No matter where I went or what I did, Berlin would always be home for me. My father had been Resident long ago… and Berlin held all my happy childhood recollections.
(Spy Hook, page 43)
The previous trilogy (Berlin Game, Mexico Set, London Match) featuring just-turning-forty British spy Bernard Samson all took place in the space of a few months, interlinked as all three novels were by the sensational defection of Samson’s wife, Fiona – who turned out to have been a KGB spy – and its repercussions.
Spy Hook is the first in a new trilogy featuring the same characters, also told in the first person by Bernard, but represents a break with the first set in a number of ways.
- It is set three years since the action of the previous set (p.47), Samson is now 43 (and it is, of course, three years since publication of its predecessor, 1988 to 1985). [In a note to the sequel, Spy Line, Deighton explains that this novel takes place ‘at the beginning of 1987’.]
- On the personal front, Fiona is long gone; his girlfriend Gloria has supervised his move from his convenient Notting Hill house to a bigger, but drabber, semi in the boring, commuter-belt surroundings of Raynes Park; the children – Billy and Sally – are older and unhappier (14 and 11).
- And in the ‘Department’ of British Intelligence where he works, there have been notable changes:
Cast
- Bret Rensselaer – after years of treatment, has – according to Frank and others – died of the wounds received when he was shot in Berlin at the end of London Match.
- Dicky Cruyer – still Samson’s boss, careful to avoid making any decisions which might compromise himself, but the Deputy DG has told him to stop wearing Medallion Man faded jeans and cheesecloth shirts; now he wears a suit like everyone else.
- Frank Harrington – head of the Berlin Field Unit, knew Bernard Samson’s dad during the war, has been persuaded to stay on in Berlin after his official retirement age.
- Director General Sir Henry Clevemore, depicted as senile in the first trilogy, he is still DG but has been sidelined by the new Deputy DG.
- With his sidelining goes the power base of the vile creep Morgan, who was his toady.
- The newly prominent Deputy DG, Sir Percy Babcock, is a successful barrister, brought in to run things better (description on page 19).
The ambience
Like the first trio there is less a plot than a likeably chatty depiction of the daily round of Samson’s life: his reaction to the new house, the pain of the commute into central London, the boredom of trying to make sense of Dicky’s meetings or wade through wordy, pointless research files. His sexy young girlfriend Gloria is good with the children but rubbish at cooking, which prompts a tearful shouting match after she makes burned sausages, lumpy mash and dripping wet spinach for dinner. Being still in her early 20s she is determined to take up a place at Cambridge where she’ll stay during the week and Bernard suspects she will fall in with the young students and, eventually, leave him.
We see Bernard chatting to other characters over pub lunches, at dinner parties, in pool halls, in hotel rooms; he pokes at hotel food, airplane food, dinner party food, pub food. He mooches.
These domestic, humdrum scenes a) distinguish Deighton’s writing from the hi-tech, glamour Bond tradition, continuing the low-key tone established in his early Ipcress novels b) are very likeable. Feels like we’re getting to know Bernie, his kids, their nanny, his girlfriend, his bosses and colleagues at work, his moans and worries. All designed, of course, to root the ‘spying’ – and the occasional outbreaks of violence – in a ‘real’ world.
The plot
In among all these homely descriptions are laced scenes relating to his work as an employee of British Intelligence, threads which come together to force Samson to a grim conclusion:
- He is sent to Washington to interview one Jim Prettyman (who once worked for the Department and is now retired) about some fund which the accountants say has gone missing, probably a cock-up. Jim denies knowledge.
- Back in London he hears that Bizet, a network of agents in Poland, has been uncovered by the KGB, and there is speculation at various meetings about what can or should be done about it: undertake a rescue mission; do nothing?
- His old friend Werner Volkmann flies in from Berlin to confide that his wife Zena smuggles between East and West and he’s worried Frank Harrington is going to betray Zena to the Stasi in exchange for the Bizet agents.
- Jim’s divorced wife, Lucinda ‘Cindy’ Mathews, contacts Bernard, invites him to a seedy south London pool hall to tell him Jim has been shot dead, 6 times, and the body cremated. Jim was on to something: he was a signatory to some secret fund: the Department had him murdered Bernard! Samson goes away confused and concerned.
- In Berlin Werner tells him that he is going to step in to run Frau Lisl’s guesthouse, the ramshackle old place where Bernard always stays when he’s in Berlin. Lisl, in fact, has said she’d like to leave it to Werner after her death: but Lisl has a sister in France, could Bernie go speak to her about the inheritance?
- Bernard takes Gloria and they visit Frau Inge in her mansion in the south of France – she is old and her house decorated with photos of Hitler and all the other leading Nazis. Bernard is monitored by her strict, spinsterish daughter, Ingrid.
