‘Your job is to provide success at any price. By means of bribes, by means of theft or by means of murder itself. Men like you are in the dark, subconscious recesses of the nation’s brains. You do things that are done and forgotten quickly.’
(Horse Under Water, page 141)

‘Don’t ever hanker after tidiness. Don’t ever think or hope that the great mess of investigation that we work on is suddenly going to resolve itself like the last chapter of a whodunnit: I’ve-got-all-gathered-together-in-the-room-where-the-murder-was-done kind of scene. After we’re all dead and gone there will still be an office with all those manilla dust-traps tied in pink tape. So just knit quietly away and be thankful for the odd sock or even a lop-sided cardigan with one sleeve…’
(The Narrator lecturing Jean on the limits of the achievable, p.93)

Tomas was as calm as a Camembert.
(Typical dry Deighton simile, Ch 46)

The Ipcress File made Len Deighton famous overnight. It sold out repeat reprints and there were high hopes for this, the sequel. Ipcress had identified itself as ‘Secret File No.1’ and Horse Under Water had ‘Secret File No.2’ prominently displayed on the cover suggesting a direct link. Sure enough it is another adventure featuring the same British intelligence officer from the first novel (unnamed in the novels, though given the name Harry Palmer in the series of movies starring Michael Caine). So it appears to inaugurate a series like the Bond books (which started in 1953) or le Carré’s Smiley series (which started in 1961). Apparently, Deighton planned five novels but only four were published before he moved on to other things. Reflecting on this, I can’t help feeling it was a mistake not to give his hero a name. Presumably it felt coolly elliptical at the time, but has made it harder to identify and market them ever since…

Paratextuality and presentation

Like IPCRESS there’s a lot of showy business going on about the presentation of the text. There’s:

• a supposedly official stamp on the flyleaf (saying the text has been ‘Downgraded to unclassified’)
• a letter placed before the narrative and dated 1941, which is meant as a clue to the plot (and letters turn out to be what the ‘plot’ is all about)
• the customary footnotes throughout, mainly explaining acronyms of the various military and intelligence organisations, in the UK, America, France, Russia etc
• 18 pages of appendices at the end, explaining half a dozen items in the text at greater length

And before all of this, there’s a page titled ‘Solutions’ with 58 numbered words on it. It took a few chapters for me to realise it’s another Deighton game – each chapter title is a cryptic crossword clue and the ‘Solutions’ page gives the one-word answers, which in turn sum up the matter of the chapter. Ha!

(Crosswords In Ipcress the Narrator very conspicuously fusses over a crossword from page 40 to page 140; similarly, in this book he starts a crossword about three-quarters the way through and his worrying over the clues accompanies the slotting together of the plot. ‘I wrote NOSTRUM to replace SISTRUM. I was beginning to get it now’, p.146.)

Tourism of the mind

Thrillers and spy novels are a form of escapism. The simplest form of escape is going abroad. Most people in cold damp England dream of going on holiday somewhere warm. The IPCRESS File includes jaunts to hot Lebanon and a sunny Pacific island; this sequel is extensively set in Portugal with outings to Morocco and Spain; and not just anywhere in Portugal but the Algarve region in the south which was, of course, to become a tourism Mecca and, eventually, cliché.

This ‘exotic’ (for 1963) setting allows Deighton to stretch his descriptive chops, with lots of descriptions of Portuguese villages, sunsets, markets packed with luscious fruit or silvery fish, fishing boats, surf crashing on the golden sands, local food, local drink, foreign phrases and so on. These are all very good and atmospheric. A little more interestingly, he slips in some (alleged) Iberian proverbs:

I remembered the Portuguese proverb that says, ‘From Spain, neither fair wind nor good marriage.’ (p.80)

What was that local saying that da Cunha had quoted—’Italy, a place to be born, France, a place to live, and here, a place to die.’

‘They say, “God gave the Portuguese a small country as their cradle and all the world as their grave.”‘ (p.63)

There is an old Spanish proverb which runs ‘For a fleeing enemy make a golden bridge’.

An old Portuguese saying, ‘Better the red face than the black heart.’

Inconsequential details

Jean and I spent a lazy Saturday afternoon. She washed her hair and I made lots of coffee and read a back issue of the Observer. The TV was just saying ‘… a Blackfoot war party wouldn’t be using a medicine arrow, Betsy…’ when the phone rang. (Ch 4)

The text is packed with inconsequential details, with overheard snippets of conversation, fragments (like the fragments of demotic life quoted in the classic Modernist texts of Joyce or Eliot).

