‘You are a regular secret agent,’ I said admiringly. ‘What did you do – shoot him in the ankle with the toe-cap gun, send out a signal to HQ on your tooth and play the whole thing back on your wristwatch?’
(An Expensive Place To Die, page 93)

The life of Paris centres on its streets; its inhabitants sit at the windows gazing down upon people as they buy, sell, thieve, drive, fight, eat, chat, posture, cheat or merely stand looking, upon the streets of Paris. (p.20)

‘You are a glib fellow,’ said Loiseau.
(p.31)

This was Len Deighton’s fifth novel and marks a significant departure from the first four:

1. No Secret File The jacket doesn’t bear the impress ‘Secret File 5’ – the first four novels were numbered Secret Files one to four.

2. No paraphernalia There are none of the other paraphernalia which made the first four novels so natty and stylish, no factual appendices or footnotes, and the fancy epigraphs before each chapter or section which graced the earlier novels, these have vanished. Instead, like tens of thousands of other paperback thrillers, its 240-odd pages are just divided into chapters (40 of them), indicated by a bare number.

Apparently, the original hardback edition of the book did contain a dossier of fake NATO files relating to a nuclear attack on China and the likely fallout which, according to legend, was offered to Russian Intelligence and concerned US security services. This, sadly, is not available or referred to in subsequent paperback editions.

3. Games The fancy epigraphs to the previous novels referenced horoscopes and crossword puzzles – games, and in the first two novels the protagonist did a crossword, one aspect of the gamification of the narratives. There’s a muted echo of that here, in the way the central characters play Monopoly (of all things) every evening in the café. It is an echo of the Ipcress texts, and at the same time I suppose a deliberate contrast with the flashy high-society gambling of James Bond, who in every novel seems to get involved in high stakes games of poker or baccarat or roulette: this guy’s nightly Monopoly game with a café owner and his wife is by way of being a parody of that.

4. Harry Palmer? Although the story is (mostly) told in the first person by an intelligence agent, gone are all references to the WOOC(P) office in Charlotte Street and the related characters from the first four novels – his girlfriend Jean, canny old office manager Alice (Bloom), aloof boss Dawlish, dim Chico et al.

According to the Deighton Dossier website, in the introduction to the Jubilee edition of the novel, Deighton does state that it is ‘the fifth and last in a sequence of novels that began with The Ipcress File, but that doesn’t clear up the mystery of whether it’s told by the same unnamed Narrator as those novels. In my opinion, use of an unnamed first-person spy Narrator and the theme of espionage certainly do link it to the first four – and after this one, there is a distinct break in Deighton’s subject matter – but it is not the same character.

5. Second point of view A large innovation is that the narrative is told by a combination of first-person Narrator (familiar from the first 4 books) with a third-person Narrator describing the activities of 32-year-old Marie (chapters 6, 17) and Jean-Paul Pascal (chapters 19). We had been prepared for it in Funeral in Berlin which had interrupted the flow of the first-person narrative with three chapters giving 3rd-person accounts of other characters (Hallam, Hannah Stahl).

Prose

And significantly toned down is the jazzy prose. Similes and special effects there still are, but much fewer and further between, confirming a reduction in verbal special effects which was already noticeable in Billion Dollar Brain. There are some good-enough similes, but nothing like the number or razzamatazz of Ipcress, and what there is, is often a bit more obvious.

They had opened me like a cheap watch, prodded the main spring and laughed at its simple construction. I had failed and failure closed over me like a darkroom blind coming down.

The noise of rain was like a vast crowd applauding frantically.

We passed the bomb-scarred façade of the War Ministry and raced a cab over the river. The Place de la Concorde was a great concrete field, floodlit like a film set. (p.120)

Instead, the prose is much tamer and more functional, much more your average thriller paperback prose. There are what, for the first time, feel like clichés:

She kicked the accelerator and the power surged through the car like the blood through my reviving limbs… She loved the car, caressing the wheel and agog with admiration for it; and like a clever lover she coaxed it into effortless performance. (p.51)

There feels to be quite a lot more psychology in the text – in the Palmer novels people’s thoughts, feelings and reactions are mostly implied, to be teased out by the reader from laconic snatches of conversation.

