Catch a falling spy =: Originally published in England under the title Twinkle twinkle little spy [Hardcover]

Len Deighton (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1976

From Wikipedia: Leonard Cyril Deighton (born 18 February 1929, Marylebone, London) is a British military historian, cookery writer, and novelist. He is perhaps most famous for his spy novel The IPCRESS File, which was made into a film starring Michael Caine. ~~~ Deighton was born in Marylebone, London, in 1929. His father was a chauffeur and mechanic, and his mother was a part-time cook. At the time they lived in Gloucester Place Mews[2][3] near Baker Street.[4] ~~~ Deighton's interest in spy stories may have been partially inspired by the arrest of Anna Wolkoff, which he witnessed as an 11-year-old boy. Wolkoff, a British subject of Russian descent, was a Nazi spy. She was detained on 20 May 1940 and subsequently convicted of violating the Official Secrets Act for attempting to pass secret documents to the Nazis.[5] ~~~ After leaving school, Deighton worked as a railway clerk before performing his National Service, which he spent as a photographer for the Royal Air Force's Special Investigation Branch. After discharge from the RAF, he studied at St Martin's School of Art in London in 1949, and in 1952 won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art, graduating in 1955.[6] While he was at the RCA he became a "lifelong friend"[7] of fellow designer Raymond Hawkey, who later designed covers for his early books. Deighton then worked as an airline steward with BOAC. Before he began his writing career he worked as an illustrator in New York and, in 1960, as an art director in a London advertising agency. He is credited with creating the first British cover for Kerouac's On the Road.[4] He has since used his drawing skills to illustrate a number of his own military history books. ~~~ Following the success of his first novels, Deighton became The Observer's cookery writer and produced illustrated cookbooks. In September 1967 he wrote an article in the Sunday Times Magazine about Operation Snowdrop - an SAS attack on Benghazi during World War II.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 268 pages
• Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (1976)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151161275
• ISBN-13: 978-0151161270
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.9 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,066,639 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Vintage Deighton spy yarn, April 29, 2002

By 

Keith Nichols (Dallas, TX United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Catch a falling spy =: Originally published in England under the title Twinkle twinkle little spy (Hardcover)

This terse, fast-moving cold-war spy yarn has to do with a pair of counterspies careening around the world (the Sahara, Washington, Paris, Florida) trying to coopt a Russian engineer in order to get at a Russian installation capable of intercepting satellite intelligence transmissions. The main characters are a CIA operative, Major Mann, and the story's narrator, a nameless British agent. The plot twists are entertaining enough, but as in all of this author's better books, the real fun is in overhearing the conversations and the wry observations that reveal the characters and situations in which the coolly competent protagonists operate. Much of the pleasure in a Deighton novel lies in coming upon the author's clever turns of phrase -- as in a scene where our two agents are in the posh Florida home of a communist agent grilling the wife regarding her knowledge of his activities. She tries to maintain a facade of innocent southern gentility, but as her story is being picked apart item by item, she fiddles with her purse, which our narrator observes is "made from a couple of yards of the Bayeaux tapestry."

3.0 out of 5 stars Betrayal and more betrayal, October 7, 2011

By 

Jersey Kid (Katy, Texas, America!) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Catch a falling spy =: Originally published in England under the title Twinkle twinkle little spy (Hardcover)

All spy stories entail - maybe require is a better word - betrayal to drive the narrative. While all of author Len Deighton's books are prime examples of that, it was this triad of books (Spy Story, Yesterday's Spy and this one) where the betrayals not only increased numerically but also moved to a more personalzied level. One might even say the reader is also subject to a form of betrayal - perhaps that is an extreme statement - becasue the ultimate solution to the narrative has nothing to do with what is presented at the start other than locale.

The story begins with our unnamed agent - who, while close, but not exactly the same, to the ones in the preceding two books and is different from the one many call Harry Palmer (a name that was the invention of screenwriters not Deighton)- working to extract a Soviet defector from the desolate wastes of the western Saharan desert. The rescue is successive but comes with literal and figurative baggage in the form of the defector's wife and a curious reluctance on the part of said defector to "pay his bill" with the sought after information.

In trying to solve this dilemma, our (anti)hero and his CIA superior travel a hazardous route along which wives and husbands and fathers and sons come to realize how little of what they see is actaully the way it appears. Politicians are moles and agents are double agents and by the end of the story several characters are compelled to face the reality about who their loved ones really are and for whom they have emotional and physical attachments.

In an ironic twist, the novel finishes about where it started physically, but emotionally, the ending is miles and miles away. And, for the reader this was the last spy book from Deighton for about seven years. During the interim, he wrote of other things - some of it non-fiction and other books dealing with a form of alternate history - before returning to the spy genre in 1983 with the triple triad plus one saga of Bernard Samson.

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Spy and Suspense Novel, July 31, 2011

By 

George Duncan "verogolfer" (Lake Placid, Fla) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Catch a falling spy =: Originally published in England under the title Twinkle twinkle little spy (Hardcover)

Thought this was the best of Deighton's spy novels. The plots of some of his novels, such as Billion Dollar Brain, was thin and, thus, the book was dull. In other novels, his prose was more like a dense thicket the reader had to plow through.
But in this one, the plot is excellent and his prose - while not sparkling - is better than average. It's an excellent suspense novel with twists and turns, and none of them cheat the reader. The unnamed British agent remains interesting and full of quips and the other characters are very well drawn too. The plot is exceptional.
As I said, the best of the Deighton's novels.