The rain beat heavily against the car windows. Outside Woolworth’s a woman in a plastic raincoat was smacking a child in a Yogi Bear bib. Soon we stopped at Admiralty Arch. (Ch 13)

These are all alienation techniques – foregrounding the trivial, repressing the important, a continual textual self-consciousness which:

• shows the Narrator’s mind is permanently registering every detail of his surroundings, like a trained camera
• keeps the reader alert to the fact that we are reading a fiction
• is at the same time a running commentary on the trivia of consumer culture

He mentions cubism at one point and I wondered if the novel could be compared to cubist technique. In many places the sentences don’t follow as a train of thought but jump from one facet to another, like an attempt to see all the angles of a situation at the same moment.

Something similar can be said about the very short chapters, often only a page long, like facets of a diamond, scores of shiny surfaces refracting the light – the secret – at the core of the gemlike plot. On the other hand, they don’t seem short because so much information is conveyed by them. I’d hazard a guess that Deighton put a lot of work into cutting back his texts, paring away till they are as clipped and allusive as possible (a little like Kipling did; I wonder if anyone’s made a comparative study of the pair of parers).

Super detachment

In a more conventional spy story the protagonist would be sharing his issues and problems with us. The majority of text in the Alistair MacLean novels I’ve been reading consists of the hero thinking through, very thoroughly, all possible avenues of action, sharing and involving the reader in his high-tension predicament – then doing it all over again as the situations change and plans have to be adapted.

Deighton is the exact opposite – he very deliberately eschews almost all inner thinking by his protagonist. He is at pains to show how detached and clinical his protagonist is and, since it is the detached clinical protagonist telling the story, the narrative itself comes over as clinical and detached, too. For example, a colleague who’s been helping out on the Portugal job gets into our man’s car at London Airport car park to drive it over to him and the car explodes, killing this colleague, as our man watches. And this is all described thus:

Joe was at the far end of the enclosure; he opened the door of my VW, got in and switched on the main lights. The rain tore little gashes through the long beams. From inside the car came an intense light; each window was a clear white rectangle, and the door on Joe’s side opened very quickly. It was then that the blast sent me across the pavement like a tiddly-wink. ‘Walk, not run,’ I thought. I jammed my spectacles on to my nose and got to my feet. A cold current of air advised me of an eight-inch rent in my trouser leg. (Ch 20)

‘Advised.’ The text evinces training, self-discipline, no emoting. It tags our man as he follows standard procedure i.e. we follow who he calls, what code words he uses, and so on. Our man steals a taxi and calmly drives away. The last sentence, the parting thought of the sequence, the thing the author wants to imprint on your mind about the whole incident, is: ‘I soon mastered the knack of double-declutching the crash gearbox.’ Cool, in the sense of absolutely unflustered and not admitting to any feeling.

Always with the vivid detail; rarely with the thought; never with any emotion.

Description instead of plot

It’s just one example of how much effort has gone into puzzling and confusing the reader. Puzzles, like the crossword clues. Deighton gives description instead of exposition. Much of this description is vivid and brilliant, sharp snapshots of people and places and scenes.

I watched the waves moving down on to the shore. Each shadow darkened until one, losing its balance, toppled forward. It tore a white hole in the green ocean and in falling brought its fellow down, and that the next, until the white stuffing of the sea burst out of the lengthening gash. (Ch 15)

It’s worth remembering that, before his writing career took off, Deighton studied at Saint Martin’s School of Art, won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art, worked as an illustrator in New York and as an art director in an advertising agency. He has a good eye, very good. Possibly this contributes to the tendency for detail not discourse, pictures not ideas.

There is a point on the A3 near Cosham at which the whole of Portsmouth Harbour comes into view. This expanse of inland water is a vast grey triangle pointing to the Solent. The edges are sharp serrated patterns of docks, jetties and hards enclosing the colourless water. (Ch 3)

Sounds like a Paul Nash landscape, doesn’t it? (He actually namechecks Paul Nash in this novel, indicating a certain type of pretentious party-goer.) And since a lot of the novel is set in Portugal, this gives plenty of opportunity for painterly descriptions.

We walked through the fish market. The flat concrete benches were ashine with bream and gilthead, pilchards, sardines and mackerel. Outside the sun reflected off the sea with a million flashing pinpoints of light, as though every bird was sitting there on the ocean top flashing angry white wings. (Ch 15)

Page after page of vivid, if often rather mannered, description. Sunday supplement subject matter – wow! the exotic destinations! The Algarve! Marrakesh! – done in Modernist-lite style. All very enjoyable.

