Len Deighton's spy stories

KeskusteluMade into a Movie

Liity LibraryThingin jäseneksi, niin voit kirjoittaa viestin.

Len Deighton's spy stories

Tämä viestiketju on "uinuva" —viimeisin viesti on vanhempi kuin 90 päivää. Ryhmä "virkoaa", kun lähetät vastauksen.

1abbottthomas
Muokkaaja: kesäkuu 13, 2016, 6:50 am

I am nearing the end of the 9 volume Bernard Samson series (can't think why I've not read them before) and was struck by just how 'filmic' the ending of Hope is. That feeling is helped along by Deighton's style - in his introduction to my copy he says how he tries to tell as much of the story through dialogue as is possible. The whole series is probably longer than War and Peace and, whatever the author claims about the stand-alone nature of each episode, I think it would be tricky to extract a single cinema film out of it: a TV series should work, however.

Looking on iMDB it appears that a mini-series of Berlin Game, Mexico Set and London Match was produced by Granada in the 1980s but has never appeared on DVD. It seems that, although getting some critical acclaim, the ratings were poor and it is said that Deighton did not agree with further production. You can find quite a bit of opinion on-line regretting that, and I, for another, would like to see it.

Deighton has never seemed to be keen on film adaptions of his novels. He was uncredited in the movie of The Ipcress File - certainly it was rather different from the book - and is said not to have liked the characterisation of his anonymous spy hero. I liked both book and film. The film of Funeral in Berlin as far as I can remember was good, certainly better than Billion-Dollar Brain, the last of the three Harry Palmer movies*.

Maybe Deighton made more than enough money from his books, maybe he doesn't get on with film-makers (although reading Violent Ward, he seems to like Southern California), who knows, but there are scenes in Hope and the others which cry out for a movie treatment.

ETA *Recently Bullet to Beijing has been shown on UK TV: this film and a sequel, Midnight in St. Petersburg were made in the 1990s starring Michael Caine as Harry Palmer. Len Deighton had no involvement in either film.

There was another espionage film based on a Deighton book, Spy Story. There is a suggestion that the narrator, referred to as Patrick Anderson, was intended to be 'Harry Palmer'. Deighton did not confirm this. Caine did not play the role in the film of the book.