Here, the thoughts and feelings of characters – especially of Maria, the co-star of the novel – are spelt out in full but they turn out, alas, to be very run-of-the-mill, almost embarrassingly so. What is truth? What is love? Yawn. There is a lot of yadda about men and women, with Maria kvetching about men, men, men and Jean-Pierre given long trite reflections about women, women, women. Chapter 30 is a dinner party at which the three French characters make long speeches about love and women.

‘When I was eighteen – ten years ago – I wanted to give the women I loved the things I wanted for myself: respect, admiration, good food, conversation, wit and even knowledge. But women despise those things. Passion is what they want, intensity of emotion. The same trite words of admiration repeated over and over again. They don’t want good food – women have poor palates – and witty conversation worries them. What’s worse it diverts attention away from them. Women want men who are masterful enough to give them confidence, but not cunning enough to outwit them. They want men with plenty of faults so that they can forgive them. They want men who have trouble with the little things in life; women excel at little things. They remember little things too; there is no occasion in their lives, from confirmation to eightieth birthday, when they can’t recall every stitch they wore.’ (p.176)

You will be pleased to learn the originator of these sentiments, the playboy Jean-Paul, is shot dead soon afterwards but there is a lot of this sort of thing and it is bad. Here’s a bit that’s as dire as Alistair MacLean:

Jean-Paul finally understood the hornet’s nest he had aroused in Datt’s brain. His face was set and defiant, but you didn’t have to be an amateur psychologist to know that if he could set the clock back ten minutes he’d rewrite his script. (p.181)

Or:

She tried to stand back and see herself in the present dilemma. Ridiculous, she pronounced, all her life had been something of a pantomime but driving a loaded ambulance across northern France was more than she could have bargained for even in her most imaginative moments. (p.211)

JUat as clunky and dumb as MacLean. The earlier novels had snappy dialogue; this one has lots of speechifying and then the complete collapse of the plot into ridiculous implausibility (see below).

Paris

Although he had a reputation for being more downbeat, ‘gritty’ and realistic than more glamour spy novels, Deighton still followed the thriller rule of setting your story in exotic or (at the time) remote locations. Thus:

• Ipcress – Pacific atoll, Lebanon
• Horse Under Water – Portugal
• Funeral in Berlin – Berlin, south of France
• Billion Dollar Brain – Helsinki, Leningrad, Riga, New York, Texas

This novel is set entirely in Paris and lets you know it with lots of knowing references to the Boul. Mich., inside tips about French cuisine, a sprinkling of footnotes clarifying the structure of the various French police agencies, and larky descriptions of Paris landmarks.

The great Arc de Triomphe loomed above them as they roared round the Étoile like soapsuds round the kitchen sink. (p.112)

And yet the cumultive impression of the City of Light is surprisingly downbeat: this is the view of an admittedly downbeat character, the down-at-heel prostitute, Monica:

It’s a lousy rotten town,’ I agreed.
‘And dangerous,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Paris is all of those things.’
She laughed. ‘Paris is like me, cousin Pierre; it’s no longer young, and too dependent upon visitors who bring money. Paris is a woman with a little too much alcohol in her veins. She talks a little too loud and thinks she is young and gay. But she has smiled too often at strange men and the words “I love you” trip too easily from her tongue. The ensemble is chic and the paint is generously applied, but look closely and you’ll see the cracks showing through.’ (p.103)

But the Narrator too, has lots of tourist descriptions of Paris streets and sun and weather but these, too, have a negative tendency:

The sky was starry and the air was warm. The visitors had spread through Paris by now and they strolled around entranced, in love, jilted, gay, suicidal, inspired, bellicose, defeated; in clean cotton St Trop, wine-stained Shetland, bearded, bald, bespectacled, bronzed. Acned little girls in bumbag trousers, lithe Danes, fleshy Greeks, nouveauriche communists, illiterate writers, would-be directors – Paris had them all that summer; and Paris can keep them. (p.119)

Or Maria:

Maria said, ‘France is a land where men command and women obey. “Elle me plait” is the greatest compliment a woman can expect from men; they mean she obeys. How can anyone call Paris a woman’s city? Only a prostitute can have a serious career there. It took two world wars to give Frenchwomen the vote.’ (p.175)

About the French

At one point the artist, Byrd, pulls rank and mocks the Narrator:

‘You don’t understand the French, my boy.’
‘So everyone keeps telling me.’ (p.64)

But despite this, Deighton has his protagonist demonstrate the exact opposite, repeatedly showing what a connoisseur he is of French ways and Paris moeurs.