The scrawny old houses [of Albufeira] stared red-eyed into the sunset. Two or three cafés – houses with a public front room – opened their doors, pale-green colour-washed walls were punctuated with calendar art, and crippled chairs leaned against the walls for support. In the evening the young bloods came to operate the juke box. A small man in a suede jacket poured thimble-size drinks from large unlabelled medicine bottles under the counter. Behind him green bottles of ‘Gas-soda’ and ‘Fru-soda’ grew old and dusty. (Ch 43)

Downbeat

And all the brighter and more exotic by contrast with sorry, smoggy London. Fog, smog, bedsits, rented flats, threadbare carpets, shillings for the meter.

The airport bus dredged through the sludge of traffic as sodium-arc lights jaundiced our way towards Slough. (Ch 6)

Anti-Bond, anti-London clubs, swish apartment and best hotels. The narrator’s offices are in unglamorous Charlotte Street, he lives in a flat in Southwark, and his beady eye registers all the shabby details of modern life.

I leaned upon the gravy-stained tablecloth as Paddington slid past. Soot-caked dwellings pressed together like pleats in a concertina. Grey laundry flapped in the breeze. Past Ladbroke Grove the small gardens suffocated under choking debris, only corrugated iron and rusty wire remained of things collapsed. (Ch 39)

Reminiscent of Philip Larkin’s famous downbeat poem of observations from a train, Whitsun Weddings, which was published just around this time, in 1964. But London is big and varied, and there are also numerous bursts of knowing sarcasm.

Number 37 Little Charton Mews is one of a labyrinth of cobbled cul-de-sacs in that section of Kensington where having a garage as a living-room is celebrated by planting a rose bush in a painted barrel. (Ch 48)

The Welsh countryside in winter comes alive under his pen.

On the horizon bare branches grew across the grey skyline like cracks in sheets of ice. Foraging around the snow patches of rooks fluttered and flopped until my arrival sent them climbing into the moist air, their black wings richly pink in the light. (Ch 40)

There are lots of paragraphs worth reading and rereading and savouring for the pure pleasure of their prose. In these early books Deighton is a wonderfully inventive stylist.

Repartee

That said, he’s not Oscar Wilde. There’s not a lot of repartee and back-chat. But what there is fits the overall style in being pithy, smart, wry, detached.

Joe MacIntosh drove me to one of the married-officer accommodations along Europa Road past the military hospital. It was 3.45am. The streets were almost empty. Two sailors in white were vomiting their agonising way to the Wharf and another was sitting on the pavement near Queen’s Hotel.
‘Blood, vomit and alcohol,’ I said to Joe, ‘it should be on the coat of arms.’
‘It’s on just about everything else,’ he said, sourly. (Ch 7)

Do these two government agents discuss the mission? Do they swap notes or catch up on information? Nope. Instead there is signature Deighton inconsequential detail, indirection and smart repartee. Very snappy, very with it, very 1963. Of course, the Narrator is cocky with his superiors, that’s part of his schtick. Thus Dawlish, his boss, gives him a snippet of his personal life.

‘Present from my son. He’s very fond of quotations by Wellington. Each year on the anniversary of the battle of Waterloo we have a little party, and all the guests have to have an anecdote or quotation ready.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I do the same thing every time I pull on my Wellington boots.’ Dawlish slid me a narrowed glance. (Ch 39)

‘Slid me a narrow glance’ has Raymond Chandler’s feel for exotic ways of describing looks, his obsession with eyes. Similarly, Deighton’s snappy take on the trials and tribulations of everyday life, such as gas meters and payphones.

He took me up to a room on the third floor back. It had an antique gas-meter that looked hungry. I fed it some one-franc pieces. It liked them…I dialled a Bayswater number. The phone made the noises associated with making a phone call in England. It buzzed, clicked and purred; it had more tones than a chromatic scale. After two or three tries it even rang at the other end. (Ch 31)

Witty comparisons

I don’t know whether Chandler invented the smart-alec simile, but it seems to be part of the humorous self-consciousness of the thriller genre. It is flashy. The text shows off its savviness with language just as the protagonists show off their knowledge of guns and cars and (in Deighton’s case, especially) good food. The whole genre is supremely confident and knowing. It is letting you into its secrets. Look! I can handle a .38 Smith & Wesson hammerless 6-shot. Look! I know how to prepare authentic stifado. Look! I understand how to play off competing government intelligence agencies. Look! This is how vividly I see everything:

Dawlish was a tall, grey-haired civil servant with eyes like the far end of a long tunnel… Dawlish nodded, removed his spectacles and dabbed at his dark eye-sockets with a crisp handkerchief. Behind him on the window ledge the sun was rolling dusty documents into brandy snaps. (Ch 2)

The old man switched off the motor. It spluttered like a candle, and there was a brief silence before the sea began its background music. Left to the disposition of the ocean the little boat was handed from wave to wave like a rich patient between specialists. (Ch 12)

