Quote of the Day (Len Deighton, on What Led Him to Write Spy Fiction)

“I was 10 when World War II started. My parents were servants. We lived in a tiny mews house in central London. Our neighbor Anna Wolkoff was the daughter of a czarist admiral. We knew her. My mother sometimes cooked for her dinner parties. I remember her arrest, late at night. The police came. I watched out the window with my parents. We learned she was a spy. Antisemitic. A Nazi sympathizer. My dad fought the Germans in the trenches in World War I. In 1939 he commanded a civilian first-aid post. Anna’s betrayal had a profound effect on my family.”—British novelist Len Deighton (1929-2026), quoted in “By the Book: Len Deighton,” The New York Times Book Review, June 25, 2023

Like fellow spytale spinner John le Carre, Len Deighton—who died earlier this week—found in the genre a vehicle for exploring his childhood memories of trauma. In le Carre’s case, the trauma was inspired by his con man father, a cause of such embarrassment to the son, even into middle age, that it inspired his novel A Perfect Spy.

For Deighton, as indicated by the quote I’ve used, personal betrayal and the trauma it came from Anna Wolkoff. I couldn’t read about her case without seeing this as a British version of the spy-next-door cable drama of the 2010s, The Americans, starring Keri Russell.

Deighton might be known best for several espionage trilogies (e.g., the “Harry Palmer” books and the so-called “Game Set Match” sequence) that, like le Carre, de-romanticized the business of spycraft set out in Ian Fleming’s James Bond tales.

But the nightmare possibility created by Wolkoff—what if she and others like her had helped pave the way for a Nazi takeover of Britain?—may have inspired his 1978 foray into speculative fiction, SS-GB.

That novel is part of a small but intriguing genre of alternative history in which the Nazis remained in control of Europe, including:

*The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K. Dick;
*Fatherland, by Robert Harris; and
*Dominion, by C. J. Sansom.