It was a fine Paris evening, Gauloises and garlic sat lightly on the air, and the cars and people were moving with the subdued hysteria that the French call élan.

Jean-Paul Pascal was a handsome muscular young man with a narrow pelvis who easily adapted himself to the cowboy look that the French admire.

‘Madame,’ said Datt. His voice took on that portentous, melodious quality that narrators on arty French films employ.

At dusk the French shutter themselves tightly against the night. This gaunt house was no exception.

À propos the silly security phrase the Inspector gives him, the Narrator thinks:

France is one place where the romance of espionage will never be lost, I thought.

(Mind you, silly codewords and processes was something Deighton had invented for his protagonist to mock in the previous novel, Billion Dollar Brain.)

How the French speak

The Narrator’s connoisseurship extending right down to a detailed explanation of French physionomy.

The French, more particularly the men, have developed a characteristic mouth that enables them to deal with their language. The English use their pointed and dexterous tongues, and their mouths become pinched and close. The French use their lips and a Frenchman’s mouth becomes loose and his lips jut forward. The cheeks sink a little to help this and a French face takes on a lean look, back-sloping like an old-fashioned coal-scuttle.

Setting and characters

The novel is (mainly) told in the first person by a middle-aged man who lives in the Rue St Ferdinand in the seventeenth arrondissement of Paris and appears to be a special agent working for London. He uses the cover of being a travel agency director as well as writing freelance magazine pieces on the side (p.63). Meeting Hudson the scientist, he hands him a resident’s card in the name of T. Davis (p.147) though it is the only appearance of the name.

He lives above a restaurant, Le Petit Légionnaire, with its little cast of patron, wife, and regular customers. One of these is a Monsieur Datt who runs a rather mysterious ‘clinic’ in the Avenu Foch. He is to be found in the café almost every evening playing Paris Monopoly with the owners.

The Narrator is friends with Byrd, a retired English Navy officer, now living the dream as a painter in Paris; he is making a painting using a nude model named Annie; he is friends with a handsome young French painter named Jean-Paul. One evening they go to a gallery party where the Narrator meets the Chief Inspector of Police, Claude Loiseau, and a pretty thirty-two-year-old woman named Maria Chauvet.

As mentioned, most of the text is narrated in the first person by the English agent, but some chapters are narrated in the third person and are about this Maria (her history, thoughts and feelings) or about police chief Loiseau or playboy Jean-Paul. For me, these don’t work so well: Maria is divorced and has a lover, and reflects on life and love and love and life and it’s all a bit Sunday supplement-level psychology.

Just as an expensive suit wrinkles in a different way from a cheap one, so did the wrinkles in Maria’s face add to her beauty rather than detract from it. I stared at her, trying to understand her better. Was she treacherous, or was she exploited, or was she, like most of us, both? (p.176)

Here she is putting on her make-up in order to go for lunch with her ex-husband Loiseau, and mulling over how she translated for the Englishman during his interrogation (see below).

She smudged her eye-shadow, cursed softly, removed it and began again. Will the Englishman appreciate the risk you are taking? Why not tell M. Datt the truth of what the Englishman said? The Englishman is interested only in his work, as Loiseau was interested only in his work. Loiseau’s love-making was efficient, just as his working day was. How can a woman compete with a man’s work? Work is abstract and intangible, hypnotic and lustful; a woman is no match for it. She remembered the nights she had tried to fight Loiseau’s work, to win him away from the police and its interminable paperwork and its relentless demands upon their time together. She remembered the last bitter argument about it. Loiseau had kissed her passionately in a way he had never done before and they had made love and she had clung to him, crying silently in the sudden release of tension, for at that moment she knew that they would separate and divorce, and she had been right. (p.72)

This strikes me as a farrago of sexist clichés. It feels totaly predictable – she divorced her police officer husband because he was married to his work! Quite possibly this is what the ex-wife of a Paris police chief would think as she puts her make-up on, but it’s dull. Dialogue and narrative in the Ipcress novels feels snappy and ahead of you. This feels predictable and behind you.

The plot

The plot gets going when a courier from London tells the Narrator he must make available to M. Datt a hefty file full of information about nuclear weapon fallout. No explanation why. The Narrator knows this M. Datt runs a ‘clinic’ on the Avenue Foch.

