by Len Deighton
‘I had a sneaking feeling I was breaking the Official Secrets Act every time I opened this book’
Daily Express
‘This secret service thriller will be read; so will the next and the next…’ Sunday Telegraph
978 0 586 04431 5
BILLION-DOLLAR BRAIN
Len Deighton
The classic thriller of lethal computer-age intrigue and a maniac’s private cold war
General Midwinter loves his country, and hates communism. In a bid to destabilise the Soviet power block he is running his own intelligence agency, whose ‘brain’ is the world’s biggest supercomputer.
With his past coming back to haunt him, the unnamed agent of The Ipcress File is sent to Finland to penetrate Midwinter’s spy cell. But then a deadly virus is stolen, and our hero must stop it falling into the hands of both the Russians and the billionaire madman.
‘So far in front of other writers in the field that they are not even in sight’ Sunday Times
‘Such credibility, such accurate line-by-line beaming of a sheer sense of the actual…a glittering, wintry entertainment’ Guardian
‘Worthy of Raymond Chandler…intelligent, inventive, constantly entertaining’ Sunday Telegraph
978 0 586 04428 5
BOMBER
Len Deighton
Bomber is a novel war. There are no victors, no vanquished. There are simply those who remain alive, and those who die.
Bomber follows the progress of an Allied air raid through a period of twenty-four hours in the summer of 1943. It portrays all the participants in a terrifying drama, both in the air and on the ground, in Britain and in Germany.
In its documentary style, it is unique. In its emotional power it is overwhelming.
Len Deighton has been equally acclaimed as a novelist and as an historian. In Bomber he has combined both talents to produce a masterpiece.
‘A massively different novel…the effect is—quite literally—devastating’ Sunday Times
‘A massive and superbly mobilised tragedy of the machines which men create to destroy themselves…masterly and by far Mr Deighton’s best’
Douglas Hurd, The Spectator
‘A magnificent story…the characters lean out of the pages’ Daily Mirror
978 0 586 04544 2
SS-GB
Len Deighton
The war is over. And we have lost.
In February 1941 British Command surrendered to the Nazis. Churchill has been executed, the King is in the Tower and the SS are in Whitehall. For nine months Britain has been occupied—a blitzed, depressed and dingy country. However, it’s ‘business as usual’ at Scotland Yard run by the SS when Detective Inspector Archer is assigned to a routine murder case. Life must go on.
But when SS Standartenfuhrer Huth arrives from Berlin with orders from the great Himmler himself to supervise the investigation, the resourceful Archer finds himself caught up in a high level, all action, espionage battle.
This is a spy story quite different from any other. Only Deighton, with his flair for historical research and his narrative genius, could have written it.
‘A brilliant picture of Britain under German rule’
Sunday Telegraph
‘One of Deighton’s best. Apart from his virtues as a storyteller, his passion for researching his backgrounds gives his work a remarkable factual authority. With Bomber and Fighter he established himself as an expert on a period…the authority of these books seem absolute.’
Observer
‘Len Deighton is the Flaubert of the contemporary thriller writers…there can be little doubt that this is much the way things would have turned out if the Germans had won the war.’
Michael Howard, Times Literary Supplement
978 0 586 05002 6
XPD
Len Deighton
A private aircraft takes off from a small town in central France, while Adolf Hitler, the would-be conqueror of Europe, prepares for a clandestine meeting near the Belgian border.
For more than forty years the events of this day have been Britain’s most closely guarded secret. Anyone who learns of them must die—with their file stamped:
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
Len Deighton
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
ACTION COOK BOOK
Len Deighton
‘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
About the Author
FUNERAL IN BERLIN
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 i
n 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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Other Books By
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
THE SAMSON SERIES
Berlin Game
Mexico Set
London Match
Winter: A Berlin Family 1899-1945
Spy Hook
Spy Line
Spy Sinker
Faith
Hope
Charity
NON-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
Copyright
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Harper
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
77-85 Fulham Palace Road,
Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
www.harpercollins.co.uk
FIRST EDITION
First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape 1964
Copyright © Pluriform Publishing Company BV 1964
Introduction copyright © Pluriform Publishing Company BV 2009
Cover designer’s note © Arnold Schwartzman 2009
Len Deighton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © SEPTEMBER 2009 ISBN: 978-0-007-34300-3
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