Customer Reviews

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

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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."

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.

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.