Product Description

Len Deighton's classic first novel, whose protagonist is a nameless spy -- later christened Harry Palmer and made famous worldwide in the iconic 1960s film starring Michael Caine. The Ipcress File was not only Len Deighton's first novel, it was his first bestseller and the book that broke the mould of thriller writing. For the working class narrator, an apparently straightforward mission to find a missing biochemist becomes a journey to the heart of a dark and deadly conspiracy. The film of The Ipcress File gave Michael Caine one of his first and still most celebrated starring roles, while the novel itself has become a classic.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #783207 in Books
• Published on: 1995
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 272 pages

Review
'A spy story with a difference.' Observer 'A master of fictional espionage.' Daily Mail 'The poet of the spy story.' Sunday Times 'The Ipcress File helped change the shape of the espionage thriller!the prose is still as crisp and fresh as ever!there is an infectious energy about this book which makes it a joy to read, or re-read.' Daily Telegraph 'The self-conscious cool of Deighton's writing has dated in the best way possible!a stone-cold cold war classic.' Guardian 'Deighton is so far in the front of other writers in the field that they are not even in sight' Sunday Times 'Nobody now seriously doubts that Deighton is the most credible of all the spysmiths' The Scotsman 'Regarded as the cold war spy thriller that made all subsequent examples of the genre possible!however much of a classic the film is, the book is a completely different proposition. It's more intricate and far superior!a must for anyone who likes this kind of fiction.' Loaded

From the Inside Flap
"A dazzling performance . . . A remarkable talent." The New York Times Book Review

What must a lone spy do to survive? The classic spy story that reinvigorated a whole genre!

About the Author
Born in London, he served in the RAF before graduating from the Royal College of Art (which recently elected him a Senior Fellow). While in New York City working as a magazine illustrator he began writing his first novel, 'The Ipcress File', which was published in 1962. He is now the author of more than thirty books of fiction and non-fiction. At present living in Europe, he has, over the years, lived with his family in ten different countries from Austria to Portugal.

Customer Reviews

Bits and Pieces, Odds and Ends
I first read this book as a teenager in the 1960s, graduating from James Bond. After Fleming's action-based thrillers, Deighton was bound to come across as a little elliptical, and my response then was a mixture of bafflement and admiration. I had to read the three subsequent books in the series before I realized that it's a waste of time looking for logical plots in Deighton's work. Perfect plotters are authors who are never diverted by inconsequential things. But Deighton's writing is fuelled by the inconsequential and the peculiar.

George Orwell once noted that Dickens's books are always packed with purposeless detail. Cheeses can't be just "cheeses": they have to be "Gloucester cheeses". His fictional world is very particular, very specific. In the same way, when you get to know Deighton, you are not surprised when his hero stops off at a delicatessen to buy a pound of - no, not just "butter", but "Normandy butter" - and when it goes soft in his pocket before he makes it home, we realize that this hero is a million miles from James Bond.

Departing from the usual profile, Deighton's novels are character-based rather than action-based, and that's both a strength and a weakness. There are any number of slick, factory-produced thrillers around, but a Len Deighton thriller is a hand-made product. The edges are not quite straight, it wobbles when you try to stand it upright, and the doors don't quite fit.

Those who look for a perfect solution to a clearly-stated puzzle should look elsewhere. What we get from Len Deighton is the kind of character-drawing that is traditionally the weakest element in popular thrillers. His descriptions are always arresting and invariably witty. Colonel Ross is described as having "the complexion of a Hovis loaf", and those who have seen a Hovis loaf will recognize the aptness of the image: that of a florid military type who is a little too fond of the bottle. He is also described as a gentleman - which Deighton defines as someone who never drinks gin before 7.30 p.m. and wouldn't hit a lady without first taking his hat off.

If you like that sort of thing, you'll like Len Deighton. He is the Charles Dickens of thriller writers, with the same faults and the same virtues. And The Ipcress File is replete with both. Deighton's shaky and approximate plotting is more than offset by his observant eye for the endless varieties of human strangeness.

Just one thing, though. Deighton is someone who doesn't just write, he re-writes. The care with which he crafts his prose is somehow evident on the page in the look of the sentences and paragraphs. He is a writer, and you should be a reader. So, my advice: forget the cassette. Go for the book.

Deighton's Debut
It is said that this debut from Deighton transformed the thriller genre, and after reading its elliptical not-plot, one can see why. This first in the so-called "Harry Palmer" quartet (the narrator isn't named in print, only in the films based on the books), firmly established the idea of spy as bureaucrat, rather than spy as action hero. The narrator is a sardonic, apparently middle-class, man who has been transferred into an awkwardly acronymed small department of the British espionage system, which is run by proper upper-class gents. There, his first assignment is to assist in the investigation of the mysterious disappearance of a number of British scientists. His problem is that information is so compartmentalized that he's never really clear what's going on or how to even begin.

Most readers are likely to be equally confused as they try to unravel the tangled web of bureaucratic infighting that seems to shroud the whole book. It doesn't help matters when the scene shifts to Lebanon, where the narrator and his support team is involved in retrieving one of the scientists. The plot (such as it is) gets further confused when the boss goes off on assignment, leaving the narrator in charge of the section. And then the boss comes back out of the blue and they all troop off to a South Pacific atoll to witness some kind of American nuclear test. It's hard to see where Deighton's going with all this, and even more so when it becomes apparent that the narrator is actually under suspicion of being a Soviet spy.

In the end, Deighton waves his wand and removes his handkerchief to reveal the solution to all the confusion, and while it more or less works, it somehow feels cheap. There's even a whole "explanation" scene where the narrator spells everything out to another character for the reader's benefit. The research into the espionage bureaucracy of the era is admirable, and Deighton does have a deft hand at description and some nice turns of phrase, but the plotting is so skimpy as to be noticeable in its absence. It's kind of interesting to read about spies as regular bureaucrats with expense account issues and bag wages owed to them, but that only gets one so far. In the end, for all the groundbreaking style, the "threat" to the

Still one of the best
This was at the beginning of cold war spy stories with double-crosses and double double crosses and moles, and was one of the first to inject humor. We had already had some of Le Carre, and James Bond and Our Man in Havana. I just re-read it after forty years and it still seems fresh and original. My copy has the price tag of 60 cents.
The plot is so ingenious that it's difficult to follow, and there's a long explanation at the end which still leaves a few loose ends if you want to pick nits. It goes fom London to the Lebanon, to a Pacific island and to Hungary (maybe) but the fact that it's first person narrative helps to keep the flow smooth. Later on I think Deighton grew repetitious, and even repeated some of his jokes.
Does anyone know Palmer's military rank? He gets addressed as Colonel at one point.