H.K. lived a long way down the Praca Miguel Bombarda. It was a simple house with a red-and-white tiled entrance hall. The dark furniture did a heavy dance as we walked across the uneven plank flooring. From the entrance hall one could see right through the house to where the light-grey sea, dark clouds and whitewashed stone balcony hung like a tricolour outside the back door. (Ch 14)

Dawlish took out a handkerchief and lowered his nose into it, like he was going from a seventh-storey window into something held by eight firemen. (Ch 19)

A little finger of grey cloud rubbed the tired eye of the moon. (Ch 24)

I was as limp as a Dali watch. (Ch 45)

He closed his eyes, gulped down his claret and leaned against the wall like a worn-out roll of line. (Ch 50)

Americanisms

Deighton’s style incorporates a wide array of prose strategies: very clipped factual; poetic prose, especially nature descriptions; brief dialogue snippets; technical specifications; English posh (upon, whilst, amongst); quoting newspapers, TV adverts etc.

But in the second half of Horse I noticed more Americanisms. During the interview with the American drug smuggler, Harry Kondit, in the heroin factory, the Narrator almost becomes American, using Damon Runyan or Raymond Chandler argot, telling H.K. he should ‘fade’, meaning disappear. On the boat, in the next scene, he is afraid lying on the deck ‘could earn me a slam on the kisser‘ (p. 176.)

I noticed that the puffs on the cover of Funeral In Berlin include one from the San Francisco Chronicle saying Deighton is ‘the Raymond Chandler of the cloak and dagger set.’ How much did this kind of thing influence Deighton, or was he channeling Chandler from the start?

• He was as calm as the Serpentine in June.
• ‘I know that I’ve been given the run-around by the phoniest set-up this side of Disneyland.’
• You think you’re the blue paper in my potato crisps, but I can work you over my way and still have enough left to shovel up for the Lagos cops.’

And the plot?

Diving There is a plot, of course, quite a few plots in fact, which keep our narrator (and us) confused right up to the end of the text. Number one, our man is instructed to recruit divers to investigate a WWII German submarine sunk off the Portuguese coast. The plan is to retrieve counterfeit Nazi money the sub is reported to have been carrying, and use it fund Portuguese revolutionaries who are planning to overthrow the Salazar dictatorship. If they come to power, they will owe a debt to HMG. Which HMG will have achieved at no cost, thus pleasing the accountants.

Albufeira The first half of the book is dominated by diving: the Narrator’s (comic) diving instruction by the Navy at Portsmouth; then the flight to Gibraltar, picking up Joe MacIntosh, Our Man in Spain, and an Italian named Gorgio, the Best Diver In Europe; then the drive to the fishing village of Albufeira and setting up base in an apartment there. Then the unexpected arrival of two ‘helpers’ from the British Embassy in Lisbon, pukka Clive Singleton and good-looking Charlotte Lucas-Mountford, quickly nicknamed Charly. Then the settling into a routine of morning dives to the U-boat, working through it compartment by compartment to try and find either cash or printing dies in cases or containers.

Strangers After a few days they are approached by the charming American, Harry Kondit (aka H.K.) who knows everyone in town, including a weaselly 40-year-old fixer, Fernie, and the highly suspect Big Man of the region, Senhor Manuel Gambeta do Rosario da Cunha. The Narrator is deeply suspicious of all of them.

Back in London As diving operations proceed, the Narrator makes a lot of short trips back to London to check on a number of other strands: first, a light-hearted one about a scheme he and his boss have, to set up a new network of informants; second, on his return from the diving training in Portsmouth he was followed by cars, one registered to Cabinet Minister Henry Smith. What is Smith’s interest in him? While the Narrator is supervising the diving off the Portugal coast, what is going on behind his back in London? Who are his English enemies? What is the deep history of these English foes i.e. is there a long-term conspiracy?

The third element is the assortment of foreigners he meets in Portugal, who each seem to have their own agendas. There are several distinct threads:

Water into ice – one of the cars that followed the narrator back from his training course in Portsmouth was owned by a certain Ivor Butcher, the man who sold British Intelligence what appear to be worthless plans for converting ice into water instantly by interfering with the molecular structure (and so useful for missile-firing submarines cruising under Arctic ice sheets). References to it crop up in houses of suspects etc: does it work, after all? Is this what the plot is about? The Narrator meets Butcher at the bar of the Ritz, where he buys off him a page from the diary of Henry Smith which happens to have been nicked by one of Butcher’s burglar contacts – in it the Narrator finds coded messages which seem to refer to smuggling industrial components to Red China?

Drug smuggling – about two-thirds through the Narrator gets an analysis back from Forensics that the canister they eventually extract from the U-boat has traces of heroin attached. He makes a trip down to Cardiff, to the FO Forensics Lab, and spends an evening with our drugs expert in his chilly Welsh home, being briefed on the drug world circa 1962, including the large amount of acetic acid generated as a by-product of heroin production.

