A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review
by John Lutz

   

LEN DEIGHTON – The Billion Dollar Brain. “Harry Palmer” #4. Jonathan Cape, UK, hardcover, 1966. Putnam’s, US, hardcover, 1966. Dell, US, paperback, 1967. Film: Lowndes, 1967 (with Michael Caine as Harry Palmer and Karl Malden as Leo Newbigen).

   Len Deighton’s first novel, The Ipcress File (1962; later filmed with Michael Caine), marked the debut of one of the major stars of espionage fiction. Since then this former photographer, illustrator, teacher, and occasional cookbook author has written a string of stylish and tightly plotted espionage novels that are thoughtful commentaries and reasoned examinations of society as well as first-rate thrillers.

   One of Deighton’s chief concerns is the morality of the world of espionage, but his treatment of this theme is never ponderous or heavy-handed. Instead he chooses to examine the ethics of the characters about whom he writes with an ironic wit; his prose has a lightness that further leavens this rather weighty subject. The books are also full of vivid description — of places, people, meals, natural wonders — that give the stories an air of authority; his use of documents and appendixes further convinces the reader that the espionage world is really as described. Along with John LeCarré, Deighton is one of our foremost contemporary writers of espionage novels.

   The billion-dollar brain of this novel’s title is a remarkable computer owned by a Texas mogul who has assembled his own private espionage network. This wild-card covert agency poses a grave threat to just about every government on earth, and what makes it tick is the incredibly complex computer, the quintessential technical-wonder successor to man’s own reason and self-asserted destiny.

   Deighton’s insubordinate, deceptively tough, unnamed first-person spy is given the task of neutralizing this menace, and along the way meets some fascinating characters. There is sensuous, champagne-swilling Signe Laine, a Finnish beauty who favors expensive underwear and has a knack and passion for besting males; Dawlish, the fumbling Intelligence chief who runs the show; Colonel Stok, of Red Anny Intelligence; Harvey Newbegin, the neurotic American agent who is in on the chase; and the maniacal General Midwinter. The action is on an international scale, swinging from Helsinki to London, Texas, Leningrad, and New York.

   This is a tightly constructed, imaginative, high-tech sort of thriller. Space Age espionage, in which Colonel Stok makes the disturbingly relevant observation “Two not very clever men will have to decide whether to extend a hand or pull a trigger.”

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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.