The Ipcress File

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At the beginning of many of the chapters Deighton would put a horoscope that loosely reflected the contents of the chapter. The lovely Sue Lloyd is Jean in the movie version. I have such fond memories of watching her star on the TV series The Baron with Steve Forrest. In my view, Deighton’s first few spy novels are by far his best: “The Ipcress File”; “Horse Under Water”; and “Funeral in Berlin”. I feel that after this period Deighton went downhill, losing the lightness of touch and sharpness that characterise these early books. Weapons aren’t terrible,” I said. “Areoplanes full of passengers to Paris, bombs full of insecticide, cannons with a man inside at a circus--these aren’t terrible. But a vase of roses in the hands of a man of evil intent is a murder weapon.” Deighton's protagonist is unnamed, and this is maintained through all the sequels. Early in the novel we learn that he worked for Military Intelligence for three years before joining his present agency – WOOC(P) – as a civilian employee. WOOC(P) is described as "one of the smallest and most important of the Intelligence Units". (It is never stated exactly what the initials stand for, although his previous boss refers to it as Provisional.) [2]

A film adaptation starring Michael Caine was released in 1965 and produced by the James Bond co-producer Harry Saltzman, assisted by several prominent members of the Bond production family. The film medium made it difficult to maintain the anonymity of Deighton's hero, who acquired the name Harry Palmer.

Re-reading the book in 2022, I wasn't surprised that I'd missed the taken-for-granted, casual but all-pervasive sexism the first time around. It was a blindness common at the time. I was surprised that the first thing that caught my attention wasn't the content of the book but the way in which it was written.

The popular works of female literature tend to be historical, romantic, family sagas etc. Male literature is more likely to be concerned with war or thrillers. In the past this would have been the Second World War, followed later by Cold War espionage. Often these are marked by a rather stodgy attention to detail, with attempts at factual information often getting in the way of telling a good story. Although the protagonist tries to explain it all in the final chapter, I cannot help but think that Len Deighton does not run a tight ship.

While there are indeed differences between the Bond books and Ipcress, there are also likenesses. Both seem to offer the privileged cognitive access to a concealed world epitomized in the first line of one of the epigraphs to Ipcress, from Shakespeare’s Henry IV 1: ‘And now I will unclasp a secret book’. Deighton’s narrator also converges with Bond in his appreciation of good food. When Dalby treats his new recruit to lunch at Wilton’s, a venerable Jermyn Street restaurant, established in 1742, that exists to this day, I. takes a gourmet’s pleasure in the ‘iced Israeli melon, sweet, tender and cold like the blonde waitress’, the lobster salad and the ‘carefully-made mayonnaise’, even if his more usual lunch venue is ‘the sandwich bar in Charlotte Street, where I played a sort of rugby scrum each lunchtime with only two PhD’s, three physicists and a medical research specialist for company, standing up to toasted bacon sandwich and a cup of stuff that resembles coffee in no aspect but price’. The other “realistic” spy story writer who came along at about the same time as Deighton was John Le Carre. But I’ve always preferred Deighton (at least the early Deighton), as I find Le Carre’s books rather humourless and bleak. (Though the TV version of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” with Alec Guinness is brilliant.) The shooting of the fight through the phone box window is one of the many optical idiosyncrasies and motifs in the film, admirably complemented by John Barry’s downbeat, intriguing score, very different from the pulsing excitement of his James Bond theme. Near its start, when Palmer wakes, we see, from his point of view, a blurred, unfocussed room that only sharpens into definition when he puts on his glasses. He sees it as a story about the emergence of a modern culture in Britain, after the still literally and metaphorically rationed 1950s: flying to Rome or Paris seems impossibly glamorous, and exotic delicatessens offer unimaginable foodstuffs such as pomegranate.

The Ipcress File helped change the shape of the espionage thriller ... the prose is still as crisp and fresh as ever ... there is an infectious energy about this book which makes it a joy to read, or re-read. ― Daily Telegraph For the working class narrator, an apparently straightforward mission to find a missing biochemist becomes a journey to the heart of a dark and deadly conspiracy. The Ipcress File has aged remarkably well. It was first published in 1962 but I’d not read it before (although I thought I had!) and I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of the writing, the excellent sense of place, especially in London, and the laconic but quite realistic tone. Hmmmmmmm - I was looking forward to this book. I've long been a fan of the Michael Caine movie based on this novel, and having read the Bond books a couple of years ago and working through the Smiley novels this year, I was intrigued to see where the unnamed spy of Deighton's books fitted in to the triumvirate.It isn't. Much as publicists might like to see them as one and the same thing. They are quite definitely not. The unnamed hero is only partly 'Harry Palmer'. The ambience and culture of the secret service in book and film are not the same. The military aspects are downplayed in the film. a new likely-looking office conversion wherein the unwinking blue neon glows even at summer midday, but […] Dalby’s department is next door. His is dirtier than average, with a genteel profusion of well-worn brass work, telling of the existence of ‘The Ex-Officers’ Employment Bureau. Est 1917’; ‘Acme Films Cutting Rooms’; ‘B. Isaacs. Tailor – Theatrical a Specialty’; ‘Dalby Inquiry Bureau – staffed by ex-Scotland Yard detectives’. ITV Turns 'The Ipcress File' into TV Series Penned by 'Trainspotting's John Hodge; Joe Cole, Lucy Boynton, Tom Hollander Star". 10 December 2020.