Giorgio dies A vivid description of his first dive into the U-boat ends with Giorgio suddenly appearing with his arm badly ripped, bleeding. The Narrator takes him to the surface, and brings him ashore where he dies of shock and blood loss.

Real identities Soon after discovering the canister which Giorgio extracted from the U-boat has traces of heroin in it, the Narrator finds from the Research Dept that da Cunha is in fact a former German naval officer and the shifty Fernie is a renegade British Navy officer and frogman. Aha.

Sleeping with Charly Back in Albufeira, with Giorgio and Joe dead (blown up in the Narrator’s car at Heathrow), Singleton requests leave, and, left to themselves, Charly seduces the Narrator. Over a post-coital cigarette she mentions H.K. runs a big cannery factory, which generates lots of acetic acid, hence the vinegar smell. Acetic acid! The by-product of heroin production! Double aha! The Narrator immediately goes over to the factory with Charly and a gun, and catches H.K. red-handed, refining heroin.

Confronting H.K. Long chapter in which the Narrator finds out a lot: Fernie found heroin in the old sub; encouraged H.K. to set up a refinery, which then became a business; the raw material is thrown overboard on buoys from passing ships, collected by Fernie, processed by H.K., sealed in sardine cans and attached to the hulls of ships bound to the States; recovered by frogmen their end. Da Cunha is an ex-Nazi, but not directly involved: H.K. pays him protection money, and da Cunha borrows H.K.’s big pleasure boat whenever he wants to. Fernie knows Ivor Butcher who’s visited a few times: but does this make Butcher a messenger from Smith, or back to Smith? After H.K. has said everything the Narrator lets him go but Charly, unexpectedly, pulls a gun and shoots him, only wounding him. The Narrator intervenes, takes the gun, allows H.K. to flee. Turns out Charly is a US Narcotics agent. Ha!

On the boat H.K. flees but leaves a note for the Narrator saying Fernie’s going out on the boat for another pick-up. The Narrator gets Charly to row him out and hides on the boat. Fernie turns up and, along with the 14 year-old street urchin Augusto, sails out to sea. The Narrator gets the drop on them but only after they’ve failed to collect the merchandise. He beats Fernie in a fight and establishes it wasn’t dope Fernie was after, but the Weiss List. The Weiss List is a list of high-placed individuals in England who were ready to collaborate when the Nazis invaded. Fernie knows da Cunha has it hidden in a sunken buoy which comes to the surface every 12 hours to radio it’s OK then drops back to the bottom of the sea.

(Fernie’s life story Fernie tells his life story i.e. fighting for Franco during the Spanish War, volunteering as a Navy diver, being captured by the Germans, and recruited into The League of St George which would have become the Nazi Party in occupied Britain, led by Graham Loveless, Henry Smith’s nephew. As the Allies advanced, he and Loveless photocopied the list and buried it, before being arrested. Loveless threatened to reveal all the names on it and was hanged for his troubles; Fernie lived. But when Fernie returned to Hanover to dig up the list, a block of flats had been built on it. Meanwhile, the man now known as da Cunha had secured the only copy and was using it liberally to blackmail eminent Brits, a small part to fund H.K.’s heroin factory, but mostly to support a network of Fascist parties across Europe.)

H.K. shoots Fernie As the boat approaches shore again, H.K. (who we thought had high-tailed it long ago) shoots Fernie dead from the cliffs using a rifle with telescopic sights. He uses up all his bullets which allows the Narrator to get ashore, hook up with Charly and visit da Cunha’s villa – long abandoned – where he finds another, and much larger, laboratory. Aha. He orders Singleton to pack up all the diving gear and return it to London. And then the Narrator returns to London himself.

Trailing da Cunha Dawlish and the Narrator get their intelligence committee off the ground. Dawlish signs ‘Closed’ on the Albufeira file but the Narrator refuses to let it lie. It feels like the story is finished to me, but it in fact continues for another 30 pages of densely packed narrative. Da Cunha makes the mistake of leaving some equipment in his old lab and then ordering it to be shipped to him. The Narrator has put surveillance on the villa and follows the equipment to a small airfield where it’s loaded onto a plane heading south. He gets air traffic control in Gibraltar to follow the plane as it flies across the Med to Marrakesh.

