Len Deighton
Kosovo 2000
I don’t read much new fiction anymore. Especially not stuff in the genre that I write. I live in mortal fear of unintentionally copying someone else’s work. I suspect that all mystery fiction is derivative at this point.
When I need to scratch my fiction reading itch, I tend to favor things in different genre’s like Science Fiction or I reread books that I have already read. It is nice to reacquaint myself with writers like Gavin Lyall, John LeCarre, Alan Furst, Martin Cruz Smith, Arturo Perez Reverte and recently Len Deighton.
Last year I watched the new take on the IPCRESS FILE, which lead me to rewatch the Michael Caine, Harry Palmer movies. Then I picked up some of Deighton’s unnamed (Harry Palmer) paperbacks. They were as entertaining as I remembered them being when I had first read them. I will eventually get around the to the Bernie Sampson books but given that there are nine of them that is a lot of commitment to one author.
Instead I picked up XPD by Deighton. I read it and came to the interesting realization that XPD is the bridge between the, for lack of a better name, Palmer novels of the 1960’s and early 1970’s and Bernie Sampson’s veteran cold warrior in the late 70’s early 80’s. There is an intimacy to the Palmer books, perhaps, because, they like hardboiled PI fiction, are written in the first person. XPD is not. It is told in the omniscient style in which we are shown what each character is thinking.
In the back of my copy of XPD there was an afterword by Deighton. He talked about the shift in voices between the series and XPD. He wrote about really liking that novel because it was a new style for him.
That struck a chord with me. My sixth Andy Roark book will be published March 2025. Andy and I have had a pretty great run so far. Like all close friends we’ve had our ups and downs. Later in 2025 my new series will be released. I like the book and like Deighton did in XPD I moved away from the first person narrative to a third person one. Maybe that is why I feel close to Andy and the new character, Tommy Kelly, feels a little bit different to me. Either way, I am pretty excited to be starting a new series. I am not sure what’s in store for my buddy Andy, but I wouldn’t write him off yet.