Len Deighton - Twinkle Twinkle Little Spy

Is this a Harry Palmer story I am sometimes asked, and the answer is ‘yes’. But the principal difference in the story construction is having Major Mann with him. Conan Doyle was probably not the first fiction writer to discover the advantage of giving your principal character a close friend. Comedians in the Victorian music halls had proved the rich benefits that come from having a ‘straight’ man ‘feed’ the comic. But like his predecessor – Colonel Schlegel in Yesterday’s Spy – Major Mann turned the tables on me. I had hardly started the outline when I found that my memories of my times with US servicemen – flyers in particular – were demanding a voice in the story. And, unlike Dr Watson’s passive role, Mann’s participation was a vital and dynamic one. American syntax gave the galloping Major the primary role in the story and the Harry Palmer figure (Frederick Anthony in the book), is my Doctor Watson. But it is of course Dr Watson with whom the reader identifies, and so it should be in this story.

Another distinction that followed publication of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy was that my use of ‘rat fink’ was recorded in a supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary. It was this vulgar expression that came to my mind when I heard that my American publishing house insisted upon changing the title of this book for the US market. It did not do much to warm my relationship with that concern or with the English friend who was the editor responsible.

Over the years many readers have told me that I write love stories and most of them are surprised when I agree with that verdict. Men and women share our world but do not share its rewards. Neither do they share the same dreams and pleasures. It is this fundamental mismatch that makes true love so sublime. It also makes observing the world around us so surprising, and writing about relationships so difficult and so sustaining. Twinkle is a love story but it does not celebrate the elation and unremitting joy that love is supposed to bring. Like many true love stories it is sad.

I usually feel a sense of deprivation when the writing ends. But that feeling is usually accompanied by dissatisfaction; knowledge that one might have done better in some aspect or other of the process. It is that dissatisfaction which starts us on the next book, swearing to do better. Twinkle was no exception to that sad feeling but this time I had the unusual belief that I had come near to what I started out to do.

Len Deighton, 2012

‘Smell that air,’ said Major Mann.

I sniffed. ‘I can’t smell anything,’ I said.

‘That’s what I mean,’ said Mann. He scratched himself and grinned. ‘Great, isn’t it?’

There’s not much to smell when you are one thousand miles into the Algerian Sahara; not much to smell, not much to do, not much to eat.

For those travellers who know the swimming-pools and air conditioning of the government hotels along the northern edge of the Sahara, Adrar comes as a shock. Here the hotel has no more than tightly drawn curtains to protect the tourist from the sun, and the staff have noisy arguments about who should siesta on the cold stone floor of the entrance hall. Only Europeans stayed awake all day, notably four bearded Austrians who, night and day, played cards in the shuttered dining-room. They were waiting for a replacement petrol pump for their truck. Between games they swigged sweet, warm cola drinks. There was no alcohol on sale, and smoking was frowned upon.

Even on this winter’s evening the stones and the sand radiated the heat of the desert day.

There was no moon but the stars were so bright that we could easily see our vehicles piled high with stores and sextant and a sign that said ‘Dempsey’s Desert Tours’. They were parked on the huge main square of Adrar. Mann walked round the vehicles just to make sure the supplies had not been plundered. It was unlikely, for they were outside the police station.

Mann stopped and leaned against the Land Rover. He took out a packet of cheroots; there were only four left. ‘Look at those stars,’ he said.

‘The Milky Way – I’ve never seen it so clearly. A spaceship travelling at 100,000 miles per hour would take 670 million years to cross the Milky Way,’ I said. ‘There’s a hundred thousand million stars there.’

‘How do you know?’ said Mann. He put the cheroot in his mouth and chewed it.

‘I read it in the Reader’s Digest Atlas .’

Mann nodded. ‘And do you know something else … the way they’re going, in another few years there will be another million stars there – enough spy satellites to put both of us out of business.’

‘Twinkle, twinkle, little spy,’ I said.

Mann looked at me to see if I was being insubordinate. ‘Let’s go back inside,’ he said finally. He decided not to light the cheroot. He put it away again. ‘I’ll buy you a bottle of Algerian lemonade.’ He laughed. Mann was like a small, neatly dressed gorilla: the same heavy brow, deep-set eyes and long arms – and the same sense of humour.

The dining-room is large, and although the big fans no longer turned it was the coolest place for hundreds of miles. The walls are whitewashed light blue, and crudely woven striped rugs are tacked to floor and walls. Overhead, the wooden flooring rattled like jungle drums as someone moved. There was the sudden roar of the shower and the inevitable violent rapping of the ancient plumbing. We helped ourselves to soft drinks and left the money on the till.

‘That Limey bastard takes a shower every five minutes.’

‘Yes, about every five minutes,’ I agreed. Major Mickey Mann, US Army Signal Corps, Retired, a CIA expert on Russian electronics and temporarily my boss, had showed no sign of discomfort during the heat of day in spite of his tightly knotted tie and long trousers. He watched me carefully, as he always did when offering criticism of my fellow countrymen. ‘That particular Limey bastard,’ I said quietly, ‘is sixty-one years old, has a metal plate in his skull and a leg filled with German shrapnel.’

‘Stash the gypsy violin, feller – you want to make me weep?’

‘You treat old Dempsey as if he’s simple-minded. I’m just reminding you that he did four years with the Long Range Desert Group. He’s lived in Algeria for the best part of thirty years, he speaks Arabic with all the local dialects and if it comes to real trouble in the desert we’ll need him to use that sextant.’

Mann sat down at the table and began toying with the Swiss army penknife that he’d bought in the souvenir shop at Geneva airport. ‘If the wind starts up again tonight …’ he balanced the knife on its end, ‘sand will make that road south impassable. And I don’t need your pal Percy to tell me that.’

‘Even in the Land Rover?’

‘Did you see that three-tonner down to the axles?’ He let go of the knife and it stayed perfectly balanced. ‘Sand that bogs down a three-ton six by six will bury a Land Rover.’

‘They were gunning the motor,’ I said. ‘You bury yourself that way.’

‘You’ve been reading the camping-in-the-desert section of the boy scout handbook,’ said Mann. Again he banged the folding knife down on to the table, and again it balanced on its end. ‘And in any case,’ he added, ‘how do we know the Russkie will be able to steal a four-wheel drive? He might be trying to get here in a Moskvich sedan for all we know.’

‘Is he stupid?’

‘Professor Bekuv’s intellect is not universally admired,’ said Mann. ‘During the time he was with the Russian scientific mission at the UN he wrote two papers about little men in flying saucers, and earned his reputation as a crank.’

‘Defecting cranks don’t get the department’s OK,’ I said.