He goes to a party at an art gallery party where Maria picks him up and takes him to visit M. Datt’s clinic in her swish E-type jag. Without any warning there is an extraordinary scene where the Narrator is beaten up by two goons, tied down and injected with LSD and Amytal and interrogated by Datt in the presence of Maria whose job it is to translate his answers. In his delirium he tells everything about his work and employer, but Maria doesn’t translate it all (as she mentions in her soliloquy, quoted above). I suppose the Narrator’s description of heightened delirious awareness under the influence of LSD is very good.

The Narrator awakens in a Disney-style dungeon with Maria who simply walks him out to her car and they drive back to her place. He sleeps, cleans up and returns to his flat only to find it has, in the traditional style, been ransacked, and the atomic file has been found and taken. A few days later he goes downstairs to the restaurant and joins in the Monopoly game with Datt as if nothing, or not much, had happened.

The way he was beaten up, tied down, injected with drugs, interrogated and then… returns to calmly socialising with the man who carried all this out snapped my credulity and from this point onwards I regarded the novel as escapist fantasy, an airport novel, something from a shiny plastic TV series like The Man From UNCLE.

The plot rotates in a rather cartoonish way around Datt’s ‘clinic’: he claims he does research into the psychology of sex; others say it is simply a high-class brothel with a bondage dungeon (where the Narrator regained consciousness) and where the parties feature hard drugs and kinky sex. The Narrator’s contact says this is all true but all the rooms are bugged and the call girls are paid to get the high-level diplomat clientele to talk about their work. The tapes of these conversations are then sent to the police/security services and Datt has persuaded many people he’s actually working for the SDECE (French Security).

Adding to the oddly plastic feel of the story is the way all the main characters turn out to be related.

• Jean-Paul turns out not really to be a painter; he does goon work for Datt sometimes; it is he who burgles the Narrator’s apartment looking for the atomic file; since the Narrator has booby-trapped the file with a chemical, this results in Jean-Paul having indelibly purple hands for several days, to the Narrator’s amusement. Jean-Paul has also been Maria’s lover, and they were caught on video having sex, a fact which periodically worries Maria.
• Maria turns out to be the ex-wife of Loiseau the police inspector, and there’s a lot of reminiscing about their marriage and why it failed etc (as in the quote, above). Datt has told Jean-Paul that Maria is in fact his long-lost daughter, though Maria insists her father was killed early in the War in 1940 – but then later confesses to the Narrator that she is Datt’s illegitimate daughter.
• Annie Couzens, Byrd’s model, turns out also to work at Datt’s clinic as a call girl; but the Narrator’s contact says she is also a British agent, reporting back on what she hears to a Paris control; Loiseau tells Maria that Annie was also working for the French police; and her friend Monique tells the Narrator she made her own independent tapes of her clients, for purposes unknown. In another extraordinary scene, the Narrator is visiting Datt, when they hear screams and a naked Annie comes running downstairs, covered in knife wounds which are bleeding profusely, runs and past them, through the front door and into the street where she collapses and dies. The police quickly arrive, Datt takes control of the situation and bullies them into removing the body pronto and taking it to the morgue. This is a bizarre, almost surreal scene, and the weirdest thing about it is how the Naarrator continues his visit and Datt maintains his urbane persona as the civilised host.
• Byrd is arrested by Loiseau for the Couzens murder, even though all concerned know he isn’t guilty, but he may or may not be another British agent. In the end, we find out is he is more than an agent, he is the Narrator’s ‘case officer’.

Farce

The way everyone is related to everyone else, and is spying on each other and misleading each other about everything, and the way it rotates around a brothel with a tape recorder in each room and a toy dungeon in the basement, begins to give it the feeling of a farce: a small cast of characters getting caught up in more and more complex predicaments, generally with their trousers round their ankles. I’m thinking the movie What’s New Pussycat? released in 1965 and set in Paris, or the Pink Panther movies.

Which is why, when the Narrator sees Annie Couzens, naked, running out of the ‘clinic’, bleeding from numerous stab wounds and drop dead in the street, it is described more as an inconvenience for all concerned than an outrageous murder. The murderer was a high-ranking Chinese embassy official, Kuang-t’en, and so both Datt and the Paris police and the Narrator want it hushed up, and it is.

There is a ludicrous scene where, in order to break into Datt’s mansion/clinic Loiseau closes the Avenue Foch and has massive roadworks put in place to dig up the road and excavate down into the drains leading to the cellar which they break into and thence into the house. Why didn’t they just knock at the front door and go in with a warrant? In any case the house is completely empty, Datt has fled, but surely they would have known that already? The entire scene is bafflingly silly.

