Len doesn’t go into details but I assumed that such a machine would be like a small submarine with a floodable chamber to make it sink and a compressed air cylinder to clear that chamber of water to make it surface again. The sequel to Len Deighton's game-changing debut The IPCRESS File, Horse Under Water sees its nameless, laconic narrator sent from fogbound London to the Algarve, where he must dive through layers of deceit in a place rotten with betrayals. Dawlish was a tall, grey-haired civil servant with eyes like the far end of a long tunnel… Dawlish nodded, removed his spectacles and dabbed at his dark eye-sockets with a crisp handkerchief. An Expensive Place to Die A new departure, abandoning all the characters and much of the style of the first four novels for a more straightforward account of a secret agent in Paris who gets involved with a Monsieur Datt and his clinic-cum-brothel.

ix] It is also interesting to note that if the projected film version of Horse Under Water had went ahead as planned the Harry Palmer character would probably have been visually and audibly very different from the blonde and bespectacled chippy cockney spy in the mackintosh raincoat as portrayed by Michael Caine in the three preceding films, The Ipcress File (1965), Funeral in Berlin (1966) and Billion Dollar Brain (1967).It retains the style of The IPCRESS File — multiple plots twists, Gauloises cigarettes, the grime- and soot-stained British winter. It hadn't occurred to me that it was on the technological forefront, I had always thought that the "horse" was the heroin. The propellor turns a generator that keeps the batteries charged and keeps the whole system working until something breaks. City of Gold A complex web of storylines set in wartime Cairo, as the city is threatened by Rommel’s advancing Afrika Korps forces in 1942.

He becomes nervous and the Narrator spots him heading off one night for a secret rendezvous; then, when accompanying the Narrator on the latter’s first dive to the U-boat, Giorgio is murdered, his diving suit shredded, his arm badly mauled, he dies of shock and blood loss as the Narrator just about manages to bring him ashore.Loses a fight with the Narrator on the motor-boat, then spills the beans: he has been using the Weiss List to blackmail, as well as helping HK run the heroin operation. Two or three cafés – houses with a public front room – opened their doors, pale-green colour-washed walls were punctuated with calendar art, and crippled chairs leaned against the walls for support. That transmitter that Austin Butterworth pulls out of da Cunha’s safe is supposed to send a VLW (Very Long-Wave) signal to the submerged buoy.

And if the RAF wasted depth charges on it, and even destroyed it, rather than on an actual German U-boat, that might be considered a net gain. In many places the sentences don’t follow as a train of thought but jump from one facet to another, like an attempt to see all the angles of a situation at the same moment. Below this is a compartment containing lead acid batteries, the radio transmitter and receiver and the control system(which is just a mechanical timer and some relays). The exact opposite, Deighton very deliberately eschews almost all inner thinking by his protagonist. Why would the US military invite a bunch of British spies to observe a nuclear test in the South Pacific including a suspected double-agent?Since Saltzman was talking during the period of Sean Connery’s absence from the Bond series, when the part was taken over – disastrously, as far as the box office was concerned – by George Lazenby, he had good reason to change his mind and let the series go.