Berlin Game

Bernard Samson works a desk in London after years of field operations in Berlin, where he grew up. An agent codenamed Brahms Four, who has been supplying economic intelligence for two decades, wants to come out.

Brahms Four will deal only with Samson. The service also has an internal problem, and the two facts turn out to be connected.

The agent will only come out for one man, and that man's own service has a leak.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

He is middle-aged, passed over for promotion, married to a colleague who outranks him, and conscious that he lacks the education his superiors share.

The class material from The Ipcress File returns in a more developed form, and Samson's resentment is specific and consistently motivated.

Deighton lived in the city and the geography is exact: specific streets, crossing points, the Wall's physical reality, and the particular texture of a divided place twenty years after the division.

The Berlin material is the strongest in the book and in the series generally.

Samson's relationship with Fiona, who is senior to him in the same service, is the novel's actual subject, and the domestic scenes carry as much weight as the operational ones.

The intersection of a marriage and a workplace where both partners hold clearances is used better here than anywhere else in the genre.

The novel is structurally a mole hunt, with a small pool of suspects and an investigation Samson conducts partly against his own department.

The comparison to le Carré is unavoidable and Deighton handles it differently: the same situation rendered through office politics and personal grievance rather than through institutional melancholy.

Samson narrates, which permits the dry commentary Deighton's third-person work cannot carry, and which conceals what he does not wish to examine.

The unreliability is limited and specific: he is honest about facts and evasive about feelings, which is exactly right for the character. Deighton also uses Samson's professional habits to characterise him, so the reader learns what he notices before learning what he thinks about it.

The final disclosure is genuinely shocking and reorganises the entire novel, and it sets up the eight books that follow.

It is among the better-executed reversals in the genre, and the preparation is visible on rereading without being obvious first time. Deighton also resists explaining it, ending the novel almost immediately afterwards and leaving the consequences for the two books that follow.

The series runs as three trilogies — Game, Set and Match; Hook, Line and Sinker; Faith, Hope and Charity — plus a prequel.

It is a substantial commitment and the arc genuinely develops, with consequences carried across all nine books. Readers who complete the first trilogy have a natural stopping point, and a substantial number do stop there, which is a reasonable decision.

Dry, conversational and full of asides about food, cars and office procedure.

Deighton's voice is the series' principal pleasure, and it is considerably warmer than the subject matter suggests. The office scenes in particular are among the funniest writing in the genre, and Deighton's ear for institutional evasion is exceptionally good.

Both were writing mole hunts in the same decade about the same service, and the comparison is inevitable and instructive.

Le Carré is the better writer; Deighton is the better company. The two books are describing the same institution from different heights within it. Samson is also considerably lower in the hierarchy than Smiley, which is why the series sees the service from the corridor rather than from the committee.

A 1988 television series adapted the first trilogy and is now difficult to find.

The novels remain the primary form, and the series' length makes it an unlikely candidate for a further attempt. Ian Holm played Samson, and the production was substantial for its period, though the series has not been widely rereleased since.

Readers who want espionage with a domestic centre and a narrator worth spending nine books with.

It stands alone adequately and is plainly the opening of something larger. Readers who want one Cold War mole hunt should read Tinker Tailor; readers who want to live in one should start here.