- While they’re there Gloria – who is in fact of Hungarian parentage – takes him to see her ‘Uncle Dodo’, an extraordinary old man who lives in ramshackle squalor, gets so drunk over dinner he passes out and, apparently, produces top class art forgeries. Bernard notices some photos of Dodo among faces he recognises, not least John Koby aka Lange, who ran a network of ex-Nazis after the war.
- In a bizarre sequence a motor cycle courier delivers tickets and instructions for Samson to fly to Los Angeles. Here he’s met by a cowboy who drives him far up into the hills, to a heavily guarded luxury mansion with heated swimming pool and all the trimmings. He is introduced to the owner, 60-year-old Mrs O’Rafferty who is an offshoot of the Rensselaer family and then, to his amazement, his former colleague Bret Rensselaer, the one everyone told him is dead who is, admittedly, not looking very well. Bernard asks him about the money and the secret account and Bret hisses at him to shut up and cease poking into matters which don’t concern him. But Bernard is motivated by the prompts of Jim Prettyman’s widow to get to the bottom of Jim’s murder.
- After an uncomfortable night in the luxury ranch Bernard is driven back towards LA airport by one of the Mexican ranch hands, when fog and rain close in and they find the way blocked by a jack-knifed lorry and traffic cops. One of them points out a black limo also heading off to LAX, why doesn’t Bernard hitch a ride? To his surprise – and the reader’s frank disbelief – the limo contains Posh Harry, a spiv and fixer and – now, apparently – CIA employee. He takes Samson to the airport, along the way heavily hinting that the CIA are behind Bret: when he says back off, back off: drop your investigation.
- Back in England Bernard motors all the way to the Cotswolds house of ancient Silas Gaunt, a retired eminence of the Department who knows everyone and everything. Here again Samson meets a brick wall as Silas refuses to clarify his suspicions about a vast slush fund. In addition he warns him not to go speaking to ‘Uncle Dodo’ who has now relocated to London.
- Which prompts the obstinate (and foolish) Bernard to drive straight to the house Uncle Dodo is renting, near Hampton Court. Dodo reluctantly lets him in and then, with no warning, punches him, karate chops him, and slips out a flick knife with the obvious intention of eviscerating him. There follows an intense fraught fight around the rooms packed high with precious antiques as Barnard just about fights Dodo off, but is visibly losing strength when – someone creeps up behind Dodo and coshes him; the lights go on; there are men everywhere collecting evidence, carrying off Dodo’s body and – leading them all is Jim Prettyman! Hang on, you’re supposed to be dead… Jim says he’s under deep cover, tell no-one, and keep your nose out of what doesn’t concern you.
‘Bernie, it’s time you realised that the Department isn’t run for your benefit. There’s nothing in Command Rules that says we have to clear everything with Bernard Samson before an Operation is okayed.’ (p.238)
Safely back home, over the next few days Bernard’s suspicions grow. He becomes convinced his defector wife Fiona and Bret were running some kind of big secret slush fund, Jim has something to do with it – now his girlfriend Gloria cheerfully tells him the bank in Berlin which appears to be the site of the fund – is owned by the Rensselaer family, bought before the war.
Finally, Bernard blags his way into the gentleman’s club where the ancient decrepit DG has a room-cum-office. Worryingly the DG gets him confused with his father, Brian, but eventually Bernard gets to present before him the complete list of evidence he has that a vast slush fund exists, deeply covered up but he’s tracked it down to this bank in Berlin and wants to expose his wife’s involvement with it.
Then Bernie catches a flight to Berlin with his pal Werner, incongruously carrying some china houseware that Werner’s bought in his capacity of renovating Frau Lisl’s old boarding house. At the airport military police step forward to arrest Samson and his old friend saves him by saying he‘s Samson; the police lead Werner away and Bernie undertakes a complicated journey across Berlin and through the Wall – then doubles back into the West by another route – all to decoy and pursuers and buy him time.
Time to make it out to Frank Harrington’s big country pile outside Berlin. Disconcertingly, Frank is expecting him, and delivers the knockout blow: ‘Yes, Bernie, maybe there is a top secret slush fund containing millions, and maybe Fiona and Bret did manage it; because maybe Fiona is a triple agent, pretending to work all these years for the KGB while actually working for us; and maybe all this investigating and shouting your mouth off to all and sundry – has put your wife’s life and her top secret mission at risk. And that is why London have issued an Orange File on you. That’s right, Bernie: you are wanted for treason!
And it is on this bombshell, this cliffhanger, that the novel ends.
Winter
Between the first trilogy and this first of the next trilogy, Deighton published Winter, the enormous novel following a Berlin family from 1900 to 1945, covering the major historical, political and military events of the era from the German point of view, and extending out to portray a cast of as many as 50 characters.
