This is by Len Deighton. Following hot on the heels of Stella Rimington's Secret Asset, it's the next in my spy run...

The recommendation for this came from here. Actually, that's not quite true. The Deighton novel recommended in that post was Berlin Game. But the book that popped up in the Kuching second-hand book fair was this one... Published in 1988, it's the first in a trilogy, and is supposed to be a standalone story. So why not, I thought, check out Len Deighton with a volume that's nice and cheap?

Well, it IS a standalone story. But all the way through I had the feeling I was somehow missing out on lots of back-story. And it turns out I was. Our narrator and key protagonist is the 40-something MI6 intelligence officer Bernard Samson. And he has already featured in a previous trilogy, where many of the current characters were introduced.

It's not that it doesn't make sense. It does. It's a perfectly valid story (although it ends with a massive cliffhanger). It's just that I think I'd have enjoyed it more if I'd read it in the right place in the sequence.

But Deighton writes very nicely, and I'm definitely up for going back and covering those earlier books when the opportunity arises.



This is a really detailed and perceptive breakdown of Spy Hook's plot and themes. I won't include any spoilers here, but a quote from that post gives you a great feel for the way the book works:

"Like the first trio there is less a plot than a likeably chatty depiction of the daily round of Samson’s life...

"We see Bernard chatting to other characters over pub lunches, at dinner parties, in pool halls, in hotel rooms; he pokes at hotel food, airplane food, dinner party food, pub food. He mooches.

"These domestic, humdrum scenes a) distinguish Deighton’s writing from the hi-tech, glamour Bond tradition, continuing the low-key tone established in his early Ipcress novels [and] b) are very likeable. Feels like we’re getting to know Bernie, his kids, their nanny, his girlfriend, his bosses and colleagues at work, his moans and worries. All designed, of course, to root the 'spying' -- and the occasional outbreaks of violence -- in a 'real' world.

"In among all these homely descriptions are laced scenes relating to his work as an employee of British Intelligence..." Some of these work better than others, it has to be said.

It's true that Samson is likeable. It's also true that he's a bit of a dinosaur. His wife having defected to the Russians (or did she...?), he's now shacked up with a woman half his age. He knows this can only end in tears, and yet he's surely not helping himself by apparently dumping the management of the household on her (he has two kids)... She works for MI6 too, and is planning to go to university, where he fears she'll meet someone more age-appropriate. She should. But generally, Samson seems a bit unreconstructed. He calls "the girl waiting in the corridor" Mabel, because he calls them all Mabel... He pines for "the days before women's lib, designer jeans, and deep-dish pizza..." Nevertheless, he doesn't do anything too egregious. I didn't get fed up with him.

And he's an interesting character. He grew up in Germany (his father was in the same line of business), and he still feels very much part of that culture. He always enjoys returning to Berlin, and staying at the old-fashioned hotel that was his home during his schooldays and youth. Now it's his "private museum of nostalgia". He tells us: "No matter where I went or what I did, Berlin would always be home for me... Berlin held all my happy childhood memories."

But he's a bit -- What's the word? I was going to say "dim". That's too cruel. But when EVERYONE is telling him to drop his personal investigations into the large sum of money that has gone missing from the Department, you'd think he'd start to figure out there might be more to this mystery than meets the eye. You're amazed when -- having been specifically warned not to -- he confronts "Dodo", the slightly crazy sponger and art forger, who he knows was also once an agent. And you're amazed all over again when he ignores a big clue he's given us earlier, and coughs up the whole story to the Director General... At the end of the book he's on his own and adrift in a hostile world.



As this analysis points out, Samson's "grumpy old man" image resonates with the "almost oppressive atmosphere of age" that pervades the book. Characters are ill, or surrounded by relics from the past, or apparently determined to appear older than they are.

The dodgy Dodo says to Samson at one point: "We’re old fossils. We’re part of another world. A world of dinosaurs." I had to check back more than once on when the action was set. We're apparently in 1987 -- late 1980s, anyway, not long before the actual date of publication, and really not long, therefore, before the end of the Cold War. It feels earlier, somehow. And I wonder how the trilogy is going to play out, with that massive game-changer waiting in the wings...

*_*_*

Len Deighton was born in 1929 (there's lots more on his life here). He is still with us, and -- at least until a couple of years ago -- was still collaborating with one of his sons on the comic-strip recipe series he pioneered in the 1960s (examples of his "cookstrips" can be found here). He has also written non-fiction history books.

So... All will not be clear by the time you've finished Spy Hook... But I was sufficiently hooked to not mind too much.