Len Deighton - An Expensive Place to Die

I was a teenager when I first went to Paris. It was not ‘warm and gay’ as the Hammerstein lyric recalled; rather it was ‘old and grey’ as in the lyric that Sinatra was crooning at that time. The war was scarcely ended and I stepped from the train into a dense aroma of Gauloises and garlic. I found myself alone and without contacts standing on the noisy concourse of the Gare du Nord. Packed tight, there were beggars, whores and black-market traders all plying their trades with appropriate subtlety. Heavily burdened infantrymen displayed the silence of the weary while polished and blancoed military police patrols sifted continually through the multitude. My parents had only agreed to this expedition because someone was to meet me and take care of me. That friend was posted away at short notice and I was left to my own devices. Someone put a card into my hand and I plodded along, suitcase in hand, to Place Blanche, a seedy district adjacent to Montmartre. Using the advertisement card, I found a tiny attic room in an old, cheap, threadbare hotel near the Moulin Rouge.

It was all exactly like the little room in which Jean Gabin fought off the flics in that wonderful old film Le Jour se Lêve . All that night I waited for the ‘daybreak’ as I had waited for Santa Claus to arrive on so many Christmas mornings. When light came through the shabby curtains I looked out of the window at the roofs of Paris. This remains one of the most memorable moments of my long, eventful and happy life. I was a teenager, and entirely unsupervised, with this great foreign city laid at my feet. I could scarcely believe my good fortune. I tramped around the city; stood alone at the tomb of Napoleon and inspected the burned-out German tanks that the French were in no hurry to clear away. The fighting had ended but the smell of war lingered. I walked all the way to the Etoile and then back across town to the Place Bastille, only to be sadly disappointed that the grim old prison was no longer there. The Folies Bergère is just for tourists, the concierge at the hotel told me; the Concert Mayol is far more risqué and the girls far, far more naked. I went to the Concert Mayol. I went to the Louvre, where they also had naked girls, to Notre Dame and to that most spectacular of Paris sights – the Sainte Chapelle. I climbed the steep, slippery, and seemingly unending iron steps to get to the top of the Eiffel Tower, and was spattered with red lead primer paint as I passed workers restoring it to good condition.

Although I was in civilian clothes, my youth and London accent caused me to be mistaken for a soldier and I capitalized on this by eating in the military facilities such as the Montgomery Club near the Place de la Concorde. In some places I was eyed with suspicion and twice I was detained on suspicion of being an army deserter. I soon made sure I carried my passport everywhere I went. I must have walked many miles during that time in Paris and by saving my money I was able to afford a lunch at the renowned Tour d’Argent, which had resumed its production of the famous roast duck, prepared at the tableside in a massive silver press.

After that first visit, I returned to Paris many times. For short periods I lived there in varying degrees of comfort. My wife’s parents enjoyed a lovely home there and we relished their hospitality. The idea of writing about this Paris I discovered never went away. I knew several fashion photographers and in the early 1960s I started notes for a book using as a background the Paris collections. I continued my lengthy stay there but I didn’t continue with this project. I also abandoned a story about a symphony orchestra because I didn’t know enough about music and musicians. Finally I met a Paris policeman who wanted to practise his English and I knew I was going to write An Expensive Place to Die .

Together with my family I have lived in many countries, but I never became one of the dedicated exiles who cluster in the sunshine and snow. Perhaps the France I depict in An Expensive Place to Die is not a land you recognize. Yet this is what France, or more particularly Paris, seemed like back in the sixties when I lived there and wrote this book.

It was the chance introduction to a detective serving with the police judiciaire that gave me the chance to write about the underside of Paris. This friend served in the brigade mondaine , which is the quaint title the French give to what in London was called the vice squad. My policeman knew everything and everyone. People high and low, people in bars and those in exclusive clubs knew him and so did those who went to sleep on the pavement, hugging smelly ventilation grills for the sake of the warmth. In late evening, hundreds of big trucks brought fresh produce into the old market area, and not all the drivers curled up in their cab with a blanket and a bottle of beer. Around the market whole streets of bars and brothels came to life at midnight and plain-clothes policemen, such as my friend, were an inevitable addition to the cast. Muscular doormen and girls with too much make-up greeted him like an old friend. He showed me the flea markets where stolen goods sometimes came to light. He showed me establishments in the swanky arrondissements that do not feature in any tourist guidebooks. It is ‘down these mean streets’ that a fiction writer can venture protected by the armour of disguise that all storytellers wear. I kept close to his side and kept my mouth shut as we walked his beat. Without his unstinting help and good-natured guidance (and did I say protection?) An Expensive Place to Die would have been a different, and rather more conventional, book.

It happens like that sometimes. You encounter a promising source and suddenly a torrent of information comes pouring down all over you. Now the problem becomes knowing where to stop. Research is always more fun than writing and there is always a temptation to go on with it for ever. I enjoy using foreign locations in my stories but feel I should carefully absorb the places I write about; live in them long enough to meet my neighbours, buy from the local shops, sit around in the local cafes and suffer the bus services and the Metro. For some books I went beyond that. My children attended local schools and we almost became natives. Only probing beyond the tourist trails will give a writer the environment in which convincing characters can roam. In An Expensive Place to Die I probed, but the Paris into which I dug was somewhat bleak. Looking back now, perhaps a more generous portion of the glamour of that much-maligned city would have given my story more optimism.

But there was a mysterious epilogue to An Expensive Place to Die . On 24 thApril 1967 the New York Times carried a story concerning two Russian nationals; both identified by the US Government as officers of the KGB. At Kennedy International Airport they boarded Air France Flight 702 scheduled to depart for Paris at 7.00pm. Ten minutes before the flight was due to leave a man who identified himself as an FBI agent went to Gate 29, handed an Air France official a package and asked him to give it to one of the Russians. Curious about the last-minute arrival of the package, the chief stewardess, Marguerite Switon, gave it to the pilot, Michel Vachey. By this time he was moving his plane from the gate to the runway for take-off.

Still at the controls, the pilot opened the package and found inside a copy of An Expensive Place to Die . It also contained a small dossier of replica documents and maps that were tucked inside the book. Here were official-looking papers signed by high officials and marked ‘Top Secret’. (This dossier had in fact been designed by Ray Hawkey as a supplement to the story; Ray designed the covers of many of my books, and also some similarly fine publicity material for books such as SS-GB .) Vachey was alarmed. He asked the tower for permission to taxi back to Gate 29, to which Air France’s station manager was summoned.