Marrakesh Here there is a bizarre scene where the Narrator uses UK influence with the local police to track down da Cunha, and interview him. Da Cunha is now openly the former Nazi Knabel, and he confirms that the expensive lab is to continue working on his (madcap) scheme to turn ice into water for military purposes, before beginning to froth at the mouth (literally) about the rebirth of a Europe-wide Fascist movement. The Narrator draws out the increasingly bonkers conversation because all the time Ossie, a professional burglar we met earlier in the novel, is breaking into da Cunha’s quarters and stealing the transmitter set to the frequency of the buoy at the bottom of the sea off Albufeira which contains the Weiss List.

Helicopters Cut to the Narrator and Royal Navy divers spending several days criss-crossing the sea off Portugal until they pick up the beacon signal, then transmitting the call which makes the buoy rise to the surface, where it is easily retrieved. The Narrator opens it on board a naval vessel and, sure enough, it contains detailed correspondence between Germans and high-ranking British Nazi sympathisers. Da Cunha had been using it for years to blackmail money out of men like Smith. Now the Narrator sees why he was tailed, and why Smith was interested in him and tried to shut down the whole Albufeira investigation. It was to hide the existence of the Weiss List, not to cover the heroin smuggling, that his car was blown up at Heathrow.

They already knew When the Narrator presents all this as new evidence to his boss, Dawlish, the latter pulls out a big file marked Young Europe Movement. He’s known about it all along. They were just using the Narrator because they knew he’d flush out the list itself. So the heroin was always a side issue, after all, and da Cunha’s ice-to-water device was moonshine. It was all about the Weiss List, but will any of the Nazi sympathisers be arrested? Of course not. British Intelligence will simply let the ageing collaborators on the list know that it is in their possession and their past treachery could be made public if they step out of line…

Confusing

The narrative is often confusing because the plot is confusing because the basic premise of the series is that spying is confusing. As the Narrator tells the Minister on page two of The Ipcress File, the story is confusing because he’s in a confusing business. Similar sentiments here:

‘It’s so confusing, isn’t it?’ Charly said.
‘Confusing,’ I replied. ‘Of course it’s confusing. You involve yourself in industrial espionage and then you complain about it being confusing.’ (Ch 44)

Cleverer people than me have been completely flummoxed by Deighton’s plots. Having read all the early ones, I’ve realised the best thing is to relax and enjoy the view – the style and presentation – and let the plot look after itself. Not, in fact, unlike the Narrator who is often as perplexed as we are.

I walked to the beach trying to arrange the facts I had access to. As I look back on it I had enough information then to tell me what I wanted to know. But at that time I didn’t know what I wanted to know. I was just letting my sense of direction guide me through the maze of motives. (Ch 43)

And, in keeping with the fundamental worldview of the books that the world is vastly more complicated and fractured than any one narrative can capture – ‘There would always be unexplainable actions by unpredictable people. (Ch 47) – some loose ends are, in fact, never tied up – as the Narrator warned Jean earlier in the story.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘OK, but don’t ever hanker after tidiness. Don’t ever think or hope that the great mess of investigation that we work on is suddenly going to resolve itself like the last chapter of a whodunnit… After we’re all dead and gone there will still be an office with all those manilla dust-traps tied in pink tape. So just knit quietly away and be thankful for the odd sock or even a lop-sided cardigan with one sleeve. Don’t desire vengeance or think that if someone murders you tomorrow we will be tracking them down mercilessly. We won’t. We’ll all be strictly concerned with keeping out of the News of the World and the Police Gazette.’ (Ch 21)

