The 6th in the 7 Harry Palmer books. Whilst the lead character is Patrick Armstrong, the story reveals that he has had an identity change since living the secret service and does have a history with Harry Palmer's old "friends" of Dawlish and Stork - so the reader can assume it's Harry. A story that combines many threads of war gaming, nuclear submarine tactics under the arctic, spying and good old Cold War tensions. The plot again involves a semi-private group trying their hand at espionage similar to Billion Dollar Brain. This private group involvement in the story seems to add more confusion than spice to the plot, but overall a good read and the ending while sudden was a quite clever take on Cold War politics the book doesn't reach the same level in showing the now classic British cynical life of the spy as the earlier novels. ( )

Just When You Think You're Out, They Pull You Back In
Review of the Penguin Modern Classics paperback edition (September, 2021) of the original Jonathan Cape hardcover (1974)

But war's a game, which, were their subjects wise, Kings would not play at. - William Cowper (1731-1800) (Epigram used for Spy Story)

Author Len Deighton considers this the second of four 'Patrick Armstrong' novels, preceded by An Expensive Place to Die (orig. 1967) and followed by Yesterday's Spy (orig. 1975) and Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy (orig. 1976).

Many would like to think of 'Patrick Armstrong' as being a later version of Deighton's spy 'Harry Palmer' from an earlier book quartet (1962-1966). That is probably especially due to 'Palmer' being embodied by popular actor Michael Caine in the film pentalogy (1965-1996, 3 of them 1965-67 based on Deighton's books, 2 later ones 1995-96 based on original screenplays). Deighton has explicitly denied that association however. The 8 books are still often grouped together due to the spy being unnamed except for his alias, and for his being associated with the fictional security organization WOOC(P) (similarly unnamed) and its spy chief Dawlish. To increase the blurring of the lines, both Dawlish and Harry Palmer's Soviet nemesis Colonel Stok both appear in Spy Story.

Spy Story is somewhat of a tentative return after Deighton having taken a few year's hiatus from the genre to write a comic thriller (Only When I Larf) and war thriller (Bomber) in the interim. 'Patrick Armstrong' is only indirectly involved with spying as he now works in a war gaming centre, but where the job does still require him to go on submarine missions to gather data on Soviet naval movements. Much of the plot of the novel is involved in describing the gaming at the centre, where a new brash American, ex-Marine Col. Schlegel has assumed command, to the irritation of Armstrong's co-worker Ferdy Foxwell.

The espionage aspect becomes more explicit when Armstrong discovers that there is a cabal planning a Soviet Admiral's defection with a possible substitution into Armstrong's own previous life due to his physical resemblance with the Russian. Soviet agents under Colonel Stok also barge into his life. He finds out that his own previous apartment has been co-opted for the defection plan and the faction succeeds in semi-kidnapping him until he manages to escape. Eventually Schlegel and Dawlish appear to direct the final steps of the plot which was an apparent misdirection to scuttle German re-unification talks. Much of this is not clear until explained in the final chapter, so the reader is confused throughout. I LOL'd with one reviewer who wrote that they were still confused even after reading the plot summary on Wikipedia (spoilers obviously if you click through).

Primarily I missed the banter of the more cynical and sardonic 'Harry Palmer' character with his chief Dawlish from the earlier books. 'Patrick Armstrong' is not as entertaining.

See cover at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/fe/SpyStory.jpg
Cover image from the original 1974 Jonathan Cape hardcover edition. Image sourced from Wikipedia.

Spy Story is the 6th of my re-reads of the early Len Deightons (I first read almost all of them in the 60's/70's/80's) after having learned of the Penguin Modern Classics republication of all of his novels which were published during 2021 as outlined in an online article Why Len Deighton's spy stories are set to thrill a new generation (Guardian/Observer May 2, 2021).

