Harry Palmer

The classic spy thriller of lethal computer-age intrigue and a maniac's private cold war, featuring the unnamed narrator from The IPCRESS File, as he travels from the bone-freezing winter of Helsinki, Riga and Leningrad, to the stifling heat of Texas, and soon finds himself tangling with enemies on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

After six weeks in a nuclear submarine gathering computer data on Soviet activity, the mysterious, bespectacled spy known as Patrick Armstrong is desperate to return home. But when he arrives at his London flat, it appears to be occupied by someone who looks just like him - and he finds himself propelled into the heart of a conspiracy stretching from the remote Scottish highlands to the Arctic ice.

An unnamed spy is sent to Paris to deliver a file of nuclear secrets to a French doctor, but soon finds himself sucked into a twilight world of sex, blackmail and hidden motive, where friend and enemy become indistinguishable.

The sequel to Len Deighton's game-changing debut The IPCRESS File, Horse Under Water sees its nameless, laconic narrator sent from fogbound London to the Algarve, where he must dive through layers of deceit in a place rotten with betrayals.

When the unnamed British agent in this story is sent to take custody of a defecting Russian scientist, his mission takes him to the Arab world and the Sahara desert as he is consistently foiled by a US Secret Service high-up. Loyalty is tested and never certain, as it becomes unclear as the novel develops who is actually chasing whom, and where the threat is coming from.