Cast

• The Narrator – 40-something British Intelligence agent, he lives in a flat in Southwark, wears glasses and, according to his girlfriend, Jean, is running to fat; he is an expert on money laundering and transfers; smokes Gauloises
• Dawlish – his boss
• Jean – his secretary and lover
• ‘Tinkle’ Bell – 17-stone employee of British intelligence
• Henry Smith – Cabinet Minister whose car was used to tail the narrator back from his diving course in Portsmouth and who he suspects of masterminding something. Smith tries to use his influence to get the diving operation cancelled but two-thirds of the way through the book the Narrator confronts Smith in his immensely posh club. Firstly, he refuses to obey the order to abandon the diving; secondly, he bluffs Smith, saying he knows about his component-smuggling-to-Red-China operation, something he has deduced from other sources. Smith appears genuinely taken back by the Narrator’s knowledge of this and for a while we are left wondering whether this is what the story is actually about.
• Giorgio – Italian diver they hire to investigate the sunken U-boat. He becomes nervous and the Narrator spots him heading off one night for a secret rendezvous; then, when accompanying the Narrator on the latter’s first dive to the U-boat, Giorgio is murdered, his diving suit shredded, his arm badly mauled, he dies of shock and blood loss as the Narrator just about manages to bring him ashore.
• Joe MacIntosh – intelligence man in Portugal, fixes up the flat in Albufeira for the Narrator and Giorgio. In a shock scene Joe is killed when he gets into the Narrator’s car at Heathrow airport and it explodes. Who planted the bomb? Why did they want to kill the Narrator?
• Clive Singleton – from the British Embassy in Portugal, turns up at the Narrator’s flat in Albufeira, which the Narrator is not happy about. A good swimmer, he is soon assisting Giorgio in his daily dives to the U-boat – ‘ career naval officer anxious to demonstrate the bungling inadequacy of a civilian intelligence organization’
• Charlotte Lucas-Mountford aka Charly – accompanies Singleton to the Albufeira apartment, quickly settles in as the home help, shopping at the local market, cooking, cleaning, washing shirts. She has a striking figure which she shows off in various bikinis and micro-skirts, triggering 1960s sexism, if you choose to object. Against his better judgement the Narrator is seduced by her, whereupon she tips him off about H.K.’s heroin factory. N promptly raids it and interviews H.K., is prepared to release him but Charly shoots H.K., though not fatally. At which point she reveals that she is a US Narcotics agent and largely drops out of the story.
• Harry Kondit, known as H.K. – loud American who approaches them on the beach and quickly is inviting to dinner, knows all about the diving. Suspicious. Turns out to be a heroin processor. Shot by Charly but escapes, they think he’s fled town. But he is hiding and shoots Fernie dead with a rifle with telescopic sights from the clifftops.
• Fernie, full name Senhor Jorge Fernandes Tomas – ‘a thin, neurotic man of perhaps forty years’ – 40-year-old local fixer. Highly suspicious. Turns out to be renegade Royal Navy officer and frogman, Bernard Peterson. Loses a fight with the Narrator on the motor-boat, then spills the beans: he has been using the Weiss List to blackmail, as well as helping H.K. run the heroin operation. H.K. shoots him dead as his boat approaches the coast.
• Augusto – street urchin, Fernie’s boy assistant, is steering the boat back ashore when H.K. opens fire on it, badly injuring the boy.
• Senhor Manuel Gambeta do Rosario da Cunha – (allegedly) the leading man of the district: H.K. introduces him to the Narrator who goes for a long intricate dinner at his palace, where the narrator acquiesces in the suggestion that he is a good friend of ‘Mr Smith’.
  • ‘You are in contact with Mr Smith?’
    ‘Of course I am,’ I lied quickly. (p.69)
• After dinner Senhor da Cunha hands him a package claiming it was washed up with a body from the U-boat: N takes it back to London where it is identified as a good quality die for forging British sovereigns. N suspects da Cunha is a fake, the story about a washed-up body is baloney; the die is some kind of bribe – but he doesn’t know what for. Da Cunha turns out to be ex-German Navy officer, using the Weiss List to blackmail eminent Brits, and using the proceeds to fund European Fascist movements. The Narrator tracks him to Marrakesh where he steals the transmitter used for retrieving the underwater container which holds the Weiss List.
• Ossie – nickname of Austin Butterworth – world-class burglar and underworld contact – tells the Narrator that the Portuguese revolutionaries he’s been ordered to give the Nazi counterfeit money to have signed a contract with a British arms manufacturer who’s got wind of being paid with counterfeit money and therefore wish to remove the Narrator. Is it they who planted the bomb in the Narrator’s car? In a second appearance at the end of the book, Ossie is commissioned by the Narrator to break into da Cunha’s house in Marrakesh, to steal the transmitter used for retrieving the underwater container which holds the Weiss List.
• Ivor Butcher – crook who sold British Intelligence the duff information about the ice converter (for £6,700!); also an underworld contact who acts as a middle-man passing messages from Smith to da Cunha.
• Kevin Cassell – British Intelligence officer, in charge of Intelligence records: reveals to the Narrator Henry Smith MP’s heavy involvement in arms companies, in backing the Nazis, Fascists, foreign dictators etc. Ends up in ultimate possession of the Weiss List.
• Glynn – a bald man in a roll-neck sweater who lives in a small stone house in the Welsh countryside outside Cardiff, who the Narrator visits because he is a government expert on illegal drugs, about which he gives the Narrator a thorough briefing.
• Sir Humphrey – British ambassador to Spain
• Baix – of the Surete Nationale in Morocco
• Chief Petty Officer Edwards of HMS Vernon – the diver who retrieves the deep-sea canister containing the White List, using the retrieval transmitter Ossie stole off da Cunha

Cars

Pop culture dates fantastically fast. These books have the quaintness of another era, over 60 years ago. The narrator references a Jayne Mansfield calendar and the latest Miles Davis disc playing on the American’s yacht (‘Miles Davis began to pump the cabin full of sound,’ p.98), the Aldermaston marches and Tio Pepe sherry, Charlie Mingus, Elvis Presley, Omo soap powder. H.K.’s luxury yacht has a 17-inch TV set! But nothing dates it quite as dramatically as seeing the cars these guys were driving and regarded as the height of style.

