9. I sit on it
10. Sort of boat
11. Help
12. Sort of man
13. More to do
14. Portuguese O.K.
15. Reaction in the market
16. One too many
17. Da Cunha lays it down
18. Sad song
19. Never say this
20. Enemy
21. Are the wages of this, that?
22. Charly raises its head
23. In the same one
24. Threads of a story
25. Ready to jump?
26. The point of a pen
27. Gain this or lose it
28. The boat gets one
29. Entreaty
30. Grave trouble
31. From a friend
32. For this game
33. Jean when I find her
34. Awakening
35. At the door
36. Sort of Secrets
37. Two readings
38. Chin wag
39. Inside a cabinet
40. H without an H
41. It’s moving
42. Hidden within treason
43. Friday on a Portuguese calendar
44. W.H.O. is part of this not me
45. Man and boy are this
46. Little else to give
47. Relinquish
48. Ivor Butcher entertains
49. And again
50. One named OSTRA has no number
51. Where I shine
52. I see better with this
53. Long arm
54. Ossie moves like double this
55. In me for a change
56. Deep signal
57. Lost letter in the mail
58. To put it together hastily
Last Word
Appendixes
Footnotes
About the Author
By Len Deighton
About the Publisher
The Ipcress File, my first book, was written in two separate sessions. It was started when I was on vacation in the South of France. Porquerolles is an island off Toulon. In those days there was very little to do there other than sit and look at the Mediterranean, and eat and drink at regular intervals. So I whiled away the sunny days writing a story.
I have always enjoyed being in France. As a moderately successful illustrator, I decided to live there. I had an energetic and encouraging artist’s agent in London and she sent work to me. My overheads were small, for the isolated cottage I lived in was Spartan accommodation for hunters. It was high on a windy hillside in the Dordogne and the forest that provided game for the hunters started within inches of the door. It had no heating other than a wood stove and drinking water was drawn from an ancient well about three hundred yards away. Day began with getting the stove started and going for water. Until the wood was burning bright, there could be no hot tea.
Rural life was enchanting but it was too good to last. Art directors of advertising agencies and magazines all preferred to deal with artists they could shout at in person. As the flow of illustration jobs diminished, I had more time for writing. But money diminished too and I reluctantly gave up my idyll and returned to London. (Not so long ago I went back to find the little cottage. It was still exactly as I remembered it but no smoke rose from the chimney. It was unoccupied and the windows were unwashed. I shed a tear and stole away.) But in those weeks of waiting for work to arrive I had continued writing the uncompleted story I had begun in Porquerolles. By the time I left for London, the story had become a book and it was more or less complete. But being almost broke I had no time for anything other than work. The manuscript of The Ipcress File was put on a shelf and forgotten until I met a literary agent at a party in London’s Swiss Cottage.
It was when The Ipcress File was accepted by a publisher that I took seriously the idea of writing books for a living. They were even talking about making a film of it. By that time I had done enough drawings to be solvent again, and with enough money to be on vacation in a dramatically situated, but somewhat shabby, cliff top apartment in Portugal. It was there on a balcony overlooking the Atlantic that I started scribbling in longhand the story that became my second book, Horse Under Water. In those days Southern Portugal was a remote region. There was no airport nearer than Lisbon and the journey from there to the south coast was gruelling. But it was worth it. The Algarve, on the very edge of Europe, is a pictorial region and I always delight in being there.
Many of the ideas in the book dated from earlier times. In the nineteen thirties, when I was a small child, my father had taken me to many museums but I particularly enjoyed the War Museum. To me the tanks, artillery pieces and aircraft were like gigantic toys and I have never lost my fascination with large examples of machinery.
So when I moved into the Elephant and Castle neighbourhood of London – where I lived for many years – the War Museum in Lambeth was within easy walking distance and it became a haunt of mine. It was a time when the Army, Navy and RAF, and many civilian agencies, began passing over to the War Museum books, films and documents that had become history