Atomic secrets

Sense of a kind is restored when an American, Hudson, on a visit to Paris, contacts the Narrator, claiming to be an atomic bomb expert. He, too, has been ordered to pass secrets to Datt. The assumption seems to be that Datt is a conduit of information to Red China and the point is this: when the US carried out its atomic tests, they hid from the world the truly destructive levels of fallout they produced, in a series of highly-doctored reports. The US knows a medium-size nuclear attack on China would kill some of its population with the blast but most would then die from long-lasting radioactive fallout. But Chinese hard-liners are using the official American reports – which give a misleadingly low estimate of fallout – to advise their government that it could survive a nuclear war, which makes the possibility that China might initiate a nuclear war more likely. Hence the West’s need to somehow pass the genuine, and much more destructive, US test fallout reports to the Chinese man in Paris.

This is the driving motor for the whole plot.

As stated, Datt had fled his ‘clinic’ in Paris (so why did Loiseau close a road, cause massive disruption, and dig up the road itself, drilling right down to house cellar level, and send the Narrator (and a cop to cover him) in that way, rather than just knocking on the front door?) But it’s hardly a flight since everyone involved knows he owns a grand house in the country and so that’s where the Narrator gets Maria to drive him.

Here he finds Datt, Jean-Paul, the housekeeper etc, and the Chinese official who, by this stage, it has emerged is in fact an eminent nuclear scientist. After wordy exchanges with Datt – who goes to great lengths to explain why his brothel was actually carrying out ‘therapy’ on his high-ranking clientele – the Narrator establishes that the Chinese, Kuang-t’ien, is there.

He phones Maria (who had been waiting outside the village) and tells her to drive Hudson, the American nuclear expert, to the house. While the two scientists go into conclave, Datt hosts a dinner party at which everyone talks at great length about human nature and love and women, which feels wildly improbable, clunky and dated. With complete improbability, Jean-Paul becomes a bit hysterical and insults his host and employer, Datt, smashing his wine glass and bottle, shattering the dinner’s civilised veneer so severely, that Datt has him dragged out of the room by one of his heavies who, when Jean-Paul makes some kind of drunken move against him in the hall, shoots him dead.

All this seems bafflingly unlikely and unnecessary.

In this crisis atmosphere, the Narrator persuades the Chinese and American nuclear scientists that they must come with him and escape across the border to Belgium using the fake papers he’s providing. This they do safely, and are collected by Belgians working for British Intelligence in the eerie setting of an empty road in the middle of the First World battlefield of Ypres. Maybe the intrusion of Great War pathos worked in 1967 but to me it felt forced and contrived and I was still reeling from the shooting of sexy Jean-Paul, and struggling to believe any of this farrago.

Time and TV, frozen food and transistor radios had healed the wounds and filled the places that once seemed unfillable. (p.193)

Éclaircissement

In Ostend the Narrator awaits his ‘case officer’, who turns out to be none other than posh, retired Navy painter, Byrd! What? The huffy old painter he’s been patronishing for years is his case officer!

‘You’ve been making a fool of me,’ I complained. (p.198)

The Narrator is disgusted at having been tricked. Byrd explains that his arrest by Loiseau was a ploy to allow him to ‘disappear’ to plan what to do with Kuang. And it turns out he did murder Annie Couzens – the narrator thought this was a mad wrong accusation by the French police. Byrd murdered Annie because she was spilling the beans about being a British agent: the initial plan had been to ‘eliminate’ her and frame Kuang for being an ‘oriental Jack the Ripper’ – but that didn’t come off, old boy.

None of this makes sense or is remotely believable but there’s more. As the plot nears its climax it gets pretty complicated:

That night Kuang tells the Narrator how he met Datt, in Vietnam, in 1954, how they were driving together when they were stopped and set upon by French soldiers who gave Datt a severe kicking. When they left, Kuang drove him to a ‘comrade’ to help. The soldiers left Datt unable to have sex (which may or may not explain his subsequent researches into other people’s sexual perversions). It certainly crystallised Datt’s commitment to Chinese communism. He is, on one level, a Chinese communist spy.

But the point of this passage is to have Kuang convey Deighton’s awareness that China is a fast-growing civilisation of 700 million, on the rise. (All this was just before Mao Zedong kicked off his Great Leap Forward which resulted in social and economic catastrophe, the deaths of 30 to 40 million Chinese, and the setting back of the country by a generation or more, only beginning to recover in the later 1980s, before commencing its current economic boom.)

