell out Samson’s name in the form of a blackmail note made up of airline baggage tags. The tags were drawn from my personal collection, and are colourful testimony to thousands of air miles spent travelling the world.
Arnold Schwartzman OBE RDI
The nine Bernard Samson stories, ten if you include Winter, have been written as complete and separate stories. “Beginning, middle and end” said a large yellow sticky note prominently displayed in my workplace. Sometimes visitors asked me what it meant but it wasn’t easy to explain and when I tried most of them looked puzzled. Didn’t every book have a beginning, middle and an end?
Giving each book a proper beginning, middle and end was a part of my assumed contract with the reader. Each book is designed to be read alone and without pre-knowledge. But I began to receive mail asking about the planning and what was to come in the next book. Not wanting to tempt fate I was somewhat evasive in my replies, but now I have an opportunity to explain a little about how the books were designed to fit together. I hope you will forgive the references to the other Samson books. (If you are not in a forgiving mood turn the page and start reading the story.)
First let me say something about the contrived and cryptic atmosphere in which Bernard moves. The intelligence services of the world, the secret police, the electronic snoopers and all the apparatus of poking and prying that governments resort to, are not the smooth, polite and competent organizations that their press and public relations experts wish us to believe they are. They are part of the same government bureaucracy that hides its failures less well. If you have visited your Town Hall or made a planning application you will have had a demonstration of the slow-moving, myopic misunderstandings that dog the trade of espionage. This is the world in which Bernard Samson works and lives. It is a fraternity where awards and pensions are on everyone’s mind and where departmental vendettas cloud decision making. It is a world where, for the most part, danger and hard work is provided in inverse proportion to pay and promotion.
Just as Berlin Game, Mexico Set and London Match together make a continuous narrative, so, after a break in the timescale, do Spy Hook and Spy Line. Three years have passed since the end of the Game, Set and Match stories. The slippery slope that Bernard first trod in Hook has seen him sliding downwards and out of control. As Line opens Bernard is still on the run. He is sitting in a sleazy Berlin dive at three o’clock in the morning. With him there is an elderly German whose life has crossed Bernard’s many times.
I must admit that I enjoyed investigating Berlin’s underworld. Sited in what was virtually the no man’s land of the Cold War, this milieu was unique in having a national and political dimension. Perhaps this sad domain was no more violent than New York, Paris or London but here in Berlin one saw that authority could be more ruthless than the criminals and more indifferent to suffering. Perhaps that was not unique to Berlin; perhaps it was more a measure of my innocence.
The story of Spy Line provides a need to explore more of the city than did the previous Samson books. And it provided a chance to use some of the startling stories that I was by now hearing from a small network of friends and well-wishers. Advised abundantly, guided sometimes, abandoned now and again, I poked and prodded my way into a world that did not welcome questions. Cameras, notebooks or tape recorders were the badges of authority; an enemy that was universally despised, feared, frustrated and fought. I had spent many years, in many different places, researching books of many different kinds but in Berlin I learned how to do it deadpan.
When I was still at school I was captivated by the world of espionage as depicted, and to some extent created, in the mind of that master craftsman Eric Ambler. On the screen Eric’s wonderful writing was interpreted in the wet-shiny cobbled back alleys and smoke-filled subterranean bars of Central Europe. Women, all resembling Marlene Dietrich, smoked black cigarettes held in long ivory holders while being serenaded by a doleful violin. This was Eric’s world and I revelled in it. Later Eric and his wife became our close friends, and we shared and multiplied the icons of our dreams. For me, Eric’s world of espionage was claustrophobic and I relished it. But things changed rapidly. That was not the world I wrote about in The Ipcress File and it was certainly not Bernard’s world.
In planning this Samson series I knew that Hook would record a change of mood. Here the story must open out and reflect more of the things happening around me. Bernard goes to Vienna and Salzburg; two cities which I had come to know some years earlier. As will become evident, there was a need to reach a climax, or at least a milestone, in the overall story; a place that would prepare me, and you, for the change in style and method that Spy Sinker, the final book of the second trilogy, was to use.
It is a curious feature of all true and real investigations that the most vital breaks come without effort or warning. This is so for Bernard, and Spy Line follows him as he stumbles back and resumes his normal life and work, while still absorbed by the questions posed by his wife and the tight-lipped men for whom he works.
My wife, and both my sons, have always maintained that my musical taste tends to favour the minor keys. Eventually I yielded to their judgment. I like the minor keys and a whole opera in a minor key is not too much for me. Line is a book written entirely in a minor key. Line depicts Samson at the nadir of his life and career. A hurtful and foolish outburst directed at someone who loved him desperately shows that he is bruised and battered by events as he moves slowly to a denouement that is professionally successful and personally catastrophic.
And in its last chapters there are three finales. In one Bernard learns more about his father and we learn about the cryptic end of the book Winter. Stunned and depressed Bernard discovers too late that what is said can never be unsaid. His immediate sense of loss is palpable. A third finale follows; it is both an end and a beginning. The next book – Spy Sinker – will have to start the story all over again.
Len Deighton, 2010
‘Glasnost is trying to escape over the Wall, and getting shot with a silenced machine gun!’ said Kleindorf. ‘That’s the latest joke from over there.’ He spoke just loudly enough to make himself heard above the strident sound of the piano. His English had an American accent that he sometimes sharpened.
I laughed as much as I could now that he’d told me it was a joke. I’d heard it before and anyway Kleindorf was hopeless at telling jokes: even good jokes.
Kleindorf took the cigar from his mouth, blew smoke at the ceiling and tapped ash into an ashtray. Why he was so finicky I don’t know; the whole damned room was like a used ashtray. Magically the smoke appeared above his head, writhing and coiling, like angry grey serpents trapped inside the spotlight’s beam.
I laughed too much, it encouraged him to try another one. ‘Pretty faces look alike but an ugly face is ugly in its own way,’ said Kleindorf.
‘Tolstoy never said that,’ I told him. I’d willingly play the straight man for anyone who might tell me things I wanted to know.
‘Sure he did; he was sitting at the bar over there when he said it.’
Apart from regular glances to see how I was taking his jokes, he never took his eyes off his dancers. The five tall toothy girls just found room on the cramped little stage, and even then the one on the end had to watch where she was kicking. But Rudolf Kleindorf – ‘Der grosse Kleiner’ as he was more usually known –