Word: deightons
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Take this book on the first page, Spy Sinker by Len Deighton. Mr. Deighton, according to the promotional material in front of me, is the "master of suspense." Now I'm not sure who gives out titles like the "master of suspense." Maybe the same Congressional Subcommittee that proclaims "National Broccoli...
...Deighton, Spy Line...
...LINE by Len Deighton (Knopf; $18.95). When the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, it landed on Deighton, who was caught in mid-trilogy about a British agent in the divided city whose wife has left him to set up her own spy shop on the east side of the Wall. A competent thriller that seems just a little quaint...
Luckily for Deighton, there is no sign of change in his narrative's other engine of mischief, the mole-ridden, class-clotted English intelligence apparatus. A considerable part of the fun of the author's nearly endless chronicle has always been his seething contempt, and Samson's, for England's upper-class bumblers, and for Oxbridge leftists of the Kim Philby stamp. Readers who have followed Samson from Berlin Game will recall that his very upper-class wife Fiona, also an English intelligence agent, defected to East Germany and set up shop as a KGB colonel, no less...
...this has bubbled cheerfully in the two novels that followed Berlin Game in Deighton's first Samson trilogy, Mexico Set and London Match, and then in Spy Hook, the beginning of a second trilogy, which has Samson under suspicion and on the run from his own colleagues. The current Spy Line sags just a bit, but it will lead, readers are assured, to resolution in a promised final thriller, Spy Sinker. Will Fiona and Samson retire to a cottage in Cornwall and argue over lunch? More important, will Deighton or anyone else find a menace to replace the Wall? Lite...