A Son of the Rock

The once prolific writer Len Deighton – whose surname I share (apart from its pronunciation: he rhymed it with Dayton, my family rhymes it with Brighton) – has died: at 97, a good innings by any standard.

Back in my youth I was a keen reader of his spy fiction – he and John Le Carré were the two preeminent spy writers of the time – but it was his Bernard Samson stories, the Game, Set and Match; Hook, Line and Sinker and Faith, Hope and Charity trilogies and their prequel, Winter, which I consumed most avidly.

Then there were his forays into Altered History, SS-GB and XPD, which I greatly enjoyed.

His interest in the Second World War was explored further in the novels Bomber and Goodbye Mickey Mouse, both excellent, before he embarked on History proper with the books Fighter: The True Story of the Battle of Britain; Blitzkrieg: From the Rise of Hitler to the Fall of Dunkirk; the lavishly photographically illustrated Battle of Britain, an interest consummated by the much later review of that war in its entirety in Blood Tears and Folly.

Of these latter I only read one during my blogging years.

Leonard Cyril (Len) Deighton: 18/2/1929 – 15/3/2026. So it goes.