Len Deighton

I’m very sorry to hear that Len Deighton died a couple of days ago. He was 97 years old and lived an enviable life, which will doubtless be retold over the next few days by better eulogists than me. 

But I wanted to share a story that you won’t hear elsewhere.

I’d idolised Deighton for his amazing cookbooks long before I had any pretensions to write myself. And I mentioned the fact to Dan Saladino, with whom I was working at the time on the BBC R4 Food Programme. Though Len legendarily never gave interviews, Dan persuaded him to come into Wogan House for an hour and asked me to interview him.

It was a ludicrous privilege - and extremely brave of both Dan and Rich Ward who produced. I’d never done a radio project of that scale before, and I was as nervous as hell. I’d prepped hard - I even had a timeline of his life on a roll of paper so I wouldn’t get lost. But Len turned out to be a superbly kind man. I think he liked the paper roll. Maybe in hindsight that was a very Deightonesque piece of research. Or maybe he recognised a grammar school boy who was way out of his depth.

We ended up talking for the full hour and then overran for another. He was intense, precise, and utterly inspiring. You can still listen to the interview here.

I had taken along all my Deighton editions like some mad stalker fanboy. (Who was I kidding? I was a mad stalker fanboy), including my treasured first edition of The IPCRESS File.

“That’s nice, he said. I don’t have a copy of that,”

They only printed a short first run, he explained, which sold out so fast that he never got his hands on one.

“Then you’ve got to have this one!” I said. 

He took it, turned it over and over, smoothing the cover with his hands.

“No, he said, passing it back. You keep it.”

I found out later that his publisher had refused to pay his friend, Raymond Hawkey the £50 they’d agreed for designing that unbelievably cool cover. They offered £15 ... and Len paid the difference himself. 

I remember every single detail of that recording. His quiet voice, his scholarly precision. His gentle diffidence. His kindness.

Have a look at the back cover. It’s one of my favourite pieces of jacket design. An excellent potted author’s autobiography. Functional but also spare and packed with self-deprecating wit that tells you about five times more about the man than the words actually mean.

It’s also the same madly innovative thinking about media that made him turn recipes into comic strips.

Len was impossibly kind about my writing and gave me a generous quote for the cover of Knife. Later, he designed two original cookstrips to go into Steak. 

He didn’t have to do either.

He was just a lovely bloke.