Part of his motivation in writing it was to show the enjoyably convoluted back stories of many of the characters who appear in the Samson books, not least Bernard’s dad, Brian Samson as a young man parachuted into Berlin just before the war ended.
Spy Hook contains knowing references to characters and incidents in Winter, which are explained and could stand alone, but gain significance, resonance, if you’ve read the longer work:
- Frank repeats Bernard’s dad’s story about being stuck in a Berlin flat with a sympathetic German waiting for news of Hitler’s assassination which doesn’t come, instead a Nazi official arrives. This is a reference to Peter and Paul Winter, the brothers and central characters in Winter and to scenes described in that novel.
- As usual, when in Berlin Samson stays with old Frau Lisl in the grand home she turned into what is now a run-down boarding house. Lisl is so crippled with arthritis that Werner Volkmann, Bernard’s best friend, plans and then begins to take over running it. We are taken to meet Lisl’s sister, Inge, and reminded of the history of the three sisters who we meet, in Winter, and see as girls before the Great War and growing up to marry Erich Hennig, the concert pianist (Lisl), and Paul Winter, the Nazi bureaucrat (Inge).
- In a thread which doesn’t, on the face of it, have anything to do with the main plot about Fiona and the missing bank account, Ingrid tells Bernard that her mother is insistent that Bernard’s father, Brian, was responsible for killing the Winter brothers. In Winter we had been told that the brothers escaped from custody and headed south to the family home in Bavaria. Brian Samson was with the American troops tracking them down, but it was those soldiers who shot the escaping brothers. Could it be that the account in Winter is a lie? Could it be that a number of events in Winter are not as reported? Could it be that the novels contain multiple levels of deception?
Grumpy old man
Bernard Samson is 43 but he moans a lot. Having recently read novels by Kingsley Amis, Alistair MacLean, Desmond Bagley, David Lodge and the Reggie Perrin novels, I have come to the conclusion that one of the thing the male novelists of the 1970s and 80s have in common is their moany dislike of the modern world: women’s lib, scruffy teenagers who speak no known language, punks and rockers and hookers on the streets, developers who rip out characterful buildings and put up glass and steel horrors from which landlords screw high rents and government high taxes, package tour operators, horrible plastic food in airports and airplanes and hotels, the frequent moans about England’s weather and culture make it sound like the world is coming to an end.
On page 219 there is a reference to AIDS, and I Googled the fact that the famous (to those alive at the time) government advertising campaign featuring an enormous tombstone made a big impression in 1987 when this novel was, presumably, being written.
The heady, optimistic, carefree days of the 1960s feel long gone in these novels.
Atmosphere of age
Why did he have to be such an old woman? (p.261)
And cheek by jowl with the moaning is an almost oppressive atmosphere of age. Lisl is old, crippled with arthritis. Bernard visits her sister Inge who is even older, surrounded by photos of Hitler and Nazi luminaries, a bedroom made for her on the ground floor because she can no longer manage stairs. Uncle Dodo, though he turns out to be a savage killer, lives in a rundown ramshackle dirty house, wearing tatty threadbare clothes. Frank Harrington in Berlin is well off but chooses to wear knackered cords and smoke rancid old man tobacco. Back in London the Director General is so old he rarely comes into the office any more, can’t remember anyone’s names, survives in a room absolutely crammed with souvenirs, relics, books and manuscripts. Even in youth-worshipping America, Mrs O’Rafferty, owner of the luxury West Coast ranch, is well-reserved but can’t conceal she is 60 and sometimes looks haggard; and Bret Rensselaer has been reduced to a shadow of his former self by illness.
We’re old fossils. We’re part of another world. A world of dinosaurs. (p.91)
Old characters
His lover Gloria and Werner’s hard-edged wife Zena, are the only people in the novel under the age of 40 (apart from Bernard’s kids) and neither of them are quite believable.
World War Two
It’s something to do with the war and the Cold War. The war because Winter made it abundantly clear that a lot of the contemporary events and people have their roots in the activities of the previous generation during and after the war. But by 1988 these people are ageing. Deighton’s imagination, his writings – both factual histories and the spy stories – were all heavily dominated by the second world war and its legacy. As the world moved into the 1990s this legacy must have seemed more remote.
The Cold War
And the clearest legacy of world war two – the domination of half of Europe by Russian-imposed communist dictatorships – evaporated half way through this second trilogy – 1988-90. How will Deighton cope when his main subject matter – the antagonism between the communist world and the free world – and its crux, its anvil, its focus – the bizarre never-never land of West Berlin – evaporate like morning dew with the collapse of the communist regimes, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the joyful reunification of Germany?
Books & Boots 