• Black Ford Anglia (Ch 4)
• azure Bristol 407 (Ch 4)
• grey Vauxhall Victor (Ch 7)
• Simca (Ch 7)
• Seat 1400 (Ch 9)
• Riley (Ch 12)
• Mini-Minor (Ch 12)

Initialisms

Listing the initialisms is one way of viewing the text, of taking a specimen slice. For what it’s worth, to out-Deighton Deighton, I give them in the order they appear in the text, as clues to the direction the story takes, the foreign and glamorous right next to the mundane and banal.

• WOOC (P) – the intelligence unit the narrator works for; initials never explained
• VNV – Vós não vedes – ‘You do not see’, name of Portuguese revolutionary movement
• FO – Foreign Office
• HMG – Her Majesty’s Government
• PST – Permanent Secretary to the Treasury
• FST – Financial Secretary to the Treasury
• QM – Quarter Master
• PO – Petty Officer
• CPO – Chief Petty Officer
• HO – Home Office
• WM – Weekly Memoranda sheets from the JIA (Joint Intelligence Agency) at the MoD (Ministry of Defence)
• C-SICH – Combined Services Information Clearing House
• DNI – Director of Naval Intelligence
• CIGS – Chief of Imperial General Staff
• PUS – Permanent Under-Secretary
• LEB – London Electricity Board
• FSL – (Home Office) Forensic Science Laboratory
• PSL – Papavar somniferum Linnaeus, the species of poppy which yields opium
• SD – Sicherheitsdienst
• SS – Schutzstaffel
• ARP – Air Raid Precautions
• BUF – British Union of Fascists
• ITMA – It’s That Man Again (radio show)
• PIDE – (Portuguese) Internal Police for the Defence of the State
• Sc.Ad.C. – Scientific Adviser to the Cabinet

Acronyms are another way of both sounding good and avoiding the issue, as anyone who’s worked in a big organisation knows.

The movie that never was

The first, third and fourth novels in the IPCRESS series were filmed but not ‘Horse’ – why? Apparently it was planned as the follow-up to ‘Billion Dollar Brain’ (1967) but was cancelled for several reasons:

• After the success of the first two films, the third, ‘Billion Dollar Brain’, was poorly received, prompting series producer Harry Saltzman to cancel further planned adaptations of the series.
• Star of the first three, Michael Caine, felt he had exhausted the Harry Palmer character, and producers were wary of changing lead actors in a series following poor reactions to swapping leads in other spy films, notably the cool reaction to George Lazenby replacing Sean Connery as James Bond in ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’ (1969).
• Lastly, and maybe most important, the plot is complicated and unfocused, with a series of violent scenes but no real knock-down climax of the kind popcorn movies require.

Credit

‘Horse Under Water’ by Len Deighton was published by Jonathan Cape in 1963. Page references are to the 1965 Penguin paperback edition. All quotations are used for purposes of criticism and review.

Related links

• Horse Under Water online (PDF)
• Horse Under Water on Wikipedia
• Horse Under Water article on the Deighton Dossier website
• Whitsun Weddings

Related reviews

• Len Deighton reviews

Other 1963 thrillers

• The Golden Keel by Desmond Bagley – South African boatbuilder Peter ‘Hal’ Halloran leads a motley crew to retrieve treasure hidden in the Italian mountains by partisans during WWII, planning to smuggle it out of Italy ‘the golden keel’ of a boat he’s built for the purpose.
• On Her Majesty’s Secret Service by Ian Fleming – Bond poses as a heraldry expert to penetrate Blofeld’s headquarters on a remote Alpine mountain top, where the bad man is carrying out a fiendish plan to use germ warfare to decimate Britain’s agriculture sector.
• The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth, is set in 1963 – An international assassin is hired by right-wing paramilitary organisation, the OAS, to assassinate French President, Charles de Gaulle.
• The Odessa File by Frederick Forsyth is also set in 1963 – German journalist Peter Miller goes on a quest to track down an evil former SS commandant and gets caught up in a high-level Nazi plot to help Egypt manufacture long-range missiles to attack and destroy Israel.
• Dr Strangelove by Peter George – novelisation of the movie about misunderstandings which lead to a catastrophic nuclear war.
• The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré – Brilliant account of a British agent, Alec Leamas, who pretends to be a defector in order to give disinformation to East German intelligence.
• Ice Station Zebra by Alistair MacLean – MI6 agent Dr John Carpenter defeats spies who have secured Russian satellite photos of US missile bases, destroyed the Arctic research base of the title