There’s a somewhat irreverent website I like to visit for some dark amusement. It’s called Deathlist. It’s a British website run by people of approximately my age, and probably started off as a game played in a university cafe in the late 1980s, where a circle of friends would come up with a list of 50 people likely to die over the course of the coming year. The list eventually became a somewhat viral website.
The rules of Deathlist are simple. Only 25 people from the previous year’s list can reappear, and all the people on the list have to be famous enough to get mentioned on the UK media for something other than a condition causing them to die.
The obituaries are irreverent and perhaps rather insensitive (eg the heading ‘Mary Tyler No Moore’, or ‘Duke of Deadinburgh’, or ‘From Sceptre to Spectre’ – well, you get the gist) but funny in that horrid way that most of us would find, but be too polite to admit.
So I just took a look at Deathlist 2026 to see how their predictions are going so far this year, and noticed that Len Deighton passed away yesterday.
Deighton was an author, principally of spy novels. In my mid twenties I read several of them, namely the three trilogies he wrote about Bernard Sampson, the anti-hero outsider of British intelligence, someone who was loyal, but distrusted, repeatedly betrayed, and feared by his superiors. They were quite enjoyable, in their own way, and mostly went a long way to set Deighton up in the company of Robert Ludlum and John Carre as a leading author of spy fiction.
Ian Fleming, mind you, was in a class of his own, if you want my opinion. [Read The Spy Who Loved Me and see if you don’t agree.]
There were a few lines in various of his novels which still call out to me across the years. There is one passage, narrated by Sampson, where he discusses the French occupation zone of Berlin, describing it as given to the French ‘so they could play at conquerors’. Sharp and cynical and totally accurate.
And then there is Goodbye Mickey Mouse, his novel about a Second World War US pilot stationed in England. I think I might have read it in my late teens, if not my early twenties, but definitely a few years before I read the nine Bernard Sampson novels. There is one part where two of the characters are discussing the nature of war, and how men welcome it as a way to escape from the reality of their lives.
It’s very dark, but not quite bleak, and it has stuck in my mind for well over thirty years. He was much more than a spy novelist, his work approached serious literature.
Goodbye Len Deighton.
Lost For Words! 