Trivia and Link
Spy Story was adapted as the film of the same name directed by Lindsay Shonteff in 1976. A trailer can be viewed on YouTube here. ( )

I was left befuddled by the story. It is either a very clever plot or a dud. Nothing much happened for three-quarters of the book, and you don't know where the plot is headed. Here and there bewildering events happen, such as a doppelganger, an MP supposedly involved in secret service, and the hasty closure of a restaurant whose proprietor was sewing a Russian uniform. Deighton did not make it all clear at the end, except to reveal that everything that happened is to prevent German reunification, which the Americans and the Brits don't want. So a plot was hatched to discredit the Russian head of the talks, who is the sister of the Russian admiral, the one who is supposed to defect. I give it a 3-star as there was some excitement at the end, making you wonder how the story will end. ( )

I struggled to finish this. It started well and I liked the main characters. But then nothing much happened to them - and anything that did happen didn't make sense. There was no tension. It felt like a collection of vaguely connected short stories randomly thrown together. Even having read the plot summary on Wikipedia I still don't really know what was going on. ( )

What is it with these British spy novelists? Modern spy stories, specifically of the American vein, are typically testosterone-brimming, gadget-wanking Cretin-A-Thons in which all the work of spying is managed by a few rubber noses, a silicon-based transmitter, a few ounces of plasticine explosives, and some rock-hard abs. While British historian, Len Deighton doesn’t provide readers with the kind of from-the-inside access that John le Carré brings to his work, he brings to the table the historian’s long-range view and the sense of bigger forces at work than merely governmental.He also carries to his novels another ingredient solely lacking in many spy thrillers: a sense of humor. It is, of necessity, the kind of dry British wit, and this novel, a Harry Palmer book (most well known for the Michael Caine films) is perhaps less humorous than previous, but on more than one occasion I laughed out loud at a wry phrase or scenario. Alas, that they are all so contextually based that if I were to type out the lines that tickled me, they’d probably lie flat on the screen, devoid of mirth, a sort of disconnected thing. The best I can dig out is this bon mot: “I had the feeling she wanted me to confess that I couldn’t live without her, and the moment I did she’d leave me.”Such is the quality of a Deighton book that mood and tone are so seamlessly interwoven with characters and events that the prose doesn’t so much sparkle as hang there unseen, a verbal scrim of near-complete transparency. The book is written in first person, which is, to my mind, a better way to tell a spy story in many respects. The ignorance of the narrator reads more naturally than third person or omniscient in which an assumed elision is preeminent. You, like the narrator, work benightedly trying to piece together the bits, trying to discover the outline of the puzzle from random pieces. In this way, this kind of spy story is more akin to a mystery than a thriller, though sharing elements of both, a trait forgotten it seems these days. As such, when something dangerous happens, it is given the added frisson of excitement for being out of place though never out of mind. We always believe that in a spy story, no matter how refined or intellectualized, someone is going to eat lead.The plot is a multi-threaded affair involving a Russian defector, an impersonator for the narrator occupying his old flat, his staggering romance, and inter-departmental squabbling at the narrator’s office. Pat Armstrong, our narrator, also known as Harry Palmer, the protagonist of Deighton’s first four novels, has basically quit the life and is now clock punching at an intelligence examination division of British counterintelligence doing historical analysis of previous battles and engagements to learn as much as possible from computer modeling. If that sounds fairly removed from action, it is, and it’s this life Armstrong/Palmer’s chosen deliberately as a kind of faux renunciation of the life of espionage and intrigue.What’s plaguing Palmer at this stage is an ability to commit to any particular action or course other than a sort of holding pattern of non-doing. His relationship with a young woman strolls on and she is fed up with waiting; his job is a perfect waste of his skills and talents, and he knows it; he is promoted to flunky for the American colonel Charles Schlegel the third who is taking over his employer as part of a NATO re-arrangement and he merely yes-man’s his way through it to the disgust of his former coworker. All of this while forces are moving in the background, using his identity as a possible alias for a defecting Russian nuclear submarine commander, while high-level talks are engaged for possible reunification of East and West Germany, and while a shadow group in British intelligence may be plotting treason. Like the le Carré from earlier, this book also takes place against the backdrop of reunification talks, which apparently stretched on forever.While Deighton’s story doesn’t lack for the human angle, it is remarkably able at dropping in the larger world around them in a way quite similar to human life. We only grasp one small piece of the story, one tiny perspective in a fragmented multi-level world, and the first person narrative drives that home in a way that is particular and intimate without feeling cluelessly adrift. The novel’s double and triple-cross ending sketch a paranoiac’s dream-life in which no one can be trusted for absolute certainty and underscore that element of not fully knowing what motivates those around you and those against which you fight. ( )