DEIGHTON, Len. The Ipcress File; Horse Under Water; Funeral in Berlin; Billion Dollar Brain; An Expensive Place to Die.

DEIGHTON, Len. The Ipcress File; Horse Under Water; Funeral in Berlin; Billion Dollar Brain; An Expensive Place to Die.DEIGHTON, Len. The Ipcress File; Horse Under Water; Funeral in Berlin; Billion Dollar Brain; An Expensive Place to Die. London: Hodder & Stoughton and Jonathan Cape. 1963 1967. 8vo. Five volumes, all first printings except The Ipcress File, which is a third impression. Original cloth lettered in gilt to spines, in the Raymond Hawkey designed dustwrappers; pp. 224; 255, [1]; 320; [8], 312; 254, [2]; moderate wear to cloth, text block edges with a few

DEIGHTON, Len. The Ipcress File; Horse Under Water; Funeral in Berlin; Billion Dollar Brain; An Expensive Place to Die. London: Hodder & Stoughton and Jonathan Cape. 1963-1967.

8vo. Five volumes, all first printings except The Ipcress File, which is a third impression. Original cloth lettered in gilt to spines, in the Raymond Hawkey designed dustwrappers; pp. 224; 255, [1]; 320; [8], 312; 254, [2]; moderate wear to cloth, text block edges with a few light marks and some toning but no spotting, wrappers with the usual wear, toning, creasing and laminate peeling to the first four volumes (see notes below), An Expensive Place to Die a little faded to wrapper spine; Horse Under Water and An Expensive Place to Die both signed by the author in black ink to upper edge of title pages; Horse Under Water is the variant with black endpapers; An Expensive Place to Die complete with the “Top Secret In Transit Docket” loosely laid in; a very good set.

A complete run of Deighton’s “Harry Palmer” quintet, two volumes signed by the author; one of the great works of post-war espionage fiction.

“At the time I wrote The Ipcress File,” Len Deighton wrote in the introduction for a recent paperback edition, “I’d never read any of the James Bond books, and John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold was still something to come in the distant future.” The five novels offered together here, however, – he referred to An Expensive Place to Die as “the fifth and last in [the] sequence” – have since comfortably taken their place beside those other great works of postwar espionage fiction.

Deighton’s unnamed protagonist (later named Harry Palmer in the film adaptations, where he was memorably played by Michael Caine) is from a different world than either Bond or Smiley, and the interplay between characters in The Ipcress File, Deighton records, was “inspired by a brief period […] spent working in a London advertising agency. I was the 'technician' surrounded by clever witty young men who'd been at Eton together.” He transplanted this, with added friction, into the context of an intelligence agency office.

These original editions, in the wonderful Raymond Hawkey-designed wrappers, have always been collectible, and notably hard to find in decent condition (the publishers reportedly balked at the predominantly white cast of the wrappers, correctly predicting their consequent discolouration and soiling). This better than average set, all first printings with the exception of Ipcress (a third impression), includes two volumes signed (without dedication) by Deighton.

SKU: 2123948