Meanwhile, Datt has tasked Maria with driving an old ambulance full of the files and porn films which constitute his ‘research’ to the dock at Ostend. There she meets the Narrator and Kuang and announces – wait for it – that she is Kuang’s case officer! What!?

This is obviously nonsense which they all ignore, and a rowboat of Chinese arrives to take them out to a ship three miles offshore outside territorial waters, which has ben masquerading as a ‘pirate radio’ ship. Here they meet Datt who had made his own way to safety.

The Narrator had cannily persuaded Kuang and the girl that they must get into the rowboat immediately and abandon all Datt’s files, because the cops were hot on their tail. This is a ruse; he knows that once out on the boat he will be able to persuade Datt to go back ashore; Kuang won’t stop them – he has the nuclear secrets he wants – and Datt won’t abandon the 800 dossiers which constitute his life work.

First they arrive at the pirate radio ship. Datt is furious to learn that Kuang abandoned all his dossiers back on the quay but Kuang, indifferent, goes off to find something to eat. Leaving Datt and the Narrator to have a set-piece discussion or debate about whether Chinese communism will triumph, the Narrator accusing Datt of being only interested in his research but Datt making it clear he is a zealous Marxist.

‘It could be said that the things of Western Europe that you are most anxious to preserve are better served by supporting the real, uncompromising power of Chinese communism than by allowing the West to splinter into internecine warrior states…

‘[George Orwell] warned the bourgeoisie to watch for militancy, organization, fanaticism and thought-planning, while all the time the seeds of their destruction are being sown by their own inadequacy, apathy, aimless violence and trivial titillation. Their destruction is in good hands: their own. The rebuilding will be ours. My own writings will be the basis of our control of Europe and America. Our control will rest upon the satisfaction of their own basest appetites. Eventually a new sort of European man will evolve.’ (p.228)

But the Narrator has got his hook into Datt; he knows the older man has invested years and untold effort into making his collection of sexual beahviour and psychology, and so is eventually persuaded to go back to the quayside to retrieve it. He knows the Narrator will hand him over to Loiseau but trusts to his high-level contacts, as high as the French Cabinet, to avoid charges or prison. And so it unfolds:  the Narrator and Datt climb back down into the little boat which takes them back ashore to find Loiseau waiting to arrest him, backed up by a squad of Belgian paratroops assigned to him.

They dock, say hello to Loiseau who is waiting with Maria, and Datt is reunited with his precious dossiers and tapes in a customs shed. But it is here the denouement takes place. Realising that her father (Datt is her father) is going to get away with everything, not least the tape of her having sex with Jean-Paul, Maria draws a pistol from her handbag to shoot him. But even as she shoots the Narrator jobs her arm and Loiseau her collar to pull her back so she misses, but of course Datt grabs an armful of tape reels, turns and runs for it. Loiseau yells to one of the soldiers (who is calmly returning to the customs shed with the cofees he ordered a few minutes earlier) to ‘Stop that man’ and, with the subtlety for which paratroopers are renowned, instead of simply pointing the gun and telling an unarmed middle-aged man to stop, the paratrooper rattles off a fusillade of shots, blowing Datt’s head off and flinging his body over the edge of the quay into the dark water.

This, of course, provides the narrative with a final filmic shot of Datt’s corpse floating in the water amid a debris of porn photos and unspooled film reels.

Is this anything to do with justice? Non. Simply that the Narrator wanted the return of the tape of the confession he made under the influence of the drugs right back at the start of the story, and he had promised he would deliver Datt to Loiseau in exchange for it.

The whole narrative is really an extraordinarily complicated series of deals and bargains – it’s quite a challenge to keep up with the scale of the double crosses and backstabbing which everyone has engaged in and, by the end, as I’ve indicated, so preposterous were so many of the ridiculous twists and turns, that it was quite hard to care.

Spy self awareness

By 1967 the spy boom was in full flood, with a plethora of spy novels, TV series and movies exploiting the fashion. And as I’ve pointed out many times, spy novelists all seem archly self-conscious of their trade, aware the the clichés they’re trying to navigate through, and so having various characters point out how this or that situation or bit of dialogue sounds like it comes straight out of a spy movie.

