Deighton, Len
Entry updated 19 January 2026. Tagged: Author.
Working name of UK illustrator and author Leonard Cyril Deighton (1929- ), mostly not resident in Britain after 1969; author of spy novels, cookery books and some other nonfiction, but still perhaps best known for early espionage thrillers like The Ipcress File (1962), the first of the Secret File sequence which features the same undisciplined and unnamed secret agent, and the subsequent Funeral in Berlin (1964). The fourth volume of the series, Billion-Dollar Brain (1966), is set in an indeterminate Near Future and deals with a super-Computer and a private preventive war launched on Russia across the ice from Finland by a mad tycoon; it was filmed as Billion Dollar Brain (1967) directed by Ken Russell.
SS-GB: Nazi-Occupied Britain 1941 (1978) is a Hitler Wins Alternate History set in a UK under German occupation, the Jonbar Point being a successful sea Invasion the year before; the protagonist, a police detective, loses his defensive indifference to the occupation after being forced into the proximity of conflicting Nazi leaders, and has a significant role in the successful American capture of a German nuclear research facility. America is now likely to win the war that now begins in earnest. The tale has been adapted for BBC Television as SS-GB (2017 five episodes).
Deighton retired in 2016. [JC]
Leonard Cyril Deighton
born London: 18 February 1929
works (highly selected)
- Billion-Dollar Brain (London: Jonathan Cape, 1966) [Secret File: hb/Raymond Hawkey]
- SS-GB: Nazi-Occupied Britain 1941 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1978) [hb/Raymond Hawkey]
links
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