At the Royal College of Art his teachers called him subversive, but it was his first novel—The Ipcress File—that sealed his reputation as an iconoclast. Ian Fleming called it his “Book of the Year.” Through humor, characters with real depth, and impeccable research, Len Deighton’s original voice revolutionized the modern spy thriller.

Born in 1929, Deighton is acclaimed as not just one of the greatest thriller writers of the twentieth century but a military historian, cookbook writer, and graphic artist. His extraordinary career spanned four decades, selling over thirty million books, being published in twenty languages, and never falling out of print.