‘What am I supposed to do if you are not out within the hour?’ he asked.
‘I’m damned if I know,’ I said. They never ask questions like that in films. (p.85)

‘Can’t you stop them?’ she said.
‘No,’ I told her, ‘it’s not that sort of film.’ (p.184)

And the almost compulsory reference to the king of spies:

On a staircase a wedge of people were embracing and laughing like advertising photos. At the bar a couple of English photographers were talking in cockney and an English writer was explaining James Bond. (p.115)

Cast

• Unnamed Narrator – lives in the Rue St Ferdinand in the seventeenth arrondissement of Paris, agent of some kind, working for London under cover of being a journalist – lives above a restaurant, Le Petit Légionnaire – keeps a budgie named Joe – ‘heavy, not young, late thirties… body thick and uncared for’ (51)
• Joe the canary – ‘I gave Joe some fresh water and cuttlefish bone for his beak’
• Tastevin – landlord, owner of the small restaurant, Le Petit Legionaire
• Madame Tastevin – wife and main cook
• Monsieur Datt – owns and runs a ‘clinic’
• Martin Langley Byrd – retired English Navy officer, now living the dream as a painter in Paris – ‘stocky blunt rigidity’
• Annie Couzens – 24, Byrd’s model, turns out to be working for British Intelligence, before she is murdered by Kuang-t’ien
• Jean-Paul Pascal – ‘a handsome muscular young man with a narrow pelvis who easily adapted himself to the cowboy look that the French admire’ (p.12) – has some chapters showing events from his point of view
• Chief Inspector Loiseau – officer in the Sûreté Nationale – ‘Loiseau was about fifty years old. Short muscular body with big shoulders. His face was pitted with tiny scars and part of his left ear was missing. His hair was pure white and very short’ (p.27)
• Maria Chauvet – 32, sexy, independent, divorced, her 10-year-old son lives with her mother – chapters (at least in part) describing her in 3rd-person narrative are 6, 17, 37, 40.

‘Stay close,’ she said quietly.
I patted her gently. ‘That’s close enough,’ she said.

• Kuang-t’ien – a middle-aged Chinese in evening dress, a regular visitor to Datt’s clinic who turns out to be ‘one of the top five men in the Chinese nuclear programme’
• Chien San-chiang – head of the Atomic Energy Institute in Peking (referred to, doesn’t appear)
• Monique – neighbour of murdered Annie, who has also worked as a sex worker at Datt’s House, but only ten or a dozen times, not the pro that Annie was, but hard and tough due to her impoverished childhood
• Hudson – an authority on hydrogen bombs, commissioned by the US government to hand on true data about the lethal impact of fallout to agents from the communist Chinese government

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Credit

‘An Expensive Place To Die’ by Len Deighton was published in 1967 by Jonathan Cape. Page references are to the 1995 HarperCollins paperback edition. All quotations are used for purposes of criticism and review.

Related links

• An Expensive Place To Die Wikipedia article
• An Expensive Place To Die article on the Deighton Dossier website

Related reviews

• Len Deighton reviews
• Atomic by Jim Baggott (2009)

1966 in thrillers

• Dirty Story by Eric Ambler – Forced to flee Greece in a hurry when a porn movie project goes bad, shabby con man Arthur Simpson (who we first met in The Light of Day) takes ship through Suez to the East Coast of Africa, where he finds himself enrolled as a mercenary in a small war about mineral rights.
• Landslide by Desmond Bagley – Tough Canadian geologist Bob Boyd nearly died in a car wreck ten years ago. Now he returns to the small town in British Columbia where it happened to uncover long-buried crimes and contemporary skulduggery.
• The Dolly Dolly Spy by Adam Diment – Introducing Philip McAlpine, dope-smoking, randy and reluctant secret agent who is blackmailed into going undercover with a dodgy international charter air firm, then kidnapping a dangerous ex-Nazi.
• Where Eagles Dare by Alistair MacLean – Six commandos are parachuted into snowy South Germany to rescue an American General who has the plans for D-Day and is being held captive in the inaccessible Schloss Adler, the Eagle’s Castle. Except this is merely a cover for a deeper mission – and the pretext for a ripping yarn chock-full of twists, turns and nailbiting excitement.
• I, Lucifer by Peter O’Donnel – An eccentric bunch of crooks have got hold of a mentally ill young man who thinks he is the Devil but has the useful knack of being able to predict natural deaths: they are using this to blackmail VIPs, until Modesty and Willie intervene.