Secret File

A high-ranking scientist has been kidnapped, and a secret British intelligence agency has just recruited Deighton's iconic unnamed protagonist-later christened Harry Palmer-to find out why. His search begins in a grimy Soho club and brings him to the other side of the world. When he ends up amongst the Soviets in Beirut, what seemed a straightforward mission turns into something far more sinister. With its sardonic, cool, working-class hero, Len Deighton's sensational debut and first bestseller The Ipcress File broke the mold of thriller writing and became the defining novel of 1960s London.

In 1963, Berlin is dark and dangerous. Len Deighton's skilled, jaded, anonymous hero of The IPCRESS File is now set to arrange the defection-and fake the death-of a leading Soviet scientist. One of the first novels written after the construction of the Berlin Wall, Funeral in Berlin revels in the fraught, chilling atmosphere of a divided city.

"For sheer readability he has no peer" -Evening Standard Paris in the 1960s caters for every taste, and nowhere more than at the private "clinic" run by the enigmatic Monsieur Datt on Avenue Foch, which supplies psychedelic drugs and sexual favors to the city's elite-all the while secretly filming guests in order to blackmail them. Into this decadent underworld steps a bespectacled British spy. Sent on what seems like a simple mission, he soon finds himself playing a game where the rules are unknown-and even victory could be fatal. "Take this excellent thriller at a single gulp" -